LOTR News 02/11

  • Oscar Odds: The year of our "Lord"?
  • Laud of the Rings
  • Oscar excitement mounts as the Academy prepares to reveal the nominees
  • Spread betting on the one film to rule them all
  • Oscar watch
  • Oscar pulls all-nighter
  • Film world awaits Oscar nominations

    Stage set for pre-dawn Oscar showdown
    Gregg Kilday
    Hollywood Reporter

    LOS ANGELES -- If the Oscar race is akin to an election -- and it is -- then tomorrow is Hollywood's equivalent of Super Tuesday, the day when the nominations for the 74th Annual Academy Awards are announced and this year's heated campaign crystallizes and enters its final stretch.

    Like politicians courting their constituents, filmmakers have been working the awards circuit in hopes of assembling the necessary votes. Baz Luhrmann, who has been tirelessly promoting his meta-musical "Moulin Rouge" ever since its premiere at last May's Cannes International Film Festival, has displayed a politico's ability to stay resolutely on message, positioning the film -- which initially looked as if it might play only to the MTV crowd -- as a respectful revival of the Hollywood musical. "I've lived with a passion to see the musical returned to the place where it began," he repeated what has become for him a mantra upon winning a Golden Globe for best musical.

    By contrast, "Gosford Park's" Golden Globe-winning director Robert Altman has ridden his own version of the Straight Talk Express, tossing off opinions without worrying whether or not they were necessarily politic. On the morning of the Golden Globe nominations, for example, he reacted to the news that both Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren had been nominated by predicting an Oscar loss. "Both Lily Tomlin and Ronee Blakely were nominated for Oscars (for 'Nashville') but they canceled each other out and ('Shampoo's') Lee Grant won," the sometimes cantankerous Altman groused.

    With the PR forces behind the competing movies operating virtual full-time war rooms -- every nominations list produced by the guilds and unions has triggered a new round of spin and counter-spin -- the stage is set for tomorrow's pre-dawn showdown. Here's how the races are shaping up.

    Best picture: Three movies -- "A Beautiful Mind," "Moulin Rouge" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" -- look to be a lock for a slot.

    From its first in-house screenings at Universal, Ron Howard's victory-over-schizophrenia biopic "A Beautiful Mind" has been touted as an Oscar contender. It certainly has all the right elements: A-list talent, an uplifting story, and even a whiff of controversy that kept the conversation alive without damaging its potential. It also won the Golden Globe as the year's best drama.

    But given their expected strength in the technical categories, both "Moulin Rouge," another Globe winner, and "The Lord of the Rings," named the year's best picture by the AFI, could end up competing for most nominations.

    The Screen Actors Guild nominations for its ensemble awards suggest the remaining two contenders will be "Gosford Park" and "In the Bedroom." However, the Directors Guild nominees point toward "Black Hawk Down" and "Memento."

    Meanwhile, several films that the pundits had included in early Oscar assessments last fall seem to have fallen off the radar. "Ali," Michael Mann's ambitious look at the life and times of Muhammad Ali, failed to strike a cultural chord, and sputtered at the boxoffice, collecting just short of $60 million. Lasse Hallstrom's "The Shipping News" has yet to take off, having pulled in little more than $10 million to date in selected theaters. And Frank Darabont's "The Majestic" -- though on paper it seemed a natural for Academy consideration given its concern with the Hollywood blacklist -- was virtually dead on arrival and is disappearing from theaters after a meager $27 million run. It's not their disappointing boxoffice that appears to have turned such films into also-rans, but the fact that they failed to become part of the year-end awards buzz that's necessary to carry the eventual winners aloft.

    Best director: Logic dictates the director race should be a replay of the best picture heat, but it never seems to quite work out that way. The DGA nominated Howard, Luhrmann and "The Lord of the Ring's" Peter Jackson. Its remaining two slots went to "Black Hawk Down's" Ridley Scott and "Memento's" Christopher Nolan. But if either of those two movies fail to win best picture noms, one or both of their directors could fall off the Academy's nominees list.

    One Oscar strategist -- not affiliated with either film -- suggested that the DGA went for Scott and "Black Hawk" over Altman and "Gosford" because the heavily-male DGA preferred a war movie over a tony "chick flick." Other handicappers question whether Nolan and "Memento" can go the distance since it was released by newcomer-to-the-distribution game Newmarket Films, which has no track record when it comes to running an Oscar campaign.

