Oscar Index: Does True Grit Have the Horses For Awards Season?

The Leading 5:

1. Natalie Portman, Black Swan

2. Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right

3. Jennifer Lawrence, Winter's Bone

4. Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole

5. Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine

Outsiders: Lesley Manville, Another Year; Sally Hawkins, Made in Dagenham; Julianne Moore, The Kids Are All Right; Tilda Swinton, I Am Love; Naomi Watts, Fair Game

Notes: No movement except among the folks clinging to the bubble, where Hawkins is pretty much sliding off without a prayer and Moore looks to be reentering the mess as an also-ran to co-star Bening and the runaway favorite Portman. Have I mentioned it's Portman's to lose? All right, moving on...

The Leading 5:

1. Colin Firth, The King's Speech

2. Jeff Bridges, True Grit

3. Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network

4. James Franco, 127 Hours

5. Mark Wahlberg, The Fighter

Outsiders: Javier Bardem, Biutiful; Robert Duvall, Get Low; Ryan Gosling, Blue Valentine; Paul Giamatti, Barney's Version

Notes: A couple things here, none more important than Franco's automatic odds-downgrading upon assuming the Oscars' co-host slot with Anne Hathaway. Others have crunched the numbers on this, which come down to: It's not unprecedented that a host be nominated or even win, but it hasn't happened in this category since 1958 when David Niven triumphed for Separate Tables. That would be 52 years, folks -- and the most formidable competition Niven faced was probably Sidney Poitier (earning the first Best Actor nod for an African-American) and Paul Newman -- not quite Firth, Bridges and Bardem, the latter of whom is set to pounce a little later this month as Biutiful rolls out in a late qualifying run.

Bridges, meanwhile, is hitched to this week's True Grit buzz and his role's Oscar heritage ("[He] gets under Cogburn's skin more fully, dare I say it, than John Wayne in the original adaptation," writes Kris Tapley) but isn't necessarily likely to stick among the frontrunners if Franco and Bardem have anything to say about it. All of which is a bloated way of avoiding the real point: that Firth remains the emotional and technical favorite to take home the grand prize, and the rest are just playing for runner-up and some nominee blurbage on their films' DVD/Blu-rays.

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