Now that the Hollywood silly season is all but over, it’s time to get serious again. For the next few months, films with pretensions of winning an Oscar will be paraded around festivals and released in cinemas with all the marketing precision and political chicanery of a presidential re-election campaign. At stake is the billion dollars that last year’s three leading Oscar contenders – The King’s Speech, Black Swan and The Social Network – amassed between them in global ticket sales from the moment the media anointed them as award frontrunners.

Adding urgency to the Oscar race is the fact that Hollywood needs these pedigree films to compensate for a rash of expensive superhero movies that have failed to truly excite what was once their most reliable demographic – teenage boys and young men stuck in adolescent limbo. In an age of social media, summer junk food such as Green Lantern, Thor, X-Men: First Class and Transformers: Dark of the Moon can no longer be pushed down audiences’ throats with a $100m marketing campaign and some fancy-looking 3D. They need to satisfy our storytelling appetites too or else risk being tweeted into oblivion.

The final Harry Potter film may massage 2011’s final tally, but with no other young adult property ready to latch onto the coat-tails of JK Rowling’s franchise the industry is clinging onto one of the two remaining episodes of the Twilight saga, praying that Tom Cruise can still deliver with a fourth Mission: Impossible and trusting that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson can turn the Belgian comic book Tintin into the next cross-generational sensation come Christmas.

In the meantime, there’s the serious business of jockeying for that Academy statuette. For now, just about the one thing Oscar pundits and betting agencies can agree on is that Meryl Streep will earn a record 17th acting nomination for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, a biopic that will be told in a series of flashbacks that include the 17 days leading up the Falklands War. The fact that two polarising women – Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann – have a shot at becoming the first female US president next year only adds to the film’s piquancy.

Also certain is that Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life, which walked away with the top prize at this years Cannes Film Festival, will be the film to beat in terms of cinematography. But when it comes to Best Picture, it is open season. The backroom politicking will begin, in all senses, on 31 August, when George Clooney’s directorial effort, The Ides Of March, opens the Venice Film Festival. The story of an idealistic young press secretary who gets embroiled in dirty politics during a presidential campaign, the film stars Ryan Gosling alongside Clooney as the White House hopeful. It won’t be Clooney’s only red carpet contender. He stars in The Descendants, directed by Sideways’ Alexander Payne, playing a father trying to reconnect with his two daughters.

As always at this time of year, there are numerous literary adaptations all screaming their artistic bona fides. Ralph Fiennes directs an interpretation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus; Andrea Arnold is the latest filmmaker to tackle Wuthering Heights; and Stephen Daldry, who has won directing nominations for all of his first three films, directs Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Daldry’s not the only Oscar darling involved with a popular work of contemporary fiction: Martin Scorsese spent this summer in London making the adventure film Hugo, his first plunge into both family fare and 3D.

Having conquered TV with a memorable BBC series, John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy makes it to the big screen this year. With a mouth-watering array of acting talent, including Gary Oldman and Colin Firth – one overdue for an Oscar, the other hot from winning this year’s gong – this version would seem to have all the hallmarks of Great British Cinema except that its director, Tomas Alfredson, is Swedish and best known for the vampire film Let The Right One In.

Just for good measure, novelist Stieg Larsson’s most Swedish of thrillers, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is being given another screen treatment, but with US director David Fincher at the helm and Daniel Craig in the lead. At least Sony and Paramount are keeping the locations Swedish.

Every autumn produces quirky wild cards and this year is no exception. Leading the pack will be Madonna’s W.E, in which the pop star turns her directorial hand to the romance between Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, contrasting their devotion to an unhappy marriage six decades later. The fact that Oscar impresario Harvey Weinstein will be championing W.E during the nomination process lends a certain credibility to this curio.

Of more obvious appeal, at least to the devotees of his cult classic Withnail & I, is Bruce Robinson’s return to film-making after almost a decade. His adaptation of Hunter S Thompson’s The Rum Diary stars – who else? – Johnny Depp in what can only be a gonzo wet dream.

And then there’s Warner Bros’ J. Edgar. Normally a film directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Leonardo DiCaprio is something you can bet the farm on for Oscar recognition. But this portrayal of FBI director J Edgar Hoover has already been attacked for focusing on his supposed penchant for cross-dressing, his hidden gay relationship with an aide and his involvement in the Charles Lindbergh kidnapping case.

Two stage successes also get movie makeovers. Carnage (Roman Polanski’s film adaptation of his friend Yasmina Reza’s play God Of Carnage) boasts a dream cast: Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C Reilly. But even that calibre might not be enough to dislodge the bookies’ favourite for Best Picture, Spielberg’s War Horse, a First World War tearjerker that has sentimental epic written all over it.

Even if Spielberg doesn’t gallop to the Oscar finishing line, he still has next year. The director’s next opus is a biopic of Abraham Lincoln starring Daniel Day-Lewis. The only lines either will need to learn after memorising the Gettysburg Address will be yet another roll call of Oscar thanks.

ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?

Miserablists can rejoice over the next few weeks.

The 20th-anniversary edition of Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind, will be released on 26 September and various collectors’ packages will provide fans with access to B-sides, pre-production demos, early demos, session recordings and live tracks, plusa collection of music videos. In addition to all of this, a DVD of the previously unreleased concert film Live at Paramount will be included in the ‘deluxe’ edition.

Meanwhile, on 3 October Rhino Records will release The Complete Smiths – Collector’s Edition, including remastered versions of all eight of the band’s full-length releases on CD and vinyl, reproductions of all 25 singles and a DVD of their videos. Look out too for bonus-free CD and vinyl box sets containing all four studio albums, 1988 live disc Rank and three singles compilations.

The two retrospectives should keep bedsitland happy until the Amy Winehouse re-releases start.