George Clooney in Michael Clayton Myles Aronowitz/Courtesy of Warner Bros.

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A keen sense of timing can make all the difference in an Oscar campaign. While Crash, Erin Brockovich, and Seabiscuit all looked to have peaked too early in recent years, all three pictures rallied when nominations came around.

Which means that this year, a quiet steady crowd-pleaser like Michael Clayton could be the last picture standing after all the noise dies down.

A strong Oscar contender needs to keep moving, like a shark. Lose your forward momentum, and you're dead. Which is how, this year, some high-priced Oscar consultants and strategists shot themselves in the foot. That's because they were looking at some of the movies that did well in recent years, such late-starters as Shakespeare in Love, Traffic, Monster's Ball, Million Dollar Baby, and Letters From Iwo Jima, and stealth campaigners that didn't wear their Oscar hopes too loudly, like Martin Scorsese's Best Picture winner, The Departed. They also noted that, on the other hand, Dreamgirls, Brokeback Mountain, and Flags of Our Fathers all stumbled after leading the pack as early front-runners.

By that logic, figured some campaigners, the trick was to fly low and peak as late as possible.

But some of this year's crop of Oscar wannabes started building up steam back in January at Sundance (The Savages), May at Cannes (No Country for Old Men and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and in September in Venice or Toronto (Atonement, Into the Wild, Michael Clayton, and Juno). The trick was to keep these fest hits on track all the way to Oscar nominations in January.

Some aced the job. Others didn't.

Some distributors went ahead with screening and opening their movies in a timely manner: two literary Miramax entries, the violent critics' fave No Country for Old Men from the Coen brothers and Julian Schnabel's French-language Diving Bell; Warner Bros.' legal drama Clayton, starring popular star George Clooney; and Universal's Harlem epic American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington, which scored big box office.

Other distributors held their films back, even when they had already been previewed at fests. Marketers' determination to delay showing Joe Wright's literary period drama Atonement and Jason Reitman's hip teen comedy Juno only inflated expectations even more. By the time Academy members saw the pictures, so much anticipation had built that they were bound to disappoint. While both films should still score multiple nominations, they suffered from over-hype.