Joan Allen - THE CONTENDER
"The one thing you don't want is a woman with her finger on the button who isn't getting laid." The Contender is a terrible movie. Rod Lurie's script is overloaded with testosterone that might have passed for wit if David Mamet had been brought in for a polish - it's one long penis-measuring contest. Allen has the title role, an Ohio senator nominated for the vice-presidency only to be ambushed by a smear campaign involving a 25-year-old sex scandal.

The Academy falls in love with certain performers: Marsha Mason in the 70s, Glenn Close in the 80s, and now Allen. She's very much a Glenn Close type - slender, fine-boned, intelligent - but she has yet to find her Fatal Attraction, her break-the-mould role. The Academy overlooked her career-best performance in Pleasantville, but did nominate this performance, a very convincing portrait of a woman holding her nose.

Fun fact: Allen played Jeff Bridges' wife in Tucker: The Man And His Dream. She also appeared opposite best-actress nominee Laura Linney in Searching For Bobby Fischer, with best-actor nominee Ed Harris in Nixon and under the direction of nominee Ang Lee in The Ice Storm.

Juliette Binoche - CHOCOLAT
"Go ahead. Have a chocolate. Have two." I made that up. Dialogue from Chocolat tends to slide out of one's memory as quickly as it's spoken. I freely admit that I don't get Juliette Binoche. I've never liked her in anything and I don't understand the fuss. With her inward demeanour and repertoire of shy smiles and look-away nods, casting her here as The Lifeforce is the oddest decision since Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu gave us Isabelle Adjani playing her role as if she were already dead.

CELEBRITY DEATHMATCH SPECIAL!!

ELLEN BURSTYN - Requiem For A Dream
vs.
JULIA ROBERTS - Erin Brockovich
The difference between Burstyn's performance in Requiem For A Dream and Roberts's in Erin Brockovich is the basis for an argument about the nature of film acting. Burstyn is old-school, hard-working, Actors Studio, carefully constructing a performance out of felt detail, sense memory, all that technique. Roberts is one of those people the camera loves. You can't teach it and you can't learn it. Burstyn can change her age, her ethnicity, she can be city, she can be country. Roberts is pretty much always Julia Roberts, which doesn't mean that she can't act or doesn't act, but simply that she doesn't get credit for it when she does.

It isn't even a question of conventional beauty. Take a close look at Roberts sometime. She's odd-looking. None of her features quite go together - the mouth is too wide, the chin too narrow, for starters. But something happens when light bounces off her and hits a chemical emulsion bonded to celluloid, not to mention that her comic timing as Brockovich is as good as it gets.

Burstyn's most powerful work in Requiem For A Dream is silent. As a lonely Brooklyn widow who gets hooked on diet pills, she's up against the Julianne Moore/Boogie Nights problem here: her most powerful scenes come late in Requiem, which means the older members of the Academy are unlikely to make it through the distorting lenses and smash cuts of Darren Aronofsky's migraine-inducing style. In her favour, she's a semi-legend. Against her is the fact that her filmography for two decades has been an illustration of the Monty Python sketch How Not To Be Seen. Spitfire Grill, anyone?

LAURA LINNEY - You Can Count On Me
"What is the Church's official position on adultery and fornication these days?" Linney gets her first true starring role in this very Sundance drama about a single mom in a small upstate New York town whose life suddenly becomes very complicated. It sounds a lot like Erin Brockovich, but she's not taking on a big utility company in a precedent-setting lawsuit. And she also insists on a certain middle-class respectability in her life, while Brockovich is borderline white trash with an attitude.

Linney gives a wonderfully intricate performance - the scene in the car after she's had sex with her boss is a triumph of conflicting prides and shames. The unfortunate thing about Linney's extraordinary performance is that she's up against Hollywood's biggest female star in her career-best performance.