LOS ANGELES " As usual in Hollywood, Oscar night looks like the same people will generally be collecting the same prizes. Yet some suspense remains for a few of the main awards. A look at the key categories:
BEST PICTURE
The Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men" is the odds-on favorite to claim best picture, winning top honors from guilds for directors, writers, producers and actors.
Despite an ending that some found unsatisfying or even baffling for its loose ends, the film has won universal acclaim and is the Coen brothers' biggest commercial success, with $60 million and climbing at the domestic box office.
Adapted from Cormac McCarthy's novel, "No Country" is anchored by three truly great performances from Josh Brolin as a wily Texan on the run with a fortune in hijacked drug money, Tommy Lee Jones as an honorable sheriff mystified by the case's brutality, and Javier Bardem as an inhuman killer trying to retrieve the cash.
The Coens' chief worry was that Bardem's character might "come across as sort of like the terminator in a bad action movie. The implacable-killer cliche, the unstoppable killer," Joel Coen said. "The thing we knew about Javier is that whatever it is he did, it would not be that." (See below for why Bardem is a shoo-in to win supporting actor.)
Strangely (perhaps fortuitously) for the Coens, whose career has been built on oddball pictures that normally aren't the stuff Oscar dreams are made of, "No Country" is up against an even weirder picture, Paul Thomas Anderson's oil-boom epic "There Will Be Blood."
"No Country" looks almost conventional next to "There Will Be Blood." A virtual silent film for the first 15 minutes, "Blood" then hurtles through a mythic struggle between commerce and Christianity, both equally greedy and underhanded.
"Atonement" is an all-around fine film but not one people feel passionate about (the two attractive and deserving leads, Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, didn't even earn acting nominations).
Despite the supreme charm of George Clooney in the title role, the legal drama "Michael Clayton" looks to be merely along for the best-picture ride. Likewise, the pregnancy comedy "Juno" seems a just-happy-to-be-nominated entry, much like another lighter nominee, "Little Miss Sunshine," was a year ago.
BEST ACTOR
Weird as it is, "There Will Be Blood" features a monumental performance from Daniel Day-Lewis, a best-actor winner for "My Left Foot" who seems certain to win again this time.
As a pioneering oil baron, Day-Lewis gives the sort of performance for which the phrase "larger than life" was invented. He's big and bad, callous and contemptuous, and riveting for every second he's on screen.
Where did all that diabolical energy come from?
"It was a fully imagined, fully understood world that Paul had already created on the page for me, therefore it was that world, in its entirety, that unleashed a curiosity that can take you, you just don't know where," Day-Lewis said.
If he did not already own an Oscar, past supporting-actor winner Clooney might have a better shot against Day-Lewis. Clooney is tremendous as an attorney rediscovering his conscience, which has gone south amid his work as a "fixer" of sordid problems.
"No Country" co-star Jones was a surprise nominee as an ex-military policeman looking into the death of his son in "In the Valley of Elah," a murder mystery set among returning Iraq veterans. A past Oscar recipient, Jones is unlikely to win again for a film generally dismissed by critics and awards watchers.
Johnny Depp is deliciously disturbed as the murderous title figure in "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," while Viggo Mortensen strikes a great balance between compassion and ferocity as a Russian mobster in "Eastern Promises."
But no one can touch Day-Lewis this year.
BEST ACTRESS
It took a lot of arm-twisting by director Sarah Polley before Julie Christie agreed to star in "Away From Her," a heartbreaking drama about a woman succumbing to Alzheimer's.
After Christie finally said yes, she went on to deliver a performance that beautifully bookends her Oscar-winning role 42 years earlier in "Darling" as a social-climber shallowly sleeping her way to the top.
In "Away From Her," Christie plays a woman with all her romantic slings and arrows behind her, who finally has arrived at a place of peace and companionship only to have it slip away as her memory fades.
The reclusive Christie understands why her performance has drawn so much attention. Everyone, Oscar voters included, loves a comeback.
"They love to see you're still alive, and not only still alive, but you're actually doing something. 'Great, magnificent, you're alive and walking. Fantastic,"' Christie said.
