Oh Jesus, it's Oscar night. Brace yourselves:

Best Picture: I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Gangs of New York will steal it from Chicago, the juggernaut. Why? Because Best Picture almost always goes to a movie that wins one of the other major awards (Best Actor, Best Actress, or Best Director), and as you'll see below, my money says that Chicago won't win a single one, while Gangs of New York has a good chance of nabbing at least one, probably two. Of course, Miramax has been pushing Chicago, not Gangs, as its favored choice...but I've always been something of a contrarian.

Best Director: Martin Scorsese for Gangs of New York. On balance, I'd have to say that Roman Polanski deserves to win for The Pianist, but there's no way in hell that's going to happen. By any measure, Scorsese is long overdue; and I do love Roger Ebert's comment on Scorsese's loss (with GoodFellas) to Kevin Costner and Dances With Wolvesin 1990: "Which one of those two would you want to see again tonight?" Not entirely fair (Ebert did give Dances With Wolves a four-star review on its first release) but true enough.

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis for Gangs of New York. Just because he deserves it: it was an awe-inspiring performance whose every aspect (the moustache, the glass eye, the bloodthirsty Walt Whitman accent) seemed to have been sculpted by hand, or by sheer force of will. It was more of a special effect than all the digital creations of The Two Towers and Spider-Man put together, but weirdly human and affecting. One could argue that Nicolas Cage's performance(s) in Adaptation was equally accomplished, but the Oscars don't usually care for comedy; and Nicholson and Caine have been awarded often enough. For Adrian Brody, the nomination is the award.

Best Actress: Julianne Moore for Far From Heaven. Again, this is the contrarian view; almost everyone else has pegged Nicole Kidman, both because her performance in The Hours was dignified and effective and because Kidman's stock in Hollywood couldn't be higher. And yet...I can't help wondering whether many Academy members have the sneaking suspicion, as I do, that Kidman's role was more of a supporting one, and more a triumph of makeup and facial prosthetics (and digital engineering) than acting. Moore, on the other hand, fully embodied a surprisingly complex role in Far From Heaven, which demanded that she play both a woman and a '50's movie's idea of a woman, and succeeded beautifully on both counts.

Best Supporting Actor: I haven't seen Christopher Walken's performance in Catch Me If You Can, but of the remaining nominees, Chris Cooper in Adaptation is both my favorite and the likely winner. Cooper's been around for a long time; he's even had plum leading roles in movies like Lone Star, and arguably should have won an Oscar for his supporting turn in American Beauty, which wasn't even nominated. Adaptation probably had more good acting than any other movie last year (Cage and Streep, of course, but also Brian Cox's terrific vignette as Robert McKee), but Cooper stood out even in that crowd. (I'd also be happy to see John C. Reilly win for Chicago but more for his work in general than for that role in particular.)

Best Supporting Actress: I haven't a clue here, despite having seen all of the nominated performances. Julianne Moore's performance was inarguably the best, but having chosen her for Best Actress, above, I can't very well choose her again; although, come to think of it, if any actress could win two Oscars in one year, it's her. Kathy Bates is a possibility; she was overshadowed by Nicholson in About Schmidt, but Supporting Actress can often go to a woman's performance in a movie dominated by a powerful actor (e.g., Marcia Gay Harden's win for Pollock). But I'll go with Catherine Zeta-Jones; she won the SAG award, which is usually a good indication, and was almost scarily good in Chicago.

Best Original Screenplay: I'm a bit adrift in the screenplay categories, usually one of my favorites. For one thing, it's a bit strange that Gangs of New York is nominated here, and not in Adapted Screenplay, given that Herbert Ashbury's The Gangs of New York provided the movie with both its title and raw material. Leaving that aside, it's clear that the screenplay for Gangs of New York, with its underdeveloped hero and occasional plot inanities (e.g. DiCaprio's isolated moments of "inspiration" regarding body-snatching and offshore boxing) was the weakest part of the movie. Far From Heaven deserves to win, but in the absence of any real consensus, I think that Nia Vardalos will take the prize, for sentimental reasons.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Adaptation, of course. Some Academy members may not have gotten it, but the temptation to award an engraved statuette to Donald Kaufman should be too great to resist. In a weird way, however, I think that The Hours may be most deserving; I didn't like the movie at all, but the screenplay was ingenious and literate, and had the sort of discipline and structural coherence that Adaptation essentially ignores, to mixed results. Some surprising omissions here, too; I would think that About Schmidt would have been a sure winner, if nominated, and also that Minority Report, despite the weakness of its ending, was so rich a mainstream screenplay that it at least deserved a nod.

Other Predictions, leaving aside all those technical awards: I'd say that Bowling for Columbine is positioned, both politically and artistically, to be the first winner of Best Documentary ever that somebody might actually have seen, and that Michael Moore's acceptance speech will be one of the evening's highlights. Spirited Away will win for Best Animated Feature, I'd say, with a trace of optimism (although Lilo and Stitch would cause me no pain). Best Cinematography, the late Conrad Hall, for Road to Perdition. Best Foreign Film, no idea (except that it obviously won't be City of God). Best Song, U2; not sure how they're planning to perform "Lose Yourself," the best of the bunch, if Eminem is avoiding the ceremony. Best Editing, Thelma Schoonmaker for Gangs of New York, because she's a genius and probably a sweetheart as well.

And it looks like Peter O'Toole will be showing up to claim his honorary Oscar, despite some reluctance. Which is a very good thing: I've long felt that Lawrence of Arabia, which recently has spent more time in my DVD player than any other movie, is the pop cultural starting point for understanding our predicament in the world, at least for those of us who haven't made it through all eight hundred pages of Seven Pillars of Wisdom just yet; T.E. Lawrence, who was made and betrayed by imperial dreams in the Middle East, really is the prince of our disorder, and the desert images that will be included in O'Toole's tribute reel couldn't be appearing on our television screens at a more timely moment.