Screenwriter

It's too early for Oscar fever, writes Donald Clarke

Is there anything that makes me want to vomit more than the increasingly early arrival of Christmas? Actually, yes. Columns on the back of newspaper supplements complaining about the premature manifestations of that season are, if anything, even more nauseating than the untimely baubles and tinsel wreaths themselves.

With that in mind, allow me to indulge in an orgy of hypocrisy as I bemoan the cinematic equivalent of this phenomenon. In a more civilised era, serious speculation on the Oscars took place in the fortnight leading up to the nominations. Then, about a decade ago, the chatter suddenly began to appear just after Christmas. We are now in the mad situation where, despite the nominations not being revealed until late January, the internet silts up with Oscar punditry before the leaves have fallen.

This would be absurd enough if those films likely to win statuettes emerged at regular intervals throughout the year. But studios, mindful of elderly Academy members' short memories, now tend to unleash many of their prestige products - my, what a gruesome phrase - during the second half of December. The result? The cyber-tipsters find themselves issuing odds on films virtually nobody has seen. It's rather as if Paddy Power elected to take bets on the 2030 Grand National. Neither Jolly Lad nor Bacon Sandwich have been born yet but, no matter, we'll still give you 20/1 on either winning by more than a length.

Should you give a hoot, the best place to dredge up this babble is on a breathlessly excitable site entitled The Envelope (http://the envelope.com). For a full 12 months a year, Tom O'Neil and his equally Fabulous contributors indulge in a kind of showbiz voodoo as they examine cast lists and plot synopses for pointers towards future awards glory.

Does this romantic comedy allow Meryl Streep to speak with a Ukrainian accent? Will Tom Hanks get to fake a glamorous disability in this tearjerker? Does this dreary literary adaptation offer a role to some superannuated diva they need to honour before she is put beneath the soil?

A case in point. A few weeks ago in Austin, Texas, 12 people, two dogs and a squirrel enjoyed the first public screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. One of them wrote a single ecstatically positive review of the flick, a tale of oilmen starring Daniel Day Lewis, and it was rapidly installed as a shoo-in for best film. More absurd still, pictures such as Mike Nichols's Charlie Wilson's War, Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd and Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters all appear in

The Envelope's list of Oscar frontrunners, even though nobody - not even the squirrels of central Texas - have caught a glimpse of the wretched things.

What are they thinking? Sweeney Todd is a good musical, but too recherché for general audiences. Charlie Wilson's War is only in the list because of Hanks. And as for The Great Debaters . . .

What am I doing? They've got me fretting about the wretched things now. Pump me full of chloroform and don't revive me until March.