KEY POINTS:
So, it's the Oscars on Monday. No, it hasn't already happened. It might just feel that way after a month of the many and various warm-up awards which has left Slumdog Millionaire the presumptive best picture winner and Danny Boyle the likely best director winner.
But despite Slumdog's fairytale success and snowballing box office, this year's Oscars like every one since that humble New Zealand production Return of the King cleaned up in 2005, still marks a disconnect between the Academy's actor-dominated movie-biz voters and those around the world who keep them in business.
Yes, the late Heath Ledger is nominated and is likely to win a posthumous Oscar for his Joker in Dark Knight and the film features in many more technical awards. But it should also be up for best picture. Not because it made more money than all the best picture nominees of the past few years combined. But because like Lord of the Rings trilogy, it changed the rules - it proved you can be a big genre blockbuster and still be beautiful.
It's also much more of a movie than the stage-developed broadcast history lesson that was Frost/Nixon. And Ledger's transformation under the clown make-up is far more remarkable than anything they did prosthetically or digitally to Brad or Cate in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
And maybe I like cartoons too much but I thought Wall-E, which is likely to be the animation category winner should have trundled into the best picture category too.
It too was more cinematic than most of the competiton and frankly said more about life, the universe and everything than Button, which so far as profundity went couldn't even come up with an annoying platitude about the meaning of life unlike its Oscar-winning chocolate-box-touting ancestor Forrest Gump.
Button is the film with the most nominations. It's also likely to be the night's biggest loser - best actor nominee Pitt is as much of a longshot as his missus is for her Changeling. Though the boffins who turned Pitt into a ugly old baby are likely to pick up something along the way.
But at least the combination of stars doing their earnest best against unknown longshots make for some intriguing possibilities in the actor and actress nominations.
If Ledger wins and Mickey Rourke does for The Wrestler, it will be a dead guy and a guy who's back from the dead.
If Ledger loses out to Robert Downey Jr for Tropic Thunder it will be will be an Australian actor in white face paint with a mad American accent who obviously had some drug problems, losing to an American actor playing an Australian actor using a mad American accent in black face paint, who also once had some drug problems.
A prediction though: Rourke's comeback ends here and Penn takes best actor for Milk.
Among the gals, well it's largely Winslet vs Streep in the best actress stakes and the remaining cast of Doubt vs the rest in the supporting category. At least if Marisa Tomei wins for her supporting role to Rourke in The Wrestler it might even things up a little - she won the same award in 1992 for the forgettable comedy My Cousin Vinny in what went down in Oscar legend as a possible presenter's mistake that the Academy was supposedly too embarassed to put right.
Winslet's bid to finally win one of her six Oscar nominations has hit a snag with a political backlash against the film in which [spoiler alert] she plays a former SS guard charged with holocaust war crimes. For Winslet it could be a case of be careful what you wish for, even in jest. When she was a guest star on Ricky Gervais' Extras a few years ago, she played herself as the Catholic nun hero of a holocaust film. As a warm-up to Monday afternoon's Oscars,
why not search out the the clip of Gervais' Andy Millman and Winslet ...
Millman: "I think you doing this is so commendable. keeping the message alive about the Holocaust ..."
Winslet: "God I'm not doing it for that. We don't really need another film about the Holocaust do we? It's like how many have there been? We get it. It was grim. Move on. I'm doing it because I've noticed if you do a film about the Holocaust you are guaranteed an Oscar. I've been nominated four times. Never won. The whole world is going 'why hasn't Winslet won one?'. That's it, that is why I am doing it. Schindler's bloody List, The Pianist. Oscars coming out of their arse."
