CHOCOLAT -- The Snowball In Hell
This is Miramax's paint-by-numbers Oscar entry, complete with a relatively distinguished literary source (see also The English Patient, Shakespeare In Love, The Cider House Rules), a classy multinational cast and easy-to-follow themes that espouse a superficial liberalism while standing four-square for the modern status quo. It's also food porn of a rather low order -- snack porn, actually.

If you want to see the awesome power of the Miramax promotional machine in action, here it is. This remarkably bland little movie became the last man standing as Miramax's other Oscar hopefuls did the long slide into bad reviews and worse box office. According to an article in the L.A. Times, the company spent $1.4 million promoting Chocolat in New York and L.A., and here's the result. Five Oscar nominations.

This is a bad-verging-on-unwatchable fake foreign film. Actors of various nationalities play French characters, but none of them speaks French -- they throw the occasional "Bonjour, madame" into the mix just to give the right impression.

Against Chocolat is a simple fact: films that don't get best-director nominations usually don't win best picture. The last film to win best picture without a director nomination was Driving Miss Daisy. Before that, you have to go back to the 1930s.

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON -- If I Were Voting
I've been looking for a better picture than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon since it premiered at Cannes in May. I've yet to see one. There are two premium reasons why the Academy may not choose CTHD as best picture. First, no foreign-language film has ever won in this category. Second, it's a martial arts film -- one of the most extraordinary martial arts films ever made, with jaw-dropping wire work enhancing the stunts, an achingly true story of love stifled by obligation, and a drop-dead-elegant visual style. It's like finding a movie with a terrific Meryl Streep performance and great car chases. Another argument against CTHD: it's a near lock for best foreign film and best director, which means the Academy can honour it in glamour categories without actually giving it best picture.

The reason why it may win is that it won one of the most powerful precursor prizes: Ang Lee got the Directors Guild Award, which since 1949 has missed predicting the best director Oscar only four times.

ERIN BROCKOVICH -- The Dark Horse
It says a lot about the kind of year Hollywood has had that this Julia Roberts vehicle from early in the year hung on for five nominations, all in major categories. And it reflects a certain susceptibility to "important" themes that in the end-of-the-year polls and critics' lists -- mine included -- it rated lower than Soderbergh's other picture this year, Traffic. Looking at both films again, I think we may have been wrong about that.

The funny thing about Erin Brockovich isn't that it's so different from Soderbergh's other work, but that it's so similar. Roberts's opening monologue bears a certain resemblance to the Andie McDowell monologue that opens sex, lies and videotape. And all those stylistic tics in Traffic, notably the hand-held camera work and jump cutting, are present in Brockovich, too, although Soderbergh doesn't make a big deal about them.

Unlike Traffic, where Soderbergh and screenwriter Steve Gaghan are trying to chop a six-hour miniseries down to a manageable movie, Brockovich is visually a remarkably graceful film, thanks to cinematographer Ed Lachman. And it gives its characters space to breathe. One of the reasons Roberts's performance is so admired is that her director has given her space -- she can show a lot more of her character than anyone in Traffic aside from Benicio Del Toro and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Can Erin Brockovich win? This may sound odd (it's a very odd year) but Erin Brockovich is the best-picture nominee with the least going against it. Chocolat is a ballot-filler -- you've got to have five nominees. Traffic is less problematical politically than it is formally -- it flaunts its style, which is not something old-school voters admire. Gladiator is at root a bloody spectacle that lacks redeeming social value. (Three words come to mind: Saving Private Ryan, a big, violent favourite with tons of redeeming seriousness that still couldn't win best picture.) And Crouching Tiger is foreign-language and a martial arts movie, and it can be given the best-foreign-language award.

The bookmakers are calling Erin Brockovich a 14-to-1 underdog. That's a very tempting price.

GLADIATOR -- The Favourite That Nobody Likes
Back in May nobody thought Gladiator would pull 13 Academy Award nominations. Tech nominations certainly, Crowe and Phoenix maybe, but 13? This story of a Roman general betrayed and returned to Rome as a gladiator to seek his revenge thinks it has the heart of its stern hero, Maximus, but it displays the aesthetic sensibility of its villain, Commodus, who offers the people blood sport in the coliseum as amusement.

Ridley Scott has never been a terribly subtle director, but here we start with a sequence that has as much decapitation, death and dismemberment as any three other movies and then moves on to bloody, over-elaborate and brutish sequences of hand-to-hand combat. Compare Computer Generated Images' Rome with the stunning natural settings of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and then try to argue for Gladiator as best picture. But of course that doesn't mean it can't win.

TRAFFIC -- Too Smart For Its Own Good

As I mentioned in my previous Soderbergh comments, it takes enormous skill and chutzpah to make a $70-million production look like a cheap indie -- Soderbergh's smash-and-grab camera style and the film's schematized colour plan shuttle us from Tijuana to Ohio to San Diego and back again. Traffic was overrated by most of us in the critical profession because it came so late in the year, and we didn't really have time to give it a second thought when we came up against the end-of-the-year deadline. But it's still strong.

However, Academy-wise, it's probably too smart for its own good (though that didn't hurt Shakespeare In Love), and being too in-your-face stylistically will hurt it as well, particularly among older voters.