First, the good news. The incomparable Billy Crystal is back as presenter for tomorrow night's 72nd Academy Awards ceremony. And viewers will be dancing with joy at the news that the often cringe-inducing dance numbers which hogged so many Oscar shows in the past have been dropped by this year's producers, Richard and Lili Fini Zanuck, themselves Oscar-winners as the producers of the 1989 winner for best film, Driving Miss Daisy.
Over Christmas the Zanucks were having dinner at a restaurant in Sun Valley, Idaho, when some people at a nearby table sent them over a bottle of wine. "They wanted to thank us for cutting the dance numbers," Richard Zanuck explained. "They were from Oklahoma. We didn't know them at all."
The bad news for those planning to watch the live transmission of the show on the Sky Premiere channel is that while the clocks change here tonight, summer time arrives a week later in the US this year. The result is that the eight-hour time difference between Ireland and Los Angeles stretches to nine hours - so when the Oscar ceremony kicks off at 5.30 p.m. tomorrow at the Shrine Auditorium in LA, it will already be 2.30 a.m. on Monday on this side of the Atlantic.
Despite the best intentions of the Zanucks to trim the show to closer to three hours - it sprawled on for more than four hours last year - it will be near to 6 a.m., if not later, before the final envelope is opened and the winner of the major award, best picture, is announced.
The tightly-contested two-horse race for best picture seems like a replay of last year's duel between Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and John Madden's Shakespeare in Love. The Spielberg film was the hot favourite to win best picture ever since DreamWorks opened it in the summer of 1998 to excellent reviews and box-office returns.
Miramax Films released Shakespeare in Love towards the end of the year and launched a hefty campaign to woo the Academy's electorate. It was a cliff-hanger fight to the finish. Saving Private Ryan seemed to have it won when the penultimate award of the evening, best director, went to Spielberg. Shock-waves reverberated through the auditorium when it was announced that the Oscar for best picture had gone to Shakespeare in Love.
DreamWorks and Miramax are back in the fray this year with American Beauty and The Cider House Rules, which the Las Vegas bookmaker Lenny Del Genio has made joint favourites at even money for best picture. Again the DreamWorks movie is much the more cutting-edge film of the two contenders, and it set the pace when it opened in the US last September, making such a strong impression, critically and commercially, that it seemed unbeatable.
The Cider House Rules barely figured in the end-of-year awards given by the US critics. It picked up just two nods in the Golden Globe nominations in December - to Michael Caine as best supporting actor and John Irving for best screenplay - and neither won. And the film's director, Lasse Hallstrom, failed to be nominated for the Directors Guild of America awards in January; only four times in the past 52 years has the winner of that award not gone on to take the Oscar.
Undaunted, the Miramax team continued to campaign assiduously for its movie and pulled off the biggest surprise when the Oscar nominations were announced last month. The Cider House Rules collected seven, just one less than American Beauty. This brought to nine the number of best picture nominations Miramax has received in the past eight years - a record no Hollywood studio can match.
Here is how the nominees shape up in the key categories. The standard is remarkably high, and even though we can expect to be surprised time and again at tomorrow night's ceremony, I will hazard some very risky predictions.
Best Picture
The three outsiders are The Insider, The Green Mile and The Sixth Sense, all of which have their supporters but none looks close to overtaking the two front-runners, American Beauty and The Cider House Rules. Having accurately predicted the unusual split between the awards for best picture and best director last year, I am forecasting revenge for the Spielberg-owned DreamWorks this year.
For all its many qualities, The Cider House Rules does not have the critical and commercial impetus which carried Shakespeare in Love to the podium last year, whereas American Beauty has an even stronger groundswell of opinion behind it than Saving Private Ryan had. By far the finest achievement among the five nominated films, American Beauty deserves to win, and will win.
Best Director
Unusually, there is only one previous nominee on the shortlist, 53-year-old Lasse Hallstrom, who was short-listed for My Life As a Dog in 1987. Even more unusually, three of the five nominees are under 35 - Sam Mendes (34), the brilliant English theatre director who made such an auspicious film debut with American Beauty; Spike Jonze (30), the American director of music videos and commercials who moved assuredly into movies with the highly original Being John Malkovich; and M. Night Shyamalan (29), an American writer-director of Indian extraction who followed two rarely seen features with The Sixth Sense, the surprise hit at the US box-office last year when it made more money than any movie other than Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. The fifth nominee is 57-year-old Michael Mann, finally receiving Oscar recognition with The Insider.
Again it's down to the two front-runners here, with Mendes looking comfortably placed to take the award over Hallstrom.
Best Actress
American Beauty could well collect another Oscar here, for Annette Bening, a very popular and well-respected actress in Hollywood circles. A win for her would make it a night of double celebration with her husband Warren Beatty, who's lined up to receive the honorary accolade, the Irving Thalberg Award.
There could even be a third cause for celebration if the excitement of the night - and the extremely long wait for the announcement of the best actress award - gets to Bening, who is eight months pregnant. This is about the only conceivable way (no pun intended) she could upstage last year's flamboyant best actor winner, Roberto Benigni, who will present the Oscar for best actress this year.
Bening's strongest opponent for the Oscar is another first-time nominee, Hilary Swank, the 25-year-old who came out of nowhere (Beverly Hills 90210) to give a devastating performance as the cross-dressing Brandon Teena in the factually based Boys Don't Cry, which opens here on April 21st. The only other realistic contender is the gifted and prolific Julianne Moore, nominated as best supporting actress for Boogie Nights two years ago, for her vivid, deeply affecting performance in Neil Jordan's The End of the Affair.
