Best bet for best flick is fuzzy

LOS ANGELES — What glorious chaos this year's Oscar race offers.

Frontrunners often begin to emerge by now. In past awards seasons, films such as "Titanic," "American Beauty" and last year's "Gladiator" rose to status as favorites in December and held on to dominate the Oscars in March.

But this time around, as studios screen the last of their prestige films, there are plenty of films catching solid Oscar buzz but no consensus on the lead contender. Reactions are across the board on latecomers with apparent Oscar pedigrees, among them "A Beautiful Mind," "Ali" and "Black Hawk Down."

And earlier films such as "Moulin Rouge" and "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" provoked love-it or hate-it sentiment among viewers.

Other awards help sort out the Oscar race. Major critics awards, honors from trade unions such as the Directors and Screen Actors guilds, the Golden Globes and the new American Film Institute awards can make or break a film's shot at Oscar nominations, which will be announced Feb. 12.

Another factor is box-office performance. If "A Beautiful Mind" or "Ali" were to bomb, their awards buzz could tail off. Conversely, if "Vanilla Sky" — generally being dismissed as cinematic sleight-of-hand — were to catch on big with audiences, that could prompt awards voters to rethink its Oscar worthiness.

Here's a rundown of possible contenders in major categories:

Best Picture:

There's a trio of films with the sort of weighty subject matter that often clicks with Oscar voters: "A Beautiful Mind," with Russell Crowe as paranoid schizophrenic and mathematical genius John Nash; "Ali," starring Will Smith as the outspoken boxer; and "Black Hawk Down," based on a doomed U.S. military foray in Somalia.

Few are raving about the movies, though. Each has drawn healthy but unspectacular responses.

Another film on the Oscar radar, "The Majestic," starring Jim Carrey as a blacklisted screenwriter who loses his memory, is generally uninvolving, though its feel-good, patriotic ending might resonate with the national mood after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," part one of the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy trilogy, has gained acclaim as a serious candidate. The film has exhilarating action and dazzling visuals, and nicely captures Tolkien's sense of camaraderie among hobbits, elves, dwarves, humans and wizards.