AS tonight's Oscar host Whoopi Goldberg puts it: 'No matter what you say to yourself, you do want to win. You try to look casual, like you're not thinking 'please, please pick me'. Then you put on your loser's face.' Goldberg herself did eventually win a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award, for Ghost in 1990.
Recalls 1990's Best Actor Jeremy Irons, for Reversal Of Fortune: 'I remember kissing Madonna, who was in the row in front of me with Michael Jackson - I very nearly kissed Michael Jackson. I would have kissed anybody, really, at that point.' And the world is, literally, watching: last year's Oscar telecast attracted more than a billion viewers around the globe. As the nominees stroll down the red carpet outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles this afternoon (tomorrow morning Hong Kong time) for the 71st Annual Academy Awards, they have the consolation of knowing anybody can win.
The field this year is considered to be more wide open than ever before.
Since the voting ended on March 16, four accountants from Price Waterhouse have been locked in a secret location in a room with no windows, and with pass codes on the door, counting the votes manually. (They stay backstage at the awards in case a mistake is made and needs to be corrected. Rumour has it this happened with Marisa Tomei's 1993 Best Supporting Actress win for My Cousin Vinnie.
The presenters, including this year's Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt from last year's As Good As It Gets, will be announcing 'And the Oscar goes to . . .' No longer do they say 'and the winner is . . .' because, according to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences director of communications John Pavlik: 'We wanted to de-emphasise the idea of winners and losers and let everyone know all the nominees are winners.' Unlike last year, when Titanic entered the night with 14 nominations and left with a record 11 Oscars (it shares the honour of being the most decorated film with Ben Hur), making director James Cameron the self-described 'king of the world', anything could happen. The main awards are evenly split between World War II stories on the one side - Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Life Is Beautiful - and Elizabethan costume dramas on the other (Shakespeare In Love, Elizabeth).
When the nominations were first announced, way back on February 9, Steven Spielberg's gritty epic Saving Private Ryan, with its 11 nominations, was felt to be the leader of the pack, despite Shakespeare In Love's superior 13 nominations. But thanks to a massive - and controversial - campaign by Shakespeare's studio Miramax, the comedy is now considered to in with a strong chance, especially for Best Actress contender Gwyneth Paltrow and co-writers Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard.