KEY POINTS:
Will it go to the precocious pregnant teen? The stun-gun assassin having a really bad hair day? The folk-singing male impersonator? The singer-slasher barber? Or the screen embodiment of the woman the French called "the sparrow".
Will the supporting actress be the 83-year-old veteran or the 13-year-old newcomer?
Will the best supporting actor be the guy who actually got his name in the title of the film?
And who's going to win the battle of the books - No Country for Old Men, Atonement or There Will Be Blood?
Well if you put it like that, the 80th Academy Awards can sound pretty exciting.
Though it's hard to get too carried away by this year's Oscars, which are happening on Monday our time.
That writers' strike, even though it's resolved and the teleprompters will roll again with your host Jon Stewart, seems to have cast a bit of a pall over proceedings. It's also meant that you won't see the delayed broadcast of the ceremony on free-to-air telly here and possibly never again.
But the reason it's hard to get too worked up about who will win what this year is due to an embarrassment of riches. There are lots of great films in the Oscars this year. Often the ceremony is big on merely good films which have greatness thrust upon them by their marketing departments.
It used to be easy to pick the Oscars - or at least have fun trying - by deriding the duds. But this year you've got a new generation of directors led by some earlier radicals like the Coen Brothers (No Country for Old Men) and Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).
The films dominating this year aren't the the prestige Oscar vehicles of old and the only title which resembles one, Atonement, seems to be out of the running; even the supposedly very English period drama has its own radical touches - pity there's no category for best use of a four-letter word in a supporting role.
It's a year of extravagant acting led by Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will be Blood and of Great American soul-searching whether it's Blood, the Coens' No Country, or the corporate-paranoia thriller Michael Clayton.
I'm usually not much cop at Oscar picks. Then again when we went through this exercise last year, I wrote that young Ellen Page was rudely ignored for not being nominated for Hard Candy which hardly anyone saw and nobody who did see really enjoyed. So bully for me.
But this year's she's up for playing that preggers adolescent in Juno, the only remotely feelgood film among the Oscar headliners. So she gets my vote again, though I get the feeling Julie Christie for little-seen Alzheimer's drama Away From Her will prove the comeback queen.
So far as best actor is concerned, that Daniel Day-Lewis is really something isn't he? But through the hypnotic, bewildering There Will Be Blood I found myself regularly closing my eyes and trying to figure out whose voice he had borrowed. And until the answer comes to me my pick is Johnny Depp for Sweeney Todd. He hasn't got a hope, of course, but if those Chicago gals got awards for breaking into song a few years ago, Depp sure deserves one too.
As the supporting players go, Casey Affleck sure stole the show as Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and actress-wise young Saoirse Ronan possibly deserves Atonement's consolation prize. Though Cate Blachett as Bob Dylan? Hey, it's just one of those years.
Director-wise, it looks like the Coens have it sewn up, even if they didn't deviate much from Cormac McCarthy's source material, and No Country For Old Men should also prove a rare best picture choice - one that the Academy won't be embarrased by in years to come.
