Actress Anne Hathaway and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Tom Sherak announce the Best Actress nominations

So there we have it. This year’s Oscars will pretty much be a straight shootout between blockbuster fantasy and gritty fact-based drama.

In the bluest of blue corners, we have James Cameron’s Avatar, an undoubted triumph in terms of technical movie making and a true ‘event’ film which deserves to be seen in 3D glory on the largest cinema screen you can find.

You might as well hand over the technical awards right now, because there’s nothing to come near this journey into the magical world of Pandora which is so vivid and realistic that cinemas have been reporting problems with filmgoers suffering withdrawal misery at the end of the adventure.

But best film of the year and best director? It;s bound to win because of its hype, because it’s Cameron’s triumphant return, and because it’s broken box office records. But it’s not where my vote would be cast.

For me, the top prize of best film should be a straight shootout between the astonishingly powerful Iraq war movie The Hurt Locker, and George Clooney’s finest hour in a stellar career, Up In The Air.

The Hurt Locker, which barely got a look-in at Shropshire cinemas, would shade it for me.

And best director ought to be James Cameron’s ex-missus Kathryn Bigelow, whose brave and patient use of silence in that tense saga helps to make it the best war movie in many a moon.

Brits look likely to come home empty handed from the Oscars this year. It’s difficult to say whether that’s merited at the moment, since the movies starring best actor and actress hot favourites Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock – country music saga Crazy Heart and American football drama The Blind Side – have yet to arrive at Shropshire cinemas.

One thing’s for certain, though. We haven’t seen the last of 24-year-old starlet Carey Mulligan, whose performance in social drama An Education as a schoolgirl who becomes infatuated with an older man, is simply wonderful.

Pixar ought to have another animated movie trophy in the bag for Up, the touching tale of a curmudgeonly OAP whose house floats of round the world.

They’ll probably have next year’s statuette sewn up to, with Toy Story 3 hitting our screens this summer!

It was nice to see In The Loop – the movie spin-off of the BBC’s hit political comedy The Thick of It – get a nomination for best adapted screenplay. It packs more laughs into its first 20 minutes than most films could ever dream of. Particularly those starring Ricky Gervais!

Unusually, we’ve got 10 films vying for the best movie title this year, and that¹s an odd one. Could the Academy not make up their minds this year . . .  perhaps, with the ceremony getting longer and longer every year, they needed to widen the net to make sure ticket sales don’t start to slide!