    Best actor, actress: Both Golden Globe drama winners Russell Crowe ("A Beautiful Mind") and Sissy Spacek ("In the Bedroom") are virtually shoo-ins. Denzel Washington ("Training Day"), Halle Berry ("Monster's Ball") and Judi Dench ("Iris") are consensus favorites.

    Beyond that, the early heats were contradictory: "Ali's" Will Smith earned a Globe nom, but failed to win SAG recognition. "I Am Sam's" Sean Penn struck out with the Globes, but moved back into the game with a SAG mention. Billy Bob Thornton's chances are complicated by the fact that he's earned serious attention for two movies: "Monster's Ball" and "The Man Who Wasn't There." Similarly, Nicole Kidman is competing against herself with performances in "Moulin Rouge" and "The Others." Possibly as a result, both Thornton and Kidman failed to make the SAG list.

    Best screenplays: Neither "Memento" nor "In the Bedroom" earned WGA nominations, since the films were not guild signatories and thus ineligible under the WGA's rules. But both are expected to show up on the Oscar rosters. In fact, Nolan's "Memento," should it be nominated, will probably be deemed the front-runner in the original screenplay category since its ingenious story-telling device follows in a clever tradition that earned Oscars for '94's "Pulp Fiction" and '96's "The Usual Suspects."

    "In the Bedroom," written by Todd Field and Robert Festinger, could face stiffer competition in the adaptation category, where it is likely to face off against "A Beautiful Mind," which got the Globes screenplay nod, and "The Lord of the Rings."

    Best foreign film: With more than $24 million in the bank, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Amelie" is the most successful French film to play the United States, but that doesn't mean it's an automatic entry on the Academy's foreign film list. According to several sources monitoring the selective foreign film committee, the imaginative "Amelie" has met with mixed reactions. And in a year that boasts a strong line-up of 51 foreign contenders, it could be squeezed out by such titles as Bosnia's "No Man's Land," Brazil's "Behind the Sun," Canada's "Atanarjuat," the Czech Republic's "Dark Blue World," Denmark's "Italian for Beginners," India's "Lagaan," Iran's "Baran" and Italy's "The Son's Room."

    Best animation feature: DreamWorks' intensive campaign on behalf of "Shrek," a huge critical and commercial hit, was aimed at earning it a best picture nomination. But in a year that offers the Academy's first-ever best animated feature Oscar, "Shrek" is more likely to show up in that tailor-made category, where its competition is expected to be "Monsters, Inc." and "Waking Life." At least, that's the inside betting as the final nominations ballots are tallied. Any other outcome tomorrow morning will be viewed as a major upset.

    Oscar Odds: The year of our "Lord"?
    E! Online

    First, let's really go out on a limb: When Oscar nominations are announced early Tuesday morning, A Beautiful Mind and The Lord of the Rings will score for Best Picture, Sissy Spacek will be nominated for Best Actress and Russell Crowe will snag yet another nod for Best Actor.

    Ho-hum. Yeah, that was tough. Let's go ahead and hand these suckers out, shall we?

    Not so fast. Although this year's Oscar race has its share of frontrunners heading into Tuesday's nominations, a handful of dark horses and divisive films are threatening to shake things up.

    The questions seem to outweigh the answers: Yes, The Lord of the Rings will score plenty of nominations, but will it tie or beat the record 14 nominations garnered by Titanic and All About Eve? Will the fans of Moulin Rouge outnumber its detractors, and how does its love-it-or-hate-it status affect Nicole Kidman's chances for a Best Actress nod? Will the box-office draw of Black Hawk Down overpower the critical praise of Robert Altman's Gosford Park?

    "A lot of people are saying the Oscar race is already over--what with A Beautiful Mind and Sissy Spacek out front," says author and awards-show expert Tom O'Neil. "Don't believe that at all, because there are a lot of wild-card factors."

    For Best Picture, Oscar oddsmakers seem to agree on the likely candidates: A Beautiful Mind, The Lord of the Rings and Moulin Rouge (despite its enemies) will make the cut. The rest isn't so clear: The Screen Actors Guild nominated In the Bedroom and Gosford Park (which, by the way, scored Robert Altman a Golden Globe). The Directors Guild, meanwhile, went with Black Hawk Down and Memento for its top honors--and snubbed Altman.

