With no one (or even two) movies dominating the critics' awards, and with four of the five best-picture nominees having reached the $100 million box-office mark ("Chocolat" is the exception) -- meaning that this crop of contenders has found favor with the public -- this Oscar race has been particularly volatile.

Here, then, are the ways things are looking through an admittedly very cloudy crystal ball.

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Best picture
This year, there has been no consistently clear front-runner for the best-picture Oscar. At various times, one film or another takes the lead, only to see yet another gain new momentum. (It's almost as if Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris were somehow involved in the proceedings.)

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It's amazing what a couple of awards given by movie guilds can do. Prior to the March 10 and 11 ceremonies held by the Directors Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild, respectively, the Academy Award for best picture looked to be a done deal.

It defies the laws of logic, but "Gladiator" seemed to have things sewn up. If, when this popcorn movie opened last May, you had suggested it would be a serious Oscar contender, you would have been laughed at, ridiculed and maybe even tossed to the lions. The film is lacking that "stature" thing.

But in a two-day period in late January, "Gladiator" was named best picture by both the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the Golden Globe folks) and the Broadcast Film Critics Association. OK, granted that these are, respectively, a band of perennially wide-eyed Tinseltown boosters and the folks who invariably show up on the small screen in mid-January, proclaiming this or that Chevy Chase vehicle "the funniest movie of the year!"

But over the years, through sheer longevity, these awards have come to count for something, if only for the buzz factor. But the most salient event at the Golden Globes wasn't that the starstruck foreign correspondents deemed "Gladiator" a better picture than "Traffic," but, rather, the standing ovation they gave to best-director winner Ang Lee. This ovation was utterly spontaneous, akin to the one accorded Roberto Benigni two years earlier -- an unfortunate event that gave the first clear indication that the Italian buffoon was on his way to an Oscar. The show of affection for Lee suddenly made it clear that at that point in time -- Jan. 21 -- his movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" was the front-runner in the Oscar race.

Why then didn't it beat "Gladiator" for the Golden Globe? For the simple reason that under Globe rules, the Taiwanese martial arts film was eligible only for best foreign film (which it won) and -- unlike at the Oscars -- not for best picture.

But "Crouching Tiger" didn't retain front-runner status for long. Far more important than the victories of "Gladiator" at the Golden Globes and Broadcast Film Critics Association was the clean sweep the film began compiling in February from the various film guilds. In quick succession, "Gladiator" received an Eddie for best-edited drama from the American Cinema Editors, a mixing award from the Cinema Audio Society and a production design award from the Art Directors Guild.

This last was especially noteworthy because so many of the sword epic's sets were not sets per se, but computer-graphic images, and shockingly shoddy ones at that. (Compare them with the incredible sets actually built for one of the direct antecedents of "Gladiator," Anthony Mann's 1964 "The Fall of the Roman Empire" -- now that was an epic.) One would have thought that members of the guild might be a little concerned that the more this computer-generated stuff is encouraged, the more precarious their job security becomes.

But the bottom line is that movie craftspeople love "Gladiator."

The film next received the Darryl F. Zanuck Award, the top nod from the Producers Guild of America. Why producers need a guild is anybody's guess, but it seems plain that both management and workers alike embraced "Gladiator," and with all of this momentum, the film became the one to beat at the beginning of March.

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