If the Academy Awards follow tradition this weekend, most winners will be podium regulars—and then there are the exceptions

Those who don't like awards shows should probably unplug the television for the first two months of the year. They are everywhere, and they are all in prime time. That's a change from a decade ago, when the Grammys, Emmys, and Oscars were the only awards shows considered worthy of network exposure. Now the Golden Globe Awards, the Critics' Choice Awards, the People's Choice Awards, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards join the Grammys and the Oscars as January and February event television.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences moved its awards from late March to late February in 2004. (The Oscars will be broadcast Sunday [February 25] beginning at 5:30 p.m.) The official reason was to level the playing field between independent films and studio movies due to the lengthy and costly trade-magazine ad campaigns the larger distributors were waging. However, there was also speculation that the Academy made the move because it felt the Oscars would bring more revenue from network television if they accommodated “February sweeps”, the name given to the period used by network affiliates to measure the ratings that will justify their advertising rates.

The other film-award shows took note of the move and scrunched into a four-week period between mid January and mid February, which means that members of most of the critics' organizations have to vote in December. The studios, their independent divisions, and independent distributors were already making thousands of videos in order to get the attention of newspaper critics' awards and the groups that hosted the televised awards shows: the Broadcast Film Critics Association (the Critics' Choice Awards), the Hollywood Foreign Press (the Golden Globes), and the Screen Actors Guild. Now, with even less time to get voters into theatres prior to the casting of their votes, the “screener” war has escalated.

Unfortunately, the release of thousands of DVDs prior to movies' theatrical release aided piracy and led to Internet downloading of several major films. The regulating organization of American film, the Motion Picture Association of America, which is run by the studios, tried to stop the sending of screeners but was accused, by independent distributors and executives of divisions of the major studios, of limiting their ability to compete. The indies assumed, probably correctly, that it would be easier for members of critics' groups and the academy voters themselves to find widely released studio films prior to deadline than to discover their own less ubiquitous gems.

Last year, with the screener regulations somewhat relaxed, one of the few truly independent distributors, Lions Gate Films, decided to invest in a bigger and better DVD campaign. They sent DVDs of the film Crash , considered by many to be an outside hope for even a nomination, to every member of every voting group, including the 100,000-member Screen Actors Guild. The mail-out helped the film win the best-cast award at the SAG awards, a victory whose momentum probably led directly to Crash 's upset Oscar win for best picture.

The commitment to strong Oscar campaigns helped films that were distributed by indies or studio divisions win four of the five best-picture nominations last year. This year they won three. The argument that the Academy's voters need help from early awards in order to mark their ballots is somewhat validated by the lists of Oscar nominees. Every nominee in the six major Academy Award categories was discovered earlier. In fact, there have been few variations in the six major categories since the first of the three early televised shows (the Critics' Choice Awards) started announcing nominees back in December. Only the best-supporting-actor nominees have varied noticeably.

The best-actress competition has seen all five Oscar nominees nominated for every major best-actress award leading up to the Oscars. The nominees are Kate Winslet for Little Children ; Penélope Cruz for Volver ; Meryl Streep for The Devil Wears Prada ; Judi Dench for Notes on a Scandal ; and Helen Mirren for The Queen . Streep won the Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy or musical, while Mirren won the Globes' best actress in a drama prize, the Critics' Choice award, and the SAG award. Needless to say, the early trends have made her a strong favourite for the Oscar.

The nominees for best actor have also been on a roll, and again one clear favourite has emerged. Forest Whitaker—the character actor and sometime director who showed great promise in Clint Eastwood's 1988 film Bird but has seldom seen that promise recognized—has won almost every critics' award and major prize leading up to the Oscars. His performance as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland has already beaten out those of fellow nominees Ryan Gosling for Half Nelson , Peter O'Toole for Venus , Leonardo DiCaprio for Blood Diamond , and Will Smith for The Pursuit of Happyness in several of the early competitions, and he will more than likely triumph again.

Dreamgirls ' Jennifer Hudson, the singer who famously lost on American Idol , has won most of the awards available to her this year. She comes into Oscar night having won the best-supporting-actress award at two of the three televised awards—the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Awards­and the British Oscars, officially known as the Orange British Academy Film Awards. She takes on Cate Blanchett of Notes on a Scandal and Babel 's Rinko Kikuchi and Adriana Barraza, whom she beat for both American awards, as well as 10-year-old Abigail Breslin of Little Miss Sunshine, whom Hudson beat at the BAFTAs and the SAG awards.

The acting category that has been most competitive this year, at least on the nominations level, is the best-supporting-actor category. The three televised award shows nominated a total of 10 different actors. It didn't matter much, however, as Eddie Murphy picked up the prizes at all three. However, Murphy did not join his fellow Oscar favourites on the podium at the recent BAFTAs. He wasn't even nominated, and the winner was Alan Arkin, who is nominated for the Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine . The two men are up against Djimon Hounsou for Blood Diamond , former child star Jackie Earle Haley for Little Children , and Mark Wahlberg for The Departed . If there is an upset to be had on Oscar night in the acting category, it could be pulled off by veteran Arkin, whose last nomination came for 1968's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter .

The early awards seem to favour Martin Scorsese to win his first best-director Oscar, but voters did not always support his film, The Departed . Although there was a time when Academy voters grouped the two together, that hasn't happened as much lately, and the trendsetters didn't create any clear favourites in the best-picture category. (The other nominees are Babel , Little Miss Sunshine , Letters From Iwo Jima , and The Queen .) The Departed won the Critics' Choice award, Babel won the Golden Globe for best drama, and Little Miss Sunshine won the Screen Actors Guild award for best cast. (The Golden Globe for best comedy or musical was won by Dreamgirls , which has eight nominations but is not nominated for a best-picture Oscar.)

Scorsese is up against Paul Greengrass for United 93 , Alejandro González Iñárritu for Babel , Clint Eastwood for Letters From Iwo Jima , and Stephen Frears for The Queen .