The red carpet has been rolled out, the limos are rolling up and the celebrities are dressed to the nines as the minutes tick down to the 76th annual Academy Awards.  

But the big questions tonight involve beings with hairy feet and rumpled clothes, and a director who's fond of shorts and going around barefoot.

Could this be the year for The Lord of the Rings and its devoted director, Peter Jackson?

Almost everybody seems to think so, believing The Return of the King -- the final film in the trilogy drawn from J.R.R. Tolkien's work -- is going to win best picture. The first film, 2001's The Fellowship of the Ring, was nosed out by A Beautiful Mind, and the second one, The Two Towers, fell to the 1920s schemers of Chicago.

Never mind that the Academy has never honored a fantasy film. Never mind that none of the Rings actors were nominated for trophies. Never mind that blockbusters seldom grab Hollywood's ultimate brass ring, much less the shiny world-controlling jewel at the center of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy.

This, say the pundits, is the year of Rings.

"Give those hairy little hobbits their Oscar and be done with it," writes The Associated Press' David Germain. "The Return of the King is steamrolling its way to the top prize with momentum not seen since 1997's Titanic."

And Thelma Adams of Us magazine calls a Rings triumph a "slam dunk," according to the handicapping site Goldderby.com.

The choice of Rings would be popular with the moviegoing public. According to an Associated Press poll, 42 percent picked Return of the King as the movie that should win best picture. Seabiscuit was second with 16 percent.

Of course guessing Oscar is never a sure thing. Martin Scorsese, thought to be last year's best director front-runner, knows that first-hand. (Roman Polanski, on almost nobody's radar, took the prize.) So does Steven Spielberg, who watched Saving Private Ryan get bounced by Shakespeare in Love for 1998's best picture.

Hoping for big things

So the only thing to do is watch the activity at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre.

Rings is up for 11 awards, one more than Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, the seafaring adventure based on Patrick O'Brian's novels, which is also up for best picture.

The other best picture nominees are the Boston-set tragedy Mystic River, which also earned acting nods for cast members Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Marcia Gay Harden; Lost in Translation, with best actor nominee Bill Murray as an aimless, sleepless American actor in Tokyo; and Seabiscuit, the story of the famed Depression-era racehorse.

Billy Crystal is back as host, his eighth turn as master of ceremonies. Oscar-watchers are hoping he's the key to a rise in Oscar ratings, which fell to just 33 million last year -- a 22 million-person drop from 1998, when Titanic took home best picture.

Organizers are also hoping for a bump from this year's scheduling, which placed the Academy Awards at the end of February, instead of the traditional late March. With the rise of other awards in recent years -- the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and others -- there have been concerns that the Oscars have become anticlimactic, which has been thought to hurt ratings.

This year's Oscars will also feature more glamour, after two years of relatively toned-down red carpets -- 2003's awards came weeks after the invasion of Iraq, and 2002's reflected the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Star power

But nothing will help ratings more than a good show, both in terms of the individual category races and the broadcast as a whole.

Oscar may fall short when it comes to drama in a number of categories. Only best actor is considered a tight race, with Penn (Mystic River) and Murray (Lost in Translation) considered favorites, but Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl) coming up fast, thanks to his victory at the SAG Awards. (The actors' branch is the largest bloc of Academy voters, which is believed to help Depp's chances.)

Moreover, though the nominated movies and performances are typically fine, Oscar is missing some of the star power that tends to attract viewers. Tom Cruise (The Last Samurai) didn't get nominated, and neither did his ex-wife, Nicole Kidman (Cold Mountain). Russell Crowe (Master and Commander) was also overlooked.

In their places are faces from a number of "small" films -- Thirteen (best supporting actress nominee Holly Hunter), Whale Rider (best actress nominee Keisha Castle-Hughes), 21 Grams (actress and supporting actor Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro, respectively) and Monster (actress front-runner Charlize Theron).

The Oscar telecast is, as always, a wild card. Frequently derided as self-importantly overlong, the awards this year -- as wags have noted -- will be even longer, thanks to a five-second delay to prevent an outbreak of Janet Jackson-type controversy. Producers have said that winners will be allowed to say their piece, even if that piece is as contentious as Michael Moore's anti-Bush acceptance speech from last year.

But, given the popularity of Rings -- Return of the King is now the second-highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, after Titanic -- many of these questions may be moot. Movie lovers everywhere are wondering if the huge gamble, a US$300 million project to which director Jackson gave nine years of his life, will have the ultimate payoff: best picture.

If predictions come to pass and the big trophy goes to the hobbits and humans of Tolkien's fantasy land, expect celebrating in Middle Earth -- and many other places.

(China Daily March 1, 2004)