    Among the favorites for Best Actor: Crowe (A Beautiful Mind) and Denzel Washington (Training Day) stand out among a slew of other possibles, including Billy Bob Thornton (for either Monster's Ball or The Man Who Wasn't There), Tom Wilkinson (In the Bedroom), Sean Penn for I Am Sam and Gene Hackman for The Royal Tenenbaums.

    For Best Actress, it'll be (duh) Spacek for her emotionally devastated role in In the Bedroom, versus any of the following: Halle Berry (Monster's Ball), Judi Dench (Iris), Kidman (for either Moulin Rouge or The Others) or Tilda Swinton (The Deep End).

    Here's a rundown of some other Oscar questions heading into Tuesday:

    • The Ali dilemma: Buzz-wise, Will Smith initially appeared to be a Best Actor contender for Ali. But the film received mixed reviews, and it didn't quite sting like a bee at the box office. If Smith does score a nomination, and Washington grabs one for Training Day, it would mark the first time two black male actors have been nominated in the category.
    • The Drive for Mulholland: Critics groups embraced David Lynch's bizarre glimpse of Tinseltown, but the town itself didn't seem too enamored. The film didn't score one nomination from the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild or the Writers Guild. The film's best shot? An acting nod for Naomi Watts.
    • What about Billy Bob and Nicole? They've both earned critical acclaim for two separate roles, but it's possible both of them could be snubbed. SAG already did it to Kidman, and O'Neil says it didn't help when she told Liz Smith that she'd prefer a Golden Guy for The Others. "It was a boneheaded blunder, because you don't win awards for horror movies unless you're Jodie Foster on an Oscar sweep," he says.
    • The Writers Guild snub job: The WGA disqualified Memento and In the Bedroom from its screenplay honors because the two films weren't guild signatories. That, however, isn't expected to hurt their chances for a Best Screenplay Oscar.
    All of these questions, however, will be answered at 8:30 a.m. ET/5:30 a.m. PT Tuesday. E! will provide live coverage of the announcements, followed by full analysis on both E! and E! Online.

    Laud of the Rings
    Susie Eisenhuth
    The Bulletin

    As the accolades (and box office takings) pile up for Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, and the venerable Mr Tolkien himself is dusted off for reappraisal, let's hear it for a small boy called Rayner Unwin, aged 10. A critic of rare insight, admirable economy, and as it turned out, historic influence. Back in the 1930s, Unwin Senior (of Allen & Unwin fame) blessed with a clever lad of voracious reading habits, used to rope young Rayner into helping to vet new manuscripts. When an adventure turned up involving elves, wizards and a stout-hearted hobbit named Bilbo Baggins, it looked like prime stuff for his son's eagle eye. And young Rayner didn't beat around the bush. "It is good," he wrote, in the childishly scrawled review he still keeps by him some 60 years later.

    Twenty years later, according to the delightful documentary An Awfully Big Adventure (shown on SBS on Christmas Eve), Rayner Unwin was still at it, urging his dad to publish Tolkien's more serious sequel. "I think it's a work of genius", he wrote, adding, with a note of grown-up caution, "I think it's going to lose us a £1000." His fears, of course, proved groundless. Worldwide sales of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are now somewhere in excess of 100 million, leaving aside the vast new industry growing around Jackson's trilogy. And why? The scholarly Mr Unwin puts it down to one thing. "His storytelling is, I think, unparalleled in this century. It is that that brings in the non-literary establishment." As for the literary establishment, which has never been at ease with Tolkien, "It only goes to show that the literary establishment is one thing, and people who read books are another."

    Jackson is one of them. And if there's one thing that distinguishes his splendid film Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring it's the clear-eyed focus on the storytelling. It's as if he stood back from Tolkien's complex world and took note of the author's own dismissal of the elaborate allegories it had spawned. His motive, Tolkien huffed, was "the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them."

    Jackson's film does all that, and more, extracting from the labyrinthine saga a simple narrative line that positively resonates with conviction. This is serious stuff, stirring stuff. There's awe and grandeur and grace in Jackson's telling, as the folk of Middle-earth pit themselves against the powers of the Dark Lord Sauron, led by the gallant Frodo (a pixieish Elijah Wood, looking freshly plucked from the roots of a fairytale tree). No post-modern flourishes here. No knowing nods and winks for an audience overdosed on savvy and self-serving special effects. There's courage to be tested, terrors to be overcome (like the ghastly Ringwraiths and their giant black horses whose shrieking whinnies are straight from the soundtrack of a nightmare.)

