With the Academy Awards (aka The Oscars) happening Sunday night, there’s lot of buzz about who the winners might be.

Will “Avatar”, which has sold more than $2 billion of tickets worldwide, take home the hardware, or will the voters go for something like “Up in the Air” or “The Hurt Locker”? What about “Up in the Air” or “Precious”?

We decided to focus on the Best Picture category, which has been expanded this year to 10 nominees from five. Using Sysomos MAP, we took at look at the nominees being talked about by the blogosphere over the past month. Our search query featured the name of the film and “oscar”, “oscars” and “academy awards”.

Not surprisingly, Avatar has attracted the most attention with 25.6% of the activity. The Hurt Locker was second with 18.1%, followed by “Precious” (12%) and “Up in the Air” (11%).

This suggests that bloggers are pretty confident that “Avatar” is going to take home the Oscar, although “Up in the Air”, which stars George Clooney, may be a serious threat.

We also took at look at overall buzz for the The Academy Awards. The keyword driving the most conversations is “locker” with a strong link to “chartier”. Given all the talk about “Avatar”, this is an interesting development.

After doing some research, we discovered that there’s a lot of buzz about how Nicolas Chartier, a co-producer of “The Hurt Locker” has been banned from attending the Academy Awards after he sent an e-mail to the Academy encouraging its members to vote for the fillm rather than “the $500-million film” (a reference to Avatar). According to the Academy’s rules, this is not allowed.

So, who do you think is going to winner the Oscar for the best picture?

The ads that appeared during yesterday’s Super Bowl attracted a lot of attention – almost as much as the game itself.

To get a better idea of how well the ads resonated with Twitter users, we used Sysomos MAP to query most of the Super Bowl ads to see which ones generated the most tweets over the past two days.

We also used our sentiment engine to determine whether the amount of positive and negative conversations for each ad. We took a conservative approach to the queries by searching for the advertiser’s brand name along with “Super Bowl” in the same tweet. An example query is “Super Bowl” AND “Google”.

By far, Google attracted the most tweets (25,076). This was not surprising, given that it was the first time that Google has advertised on television, and Twitter users are likely Google fans. This also demonstrates the web advertisement giant’s acceptance of more traditional TV advertising.

Dorito’s was second with 6,710 tweets, while Budweiser was third with 4,550. Dorito’s and Budweiser ran several different ads during the Super Bowl, which was won 31-17 by the New Orleans Saints.

Among the top-10 ads that attracted the most tweets, Intel attracted the most positive conversations (81%), while Coca-Cola’s Mr. Burns’ ad garnered the most negative conversations (12%).

Note that the number of tweets in the chart above are based on mentions of the brand and the phrase “super bowl” in the same tweet to avoid counting general mentions of the brand name.

We also used MAP to explore the amount of Twitter activity for the two teams over the past three days (Feb. 6 to 8). The chart shows the amount of activity for the New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts was fairly even until Sunday when the number of tweets about the Colts surged – likely because the Colts took at 10-0 lead in the first quarter.

When the Saints rallied for 15 points in the fourth-quarter to take the lead, the amount of activity spiked.