The two long-shots are Meryl Streep, making history by getting her 12th Oscar nomination for Music of the Heart, and British actress Janet McTeer, a Tony winner for the Broadway production of Frank McGuinness's adaptation of A Doll's House, for the low-budget Tumbleweeds, which has been described as "a McTeer-jerker".
It will be a close race between Annette Bening and Hilary Swank, but I expect Bening should just have the edge.
Best Actor
An exceptionally difficult category to predict this year. Two nominees seem like distant prospects: Sean Penn, previously nominated for Dead Man Walking, for his hilarious portrayal of a vain jazz guitarist in Woody Allen's faux documentary, Sweet and Lowdown getting his first significant role (and an Oscar nomination) in the 1979 Comes a Horseman - for his tender portrayal of an elderly man travelling across the US by lawnmower in The Straight Story.
There are two formidable nominees who have already won the best supporting actor Oscar - Kevin Spacey, who won for The Usual Suspects in 1995 and is nominated for American Beauty, and Denzel Washington, a winner for Glory in 1989 and on the shortlist this year for The Hurricane.
The dark horse is the only first-time nominee, the remarkable New Zealand-born actor, Russell Crowe, aged by the make-up department and fattened by cheeseburgers and bourbon to play the tobacco industry whistle-blower, Jeffrey Wigand, the moral centre of The Insider.
Crowe conceivably could shade this exceedingly tight contest, and Spacey cannot be discounted under any circumstances, but Washington's performance transcends the discredited elements of The Hurricane and I suspect he will win.
Best Supporting Actor
The nominees range in age from 66-year-old Michael Caine, who's on his fifth nomination for The Cider House Rules and won this category for Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986, to 11-year-old Haley Joel Osment, previously best known for playing the title character as a boy in the 1994 Oscar-winner Forrest Gump, for his powerfully expressive performance in The Sixth Sense.
The fast-rising English actor Jude Law secures the only acting nomination from the fine cast of The Talented Mr Ripley, while the towering Michael Clarke Duncan seizes on his breakthrough role as the condemned prisoner in The Green Mile. In a break from studio vehicles, Tom Cruise is a revelation as the foul-mouthed sex guru of Magnolia.
The supporting role categories are usually the first to be presented at the Oscars and regularly deliver surprises, which makes this one an even tougher call than usual. Cruise and Caine would appear to be the front-runners, but my sixth sense tells me that little Haley Joel Osment will slip past both of them and take the award.
Best Supporting Actress
Unusually, all five are first-time nominees. There are three Americans on the list: Angelina Jolie, whose dad won best actor in 1978 - Jon Voight, for Coming Home - and who's nominated for playing a mental patient in Girl, Interrupted; indies veteran Catherine Keener, agreeably cast against type to play the icy, determined Maxine in Being John Malkovich; and rising actress Chloe Sevigny, who gives her characteristically risk-taking all in Boys Don't Cry.
Completing the shortlist are the talented young English actress Samantha Morton as the mute, guileless lover of the Sean Penn character in Sweet and Lowdown; and Toni Collette, the Australian best-known as the hapless Muriel in Muriel's Wedding and unrecognisable as the perplexed single mother in The Sixth Sense.
Angelina Jolie has scooped most of the awards which have preceded the Oscars, making her the firm favourite, while Toni Collette is regarded as her strongest opposition. However, I would wager a (small) bet on Catherine Keener coming through to take the Oscar.
Foreign Language Film
Anything goes in this category which regularly defies predictions - and belief. If there is any justice Pedro Almodovar will get the award for his wonderful All About My Mother. However, I have only seen one of the other four nominees - the French entry, Regis Wargnier's sturdy anti-Communist, 1940s-set East-West.
The other nominees are the Welsh anti-Semitism drama, Solomon and Gaenor; the Swedish emotional triangle picture, Under the Sun, directed by an expatriate Englishman, Colin Nutley; and the first-ever Nepalese nominee, Caravan, in which an ageing yak-herder embarks on a salt-transporting odyssey to faraway markets.
A box-office success in France, where it was released as Himalaya, Caravan is building up a head of steam and looks like the only picture which could pip Pedro for the prize. Nevertheless, my pesetas are on Almodovar to win.
In other categories
The only Irish nominee, Michele Burke, should collect her third Oscar for her work on Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. The booty for American Beauty is likely to total seven Oscars, with victories in sight for original screenplay (Alan Ball), cinematography (veteran Conrad Hall, who last won for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969), film editing (Tariq Anwar) and music (Thomas Newman). The best shot for The Cider House Rules is in best adapted screenplay, which should go to John Irving, who adapted his own novel.
Nominated for four Oscars, The Matrix could collect three - for visual effects, sound and sound-effects editing. Rick Heinrichs is my tip for art direction for his work on Sleepy Hollow, and that film is also a likely contender for costume design, although I expect it to be pipped by Jenny Beavan's work on Anna and the King. Aimee Mann deserves the best song Oscar for Save Me from Magnolia. And as I've only seen one of the eight nominees in the two documentary sections and none of the short-listed short films I couldn't possibly comment on those outcomes.
The Oscars ceremony will be carried live on the Sky Premiere subscription channel at 2.30 a.m. on Monday, followed by a repeat of the full show at 6 p.m. Edited highlights will be shown by Network 2 at 8 p.m. on Wednesday night.