    A dream cast helps invest Jackson's dreamscape with the reality it requires, including an elegant Hugo Weaving as the elf king, handsome Viggo Mortensen as the steadfast Aragorn, Ian McKellen bestowing equal parts gravitas and good humour on the beloved Gandalf, and Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, aglow with healing calm. And then there's the other key character, sumptuously played by New Zealand, all mysterious peaks and velvety forests.

    Diehard fans may quibble (like the ones in the SBS doco who gather regularly to converse solemnly in Elvish). But Jackson's lovely legend will find a warm audience, and his celebration of the power of ordinary people of good will to defeat the notion that might is right is perfectly timed for a troubled New Year. As the Lady Galadriel counsels, even at the worst of times, "hope remains, while all the company is true".

    Oscar excitement mounts as the Academy prepares to reveal the nominees
    Hello Magazine

    Though the 2002 Golden Globes have come and gone, and the BAFTA nominations are a matter for the history books this year's Oscar candidates are still anyone’s guess – until the short list is revealed on Tuesday, that is. The roster of nominees is under lock and key until 5:45am Los Angeles time but, as is Tinseltown tradition, Hollywood insiders are already making predictions as to which front runners will make the final cut.

    Critics awards and the Golden Globes have not revealed any one movie to be a sure standout in the race for Oscar gold, but there are plenty of pundits ready to speculate. The west coast editor of Premiere magazine, Anne Thompson, says we can count on Lord Of The Rings, which left the Globes empty handed, scoring “an enormous number” of nominations. “I’ve been talking to a lot of people in the academy, and they love this movie. They applaud its vision, its artistry, its scope.” Also a good bet, according to Oscar watchers, is Robert Altman’s murder mystery Gosford Park.

    Others have more faith in the bookmakers, and where better to go for the hard odds than Las Vegas. Chuck Esposito, a bookmaker at the famed hotel and casino Caesar’s Palace, is giving A Beautiful Mind, which was the top Golden Globe nominee, the edge for best picture, with all-singing all-dancing Moulin Rouge, Black Hawk Down and family drama In The Bedroom tipped as likely nominees as well.

    But, as inevitably occurs every year, there sure to be some unexpected names popping up in the shortlist, perhaps the animated fun fest Shrek or French phenomenon Amelie. “It looks like A Beautiful Mind being number one in so many categories,” says Chuck. “But it’s the Academy. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few surprises.”

    Many networks, including the BBC, plan to cover the nominations live on Tuesday. Winners will be revealed at the annual star-studded ceremony at LA’s Kodak Theatre on March 24.

    Spread betting on the one film to rule them all
    The Observer

    Luvvies won't be the only ones sweating when Oscar nominations are announced this Tuesday, writes Nick Mathiason. For the first time British punters can spread bet on cinema's most prestigious awards.

    Cantor Index last week released its spreads on Oscar nominations and awards. Favourite is Lord of the Rings, tipped to bag five or six Oscars, followed by Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind. Russell Crowe, who won Best Actor last year for Gladiator, is tipped to repeat his success with A Beautiful Mind; Sissy Spacek is expected to win Best Actress.

    With Cantor Movies, which started last July, gamblers can bet on how much a film will gross in its first weekend. Cantor has 17,000 UK traders playing Hollywood Stock Exchange - players sell shares in actors, films and artists using fantasy Hollywood dollars.

    Oscar watch
    Jason Solomons
    The Observer

    As the rocket salads are being cleared from Soho lunch tables on Tuesday, the nominations for the 74th Academy Awards will be revealed in Beverly Hills.

    The rather stern Frank Pierson, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (as D.W. Griffith said: 'What art? What science?') reads out the list. Tradition also requires that he mispronounce in an unabashedly American way candidates in the Foreign Film category.

    This year, Pierson will be joined by Marcia Gay Harden, holder of the Best Supporting Actress title for her portrayal of Lee Krasner, the put-upon wife of Jackson Pollock in Pollock. Significantly, Pollock has still not been released here (latest estimates reckon on June). For us Brits, the Oscar nominations act as one big advert for coming attractions. All that 'overseas territories' - and that includes us - can do is slaver over a nominee's heralded performance during the run-up to the big night - 24 March.

    So what can we expect from Oscar? The Golden Globes suggest Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind will do well, with Russell Crowe certain to be up for Best Actor for his 'tortured maths genius' - Oscar adores a tortured genius. Jennifer Connelly, playing Crowe's wife, is sure to be nominated too.

