Eastwood vs Scorsese in fight for Oscar glory

IT'S the question everybody's asking: when the Oscars are handed out tomorrow night, will Clint Eastwood and his Million Dollar Baby clip the wings of Martin Scorsese's The Aviator's wings and burst Sideways bubble?

The irony is that if Scorsese wins, it will make up for the fact that he lost the decision in perhaps his most heralded work, Raging Bull. Effectively, his boxing movie classic could deliver the knockout punch to another great boxing movie.

Eastwood's boxing opus and Scorsese's Aviator look to be the favourites for the Best Director and Best Picture prizes, respectively, but that does little to break Scorsese's notorious losing streak having been overlooked four times for Best Director (for Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas and Gangs of New York) and twice for Best Adapted Screenplay (The Age of Innocence, Goodfellas).

Unlike last year's utterly predictable ceremony, when the clear front-runners took all the acting awards, these Oscars are anyone's guess in most categories.

Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman and Cate Blanchett look like solid acting front-runners, but Annette Bening, Clive Owen and Virginia Madsen are among the rivals who could play spoiler.

Jamie Foxx looks the one dead cert. His remarkable portrayal of Ray Charles in Ray makes him of the surest bets in Oscar history.

Best picture: The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Million Dollar Baby, Ray, Sideways.

The prevailing sense in Hollywood is that Eastwood's boxing saga will triumph because it carries an emotional wallop lacking in Scorsese's epic.

Yet The Aviator is not down for the count. It has grand filmmaking buoyed by spectacular visuals, excellent performances and a glimpse of old Hollywood in all its garish glory.

Million Dollar Baby has the momentum, though. The film stars Swank as an indomitable boxer in what initially is an uplifting Rocky-like story before it takes a harsh turn. Eastwood co-stars as her gruffly loveable trainer.

At its first Warner screening, "people were crying, and it was so evident that it was almost there already", said producer Albert Ruddy.

Scorsese's best hope is that it is truly a close race among the 5,808 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. If it is, a few sentimental-favourite votes could bring The Aviator in for a triumphant landing.

The other three nominees are admirable films but long shots to win.

Sideways, a darling of critics, stars Paul Giamatti as a sad-sack whose wine-tasting road trip with a buddy offers him a fresh chance at love. Finding Neverland features Johnny Depp as playwright JM Barrie in a whimsical exploration of the creation of his masterpiece, Peter Pan.

Ray broke into the best-picture category on the strength of Foxx's great performance as singer Charles.

Best director: Nominated alongside Scorsese and Eastwood are Taylor Hackford for Ray; Alexander Payne for Sideways and Mike Leigh for Vera Drake. As with best picture, the directing category is a two-horse race. Eastwood won the Golden Globe and the Directors Guild of America honour, the latter being a solid forecast of who will win the Oscar.

Only six times in the previous 56 years has the guild winner failed to take the directing Oscar.

But any predictions should be accompanied by a huge caveat, given some strange decisions by the Academy in the past.

How could the Academy have given the nod in 1944 to How Green Was My Valley over the directorial debuts of John Huston's The Maltese Falcon or Orson Welles's Citizen Kane?

Equally baffling is the 1980 victory of the very ordinary Robert Redford film, Ordinary People, over Scorsese's Raging Bull.