Russell Crowe - GLADIATOR
"Unleash hell." There are problems with the movie, but Crowe isn't among them. From his brutal cop in L.A. Confidential (sadly unnominated) and his remarkable whistle-blower in The Insider (nominated) to his sturdy incarnation of the title character in Gladiator, Ridley Scott's resurrection of a dead genre, Crowe has compiled a genuinely impressive filmography. His sullen intensity - someone described his performance here as that of a man who woke up, found himself in a movie and wasn't happy about it - works perfectly; the second you treat material like this with the least ironic distance, it turns to camp.

Fun fact: Crowe would be the first New Zealand-born acting winner.

Tom Hanks - CAST AWAY
"I have made fire!" Here's the thing. No male actor has ever won the Academy Award for best actor in a leading role three times. Spencer Tracy won it twice in the 30s, acted for another 35 years, got a clutch of nominations but never won again. Two decades passed between both Jack Nicholson's and Marlon Brando's two best-actor Oscars. And it took more than 40 years for Katharine Hepburn to get three statuettes for lead performances. Is the Academy willing to give Hanks his third in less than a decade?

Frankly, I think he deserves two, but not the ones he's got. And if he hadn't won those, he would have won for Saving Private Ryan, sparing us all the lovable but somehow unpleasant spectacle of Roberto Benigni.

That said, he's very good in Cast Away, managing the unusual feat of carrying the central 90 minutes of the film with only a volleyball.

Javier Bardem - BEFORE NIGHT FALLS
"I think xsdfta asdofbrh gfewiouacd." OK, Bardem gives a wonderful physical performance as the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, quite a stretch from his studly hetero roles in the comic farces of Spanish filmmaker Bigas Luna. But this movie is linguistically challenged. Everybody's playing Cubans, including Johnny Depp and Sean Penn (bonus points for actually spotting Penn), and they're all speaking English with thick Cuban accents and occasional Spanish outbursts (at least I think they're Spanish outbursts). There are moments, and lots of them, when one wishes director Julian Schnabel had simply shot the film in Spanish, because it's hard to assess Bardem's performance when you can't understand what he's saying.

The nomination is the award.

Ed Harris - POLLOCK
Ed Harris's turn as Jackson Pollock enters the Oscar fray from a category that's often nominated, an actor realizing a long-held dream project. Think Robert Duvall's The Apostle or Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves. Harris delivers a portrait of the artist as an abusive drunk, and he acts up a storm, knocking over the furniture and dripping paint on really big canvases,

In terms of the odds, Harris's pluses - his commitment and intensity - are outweighed by the minuses. First among these is the fact that bringing your dream project to the screen impresses actors (who nominate actors) more than the Academy as a whole. Then, too, although Harris is a respected veteran , Pollock is a small, independent film in a year that's favoured grand subjects and epics like Gladiator, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Traffic.Small world: Harris has worked with fellow nominees Hanks, Joan Allen, Laura Linney and Julia Roberts.

Geoffrey Rush - QUILLS
"Go ahead, you've a key; slip it through my tiny hole!" With dialogue like this, Rush gives us the Marquis de Sade as a jolly fellow who believed in sexual freedom. This is historically unsound, and Philip Kaufman's film simply reeks of the proscenium, but it's almost impossible to fault Rush's commitment to the part or his interpretation of it. (Rush didn't write the script, after all, and I suspect that somewhere in hell de Sade had a good laugh at it.) He displays an unassailable dirty glee in the character's outrageousness, which counts for something.

The problem is that the buzz about Quills has faded irreversibly ever since the first bloom of raves from the San Francisco critics (notably Michael Sragow and David Thomson), who also happen to be friends of the director. Its simple-minded freedom-over-repression message lost ground to the simple-minded indulgence-over-abstinence message of Chocolat. And the lack of nominations in other key categories (where's Kate Winslet's?) works against the likelihood of Rush picking up a second Oscar, following his 1996 win for Shine.