    We predict that most nods will go to: The Shipping News; The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings because it's got several big words, lots of big effects and is based on literature; Moulin Rouge because it's brilliant and very arty for Hollywood; Shrek because it made loads of money and realistically rendered fur in the CGI format, which we know you'll all agree is a significant step forward for art in the new millennium.

    It may also be the year of the Kidman, with nominations for The Others and Moulin Rouge.

    We'd like to see Robert Altman and Gosford Park at least getting a look-in for Best Director, with Julian Fellowes getting recognition for his witty debut screenplay.

    Other British cheers will probably be limited to acting: Tom Wilkinson ( In the Bedroom), Jim Broadbent ( Iris or Moulin Rouge), Sir Ian McKellen ( Lord of the Rings), Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid was cool, no?), Dame Judi Dench (Iris , The Shipping News) someone from Gosford Park or Ben Kingsley ( Sexy Beast). British disappointments will surely come too, perhaps for Kate Winslet, Harry Potter and Ewan McGregor.

    Most interesting will be nominations for Films in a Foreign Language. Miramax-backed Amélie is likely to be the favourite (Americans just love that insufferable little movie) but Nanni Moretti's delicate Cannes winner The Son's Room - a 'downer' certainly, but one also being lifted by Miramax - should feature, as will Walter Salles's Behind the Sun and Mexico's Amores Perros. India could be there for the first time in years with Lagaan .

    Oscar pulls all-nighter
    Timothy M. Gray
    Reuters

    HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - Imagine being locked up overnight with your co-workers. The phones are shut down. You're not allowed to sleep, you're not allowed to leave. It sounds like a Freudian nightmare. But for two dozen workers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, it's an annual ritual. Monday night, leading up to Tuesday's predawn announcement of Oscar nominations, the upper floors of the academy's headquarters in Beverly Hills will be sealed from 9 p.m. until 5:45 a.m.

    Delivery people bring food to the lobby. Also in the lobby is a technician, on standby in case of glitches to the photocopier. But if the techie or caterer ventures into the Forbidden Zone upstairs, he or she will have to stay there until 5:45 a.m. If somebody wanders into the quarantine area, "We have to kill him or make him a certified public accountant, which is worse," academy executive administrator Ric Robertson said quietly.

    Robertson is the king of deadpan humor, but he's usually very serious when he talks about Oscars. As he sits in his seventh-floor office -- festooned with books and punctuated with photos of the Oscar statuette, a Moosehead Beer neon sign, a giant poster of Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles in "Signora di Shanghai" and a clock that sings Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" every hour ("As seen on TV!" he intones with mock excitement) -- Robertson gives the rundown of the hard day's night at the academy's HQ.

    By 2 p.m., most Academy employees have gone home. But a member of accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers is already on site with the official list of nominees and has been locked into the massive sixth-floor mailing room, to begin photocopying the list.

    "A little before 9 p.m., people start to wander in," Robertson said. There are about two dozen Academy workers, mostly supervisors who've been doing this for a number of years.

    9:00 P.M.

    PricewaterhouseCoopers staffers wheel out 1,200 copies of the nominations list. PWC partner Greg Garrison arrives and -- since everybody in Hollywood loves rituals -- makes a presentation of the first copy of the list to academy executive director Bruce Davis.

    Then the phones are shut down. Of course, in an era of cell phones, this is a bit of a ritual as well. But if anyone is seen walking around with a cell phone, he or she is told to turn it off.

    9:01 P.M.

    Academy staffers go into overdrive. On the fourth floor, Margaret Herrick Library director Linda Mehr and others begin collation of 1,200 press kits. It usually takes them three to five hours to put together the PWC tallies, the production notes on the five best picture nominees, bios of the key contenders and photos, which have been submitted by the studios.

    On the fifth floor, Davis, director of communications John Pavlik, Academy historian Patrick Stockstill and Robertson meet in Stockstill's office to come up with fun facts about the nominees.

    On the sixth floor, membership administrator Michael Angel begins working on Oscar-night seating: The number of tickets to be allocated to a company based upon the number of nominations received; the number of seats to set aside when there are multiple nominees for a single nomination (such as sound editing), etc.

    In the seventh-floor boardroom, Oscar.com workers (who are ABC employees) prepare the Web pages that will go up as soon as the announcements are made.

    Douglass M. Stewart Jr., president of DMS Production Services, prepares slides to be used in the announcement of the nominations.

