Best Actor

Sean Penn is the front-runner and deservedly so, I think. Although his role choices have sometimes left a bit to be desired and his mercurial nature makes him a virtual pariah at the Oscars, whenever he commits to a role as he previously did with Dead Man Walking and I Am Sam, Penn has few peers. With the Tolkien/Lord Of The Rings bandwagon approaching Best Picture at full speed, Oscar voters will likely compensate Mystic River by awarding Penn his first ever golden statuette (in four tries).

Johnny Depp's marvelously flamboyant, redemptive turn in Pirates Of The Caribbean is a worthy top contender. But Depp's politically incorrect views, his decidedly non-Hollywood disposition (he lives with lover Vanessa Paradis and their children in France) may cause Oscar voters to put him on the plank come decision time. Don't smirk, it worked against Russell Crowe.

Jude Law steps into a venerable tradition of British excellence in the Best Actor category. Anthony Hopkins' win for Silence of the Lambs, in 1991, capped a three-year run for British-born lead actors, beginning with Daniel Day-Lewis for My Left Foot and continuing with Jeremy Irons in Reversal of Fortune. The last decade however, has been split between the US and Australia and it's unlikely that Britannia will rule this year.

Principally, Cold Mountain director Anthony Minghella has been shut out this year and barely one-third of the Best Actor winners in Oscar history (22 out of 75) have won for a picture with no Best Director nomination.

Bill Murray has been basking in critical praise for his performance in Lost in Translation, and could prove the sleeper in this category.

The key will be whether Oscar voters regard Murray's transition from comic prankster to well-intentioned "serious" actor in the same vein as they viewed that of Tom Hanks, who mined Oscar gold in two consecutive years (Philadelphia and Forest Gump 1993&94) after struggling through largely forgettable comedies like Volunteers and The Man with One Red Shoe. My guess is, not yet.

It's been a long, strange Oscar trip for Royal Shakespeare veteran Ben Kingsley. Since blowing both critics and audiences away as Mahatma Ghandi in the Oscar sweeper of the same name back in 1982, he's had to endure two Best Supporting Actor losses (10 years apart - 1992's Bugsy and 2002's Sexy Beast) before returning to the Best Actor toss-up as a bigoted landlord in House of Sand and Fog. Despite a great reception from critics (the film is yet to screen locally), I'm guessing it will be third time unlucky for Ben.

Best Supporting Actor

Take two Americans, a West African (via France), a third American by way of Mexico and a Japanese and you have a global mélange competing for Best Supporting Actor.

A glance at the past winners going back to Jason Robards back-to-back triumphs in 1976-77 (the only actor with back-to back wins in the category) shows a notable preponderance of 40-plus and even 50-plus actors. This would tend to put Benicio del Toro and Djimon Hounsou, the youngest of this year's nominees, in the underdog category. But del Toro has won before and Hounsou has a number of Hollywood typographies going for him: he plays an HIV-AIDS sufferer, and he's in the kind of touching yet largely unsentimental picture (In America) that Academy voters tend to like.

Robbins and Baldwin, however, have to be regarded as the clear favourites. As the mentally anguished former childhood abuse victim in Mystic River, Robbins does some of his best acting work since The Shawshank Redemption. Baldwin meanwhile, has seen his film career reach a stark counterpoint to his personal life.

Consistently compelling performances (he was easily the best player in Pearl Harbour and wowed TV audiences in the cable mini-series, Nuremberg) are sadly countered by a nasty divorce from actress wife Kim Basinger, complete with allegations of domestic violence.

As the inscrutable samurai warrior leader in Tom Cruise's otherwise self-absorbed The Last Samurai, Ken Watanabe is, to my mind, the best performer of the lot, but the statistics simply don't favour a non-American actor in a largely non-English-speaking role.

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'

Cheeky's World