The 2015 Oscar nominations will be announced on Jan. 15 and handed out on Feb. 22. Even though the nominations have not even been announced yet, Oscar prognosticators have already picked Michael Keaton (Birdman) and Julianne Moore (Still Alice) as the heavy favorites to take home the little gold men for Best Actor and Actress respectively. Even though there are always surprises, it is actually pretty common for an eventual Oscar winner to be known as soon as the nominations are announced, if not sooner.

While Keaton and Moore delivered knockout performances in 2014, they have the momentum, though not necessarily because of their acting prowess in 2014. They have both had long careers, delivered outstanding performances before, are respected within the industry and, perhaps most importantly, are currently Oscar-less. It’s just their time. And The Academy has set a precedent to hand out unofficial lifetime achievement awards to artists whose “time has come.”

Kathryn Bigelow won Best Director in 2010. Bigelow is a great director and The Hurt Locker is a fine movie, but it can be debated whether Bigelow’s direction for The Hurt Locker is a greater artistic achievement than James Cameron’s for Avatar or Quentin Tarantino’s for Inglourious Basterds, two of the directors who lost to her that year. Just a few years earlier, it was widely assumed that Martin Scorsese would win Best Director for The Departed in 2007. Again, The Departed is a very fine movie, but it could be argued that Scorsese should have won for Taxi Driver or Raging Bull or Goodfellas. Scorsese’s win was, in effect, a lifetime achievement award for his body of work.

Speaking of Raging Bull, Scorsese lost the Best Director Oscar to Robert Redford for Ordinary People in 1981. While Ordinary People is a great movie, Raging Bull is widely considered to be a classic, while Ordinary People has not aged quite as well. At the time, Scorsese was more of the Hollywood upstart while Redford was already a Hollywood icon who was thus far Oscar-less.

In 1986, Geraldine Page won Best Actress for The Trip to Bountiful beating Whoopi Goldberg (The Color Purple), Jessica Lange (Sweet Dreams), Meryl Streep (Out of Africa) and Anne Bancroft (Agnes of God). Bancroft, Lange and Streep had already won Oscars while Goldberg was the newcomer at the time. Page had already gone home empty handed from the Oscars seven times and there was no way The Academy would let her leave Oscar-less an eighth time.

In an Oscar-y bit of symmetry, like Page, Al Pacino earned an Oscar with his eighth nomination for Scent of a Woman in 1993. He was nominated – and lost – for Best Supporting Actor the same year for Glengarry Glen Ross, which had been awarded earlier in the ceremony. Pacino walked into the 1993 Oscar ceremony having left six previous Oscar ceremonies empty handed for his roles in Dick Tracy (1990), …And Justice for All (1979), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), The Godfather: Part II (1974), Serpico (1973) and The Godfather (1972).

As Oscar season nears, may the best man and woman win with a big “Booyah” as Al Pacino famously said in Scent of Woman.