    12:30 A.M.

    Publicity coordinator Leslie Unger and publicity logistics coordinator Kim Tamny admit members of the electronic media to the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, up one flight of stairs, to begin setting up.

    3 A.M.

    There is a tech rehearsal for everyone, using last year's slides and script.

    3:30 A.M.

    In the ground-floor lobby, about 400 members of the media arrive. There is an open bar; several people avail themselves of the free liquor. Have they been up all night, and this is a nightcap, or is this their breakfast? Like the origin of the nickname "Oscar," this is one of the Academy's mysteries that may never be solved.

    4 A.M.

    Academy president Frank Pierson and a star arrive. The star is usually a past Oscar winner, and the two will announce the nominees. Meanwhile, the electronic media are cleared out of the theater, banished to the lobby.

    Pierson and the Oscar star will have a dress rehearsal, using the real slides for the first time, and going over the list and pronunciations. (In the past few years, nominees have included Tsai Kuo Jung, Vincenzo Cerami, M. Night Shyamalan and Pieter Jan Brugge.)

    5 A.M.

    Members of print and electronic media are admitted to the Goldwyn Theater. On-air personalities take their places in front of cameras, all cleverly positioned to make it look as if they are the only ones there. Print media members commiserate with publicists and Oscar campaigners about the early hour.

    5:38 AND 30 SECONDS

    Announcements are timed to the morning chat shows back East.

    Robertson said he's been doing this for 20 years. Any favorite years? "When it's 6 o'clock and it's gone off without a hitch -- that's always my favorite year."

    Film world awaits Oscar nominations
    BBC News

    Hollywood on Tuesday as the nominations for the 74th Academy Awards are announced.

    Actors Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman are among the favourites to gain nods for their roles in A Beautiful Mind and Moulin Rouge respectively, while the makers of The Lord of the Rings and In the Bedroom will be hoping also that the academy smiles on them.

    This year's Oscars are considered by many film critics as among the hardest to predict with no film emerging from the pack of contenders as an outright favourite.

    The nominations will be announced by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Frank Pierson and Marcia Gay Harden, winner of the best supporting actress Oscar in 2001, at 1330GMT.

    Best picture

    While The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone have dominated the box office there is no guarantee that they will do the same at the Oscars.

    Smaller films In the Bedroom, directed by Todd Field, and A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard, are also expected to be in the running for best picture award.

    In the build-up to the Academy Awards, the traditional pre-Oscar guides have been divided.

    While A Beautiful Mind scooped the Golden Globe for best film, Mulholland Drive won the New York Film Critics' Circle award.

    And the first Lord of the Rings film won movie of the year as judged by the American Film Institute (AFI), while In the Bedroom won the Los Angeles Film Critics' Association award.

    It all adds up to a sense of excitement and uncertainty with other contenders such as Gosford Park, Monster's Ball and Moulin Rouge also tipped.

    Black Hawk Down, Rdiley Scott's war film, appears to be ranked as an outsider.

    Acting prizes

    The awards for actors and actresses are no clearer, however.

    Kidman and Crowe may have walked away with the Globes but other film awards have spread the acting prizes around evenly.

    The nominations for the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) give a strong indication of who is in favour in the acting stakes.

    Crowe, Kevin Kline (Life as a House), Sean Penn (I Am Sam), Denzel Washington (Training Day) and Tom Wilkinson (In the Bedroom) all have nods in the best actor category for the SAGs and will hope for similar interest from the Oscar voters.

    In the best actress category at the SAGs Halle Berry (Monster's Ball), Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind), Judi Dench (Iris), Sissy Spacek (In the Bedroom) and Renée Zellweger (Bridget Jones's Diary) are nominated although it remains to be seen if the academy is thinking along similar lines, however.

    There is also uncertainty over the British element to this year's awards.

    Iris, the film about the life of novelist Irish Murdoch directed by Richard Eyre, has been generally well-received.

    But it has not made much of an impact on the consciousness of American cinema-goers, although Jim Broadbent, who was also in Moulin Rouge, has already won a Golden Globe for his performance.

    He and Dame Judi Dench are considered in the running for acting awards.

    Elsewhere, the ensemble cast of Gosford Park may be impressive but the cameo-nature of the roles may go against them.

    For the first time, the academy will be handing out an Oscar to the best animated film with Shrek and Monsters, Inc. favourites to win nominations.

    And in the foreign film category, French film Amelie looks to be the runaway winner.

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