Oscar voters also love fresh faces, and there are two potential spoilers for best actress: Marion Cotillard, who undergoes a remarkable transformation from dauntless teen to worldly chanteuse to frail has-been as singer Edith Piaf in "La Vie En Rose"; and Ellen Page as a whipsmart pregnant teen with a bag full of smart-alecky put-downs in "Juno."
Cate Blanchett is grandly showy as Britain's monarch in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," but it's a been-there, done-that sequel to the film that shot her to stardom. Plus she already has a supporting-actress Oscar.
Laura Linney, nominated for the sibling comic drama "The Savages," is great as usual, but with Christie, Cotillard and Page in the race, this is not her year.
SUPPORTING ACTOR
True evil is hard to embrace, but Javier Bardem cannot lose. His "No Country for Old Men" killer is a merciless terror out of your worst nightmares, yet Bardem imbues him with a twisted charm and tenacity that makes him irresistible and even perversely human, albeit from the depraved side of humanity.
"It's about playing somebody that is numb with any other people's feelings or even his own feelings," Bardem said. "He doesn't have any goal or any need or wish in doing what he does. He's about to bring fate to you in order for you to face it, whether you like it or not."
Turns out, everybody liked it. Bardem has dominated at earlier awards and is considered a lock to win in a category crowded with worthy performances: Casey Affleck as a jilted devotee who turns on his idol in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"; Hal Holbrook as a lonely widower who tries to become surrogate father to an idealistic wanderer in "Into the Wild"; past best-actor winner Philip Seymour Hoffman as a slovenly but capable CIA man in "Charlie Wilson's War"; and Tom Wilkinson as a brilliant but unstable attorney in "Michael Clayton."
In any other year, any one of them could win.
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Here's the category that still holds real suspense. If Blanchett had not already won an Oscar, she'd be the likely pick to take the prize for her transgender brilliance in a spot-on incarnation of Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There." But the movie itself left viewers cold, and Blanchett's win as Katharine Hepburn in "The Aviator" is fresh in Oscar voters' minds.
Child actors have fared best in the supporting-actress category, a potential plus for teenager Saoirse Ronan as a jealous girl in "Atonement" whose fib has devastating consequences for an older sister and her new lover.
On the other end is Ruby Dee, who has a fairly fleeting role as mother to a crime lord in "American Gangster" but may have sentiment on her side with her first Oscar nomination coming at age 83, after a venerable 60-year career.
"They didn't notice me till I got to be an old, old lady," Dee joked.
With "Michael Clayton" co-stars Clooney and Wilkinson facing seemingly insurmountable competition in their categories, Tilda Swinton could be the most likely performer from that movie to win for her role as an attorney who stops at nothing to achieve her ends. Next to Clooney and Wilkinson, though, Swinton's is the weakest performance of the movie's three principals.
Then there's Amy Ryan, a theater and TV veteran whose film career has taken off on the strength of her turn in "Gone Baby Gone" as the mother of all bad mothers, a woman who responds to her 4-year-old daughter's abduction with infuriating selfishness.
"Mostly, when I do a scene, I'm relieved when it's over," Ryan said. "With this, it was, 'Oh, man, I want to go again. Let's go again.' There's so much to do with her. There are so many variables to the equation."
BEST DIRECTOR
The category is full of first-time directing contenders, with only Joel Coen having previously been nominated, for "Fargo" (he and brother Ethan used to split the producing and directing credits but lately have been sharing both).
They are up against Anderson for "There Will Be Blood," Tony Gilroy for "Michael Clayton," Jason Reitman for "Juno" and Julian Schnabel for "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," adapted from the memoir of French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a paralyzing stroke.
The Coens have gradually advanced from admired outsiders to exalted players on the mainstream fringes. With "No Country," they have delivered their most popular film yet, one that has found an audience at large along with the enthusiastic respect of critics.
So it seems inevitable that they will take home Hollywood's biggest filmmaking honor, which usually goes hand-in-hand with best picture.
Accepting the Directors Guild of America prize for "No Country," Joel Coen said it would find an honored place among the "various plaques and such that we've gotten over the years that we call our ego corner." On a bad day, he joked, brother Ethan goes over and shines up their trophies.
After Sunday, the Coens' ego corner should have a new centerpiece.