Tonight's Oscars ceremony could see Meryl Streep join an elite acting club with a third Academy Award, Jean Dujardin could become the first Frenchman to win best actor while Christopher Plummer could become the oldest acting winner ever at 82.
Streep (62) is favourite to win best actress for her role as the former British prime minister in The Iron Lady - and has already carried off a Bafta award and a Golden Globe for her role.
And The Artist is favoured to become the only silent movie to take the best-picture prize since the first Oscar ceremony 83 years ago.
Along with Streep, Hollywood’s big night has plenty of other returning stars. Past Oscar winners and nominees George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Glenn Close, Michelle Williams and Nick Nolte are also in the running again.
The show also has a returning favourite as ringmaster. After an eight-year absence, Billy Crystal is back for his ninth time as host.
Because of a change in voting rules, the Oscars feature nine best-picture nominees for the first time, instead of the 10 they had the last two years.
Competing against The Artist for the top honour are Clooney's family drama The Descendants; the Deep South tale The Help, featuring best-actress nominee Viola Davis and supporting-actress favourite Octavia Spencer; and the Paris adventure Hugo, from director Martin Scorsese.
Also in the line-up: the romantic fantasy Midnight In Paris, from writer-director Woody Allen; Pitt's baseball tale Moneyball and his family saga The Tree Of Life; the First World War epic War Horse, directed by Steven Spielberg; and Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock's September 11th story Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.
Hugo leads with 11 nominations in total, with The Artist right behind with 10.
Spencer is a virtual lock for supporting actress, having dominated earlier film honours for her
breakout role in The Help as a brash maid in 1960s Mississippi.
The same holds true for Plummer, the front-runner for supporting actor for his role as an elderly widower who comes out as gay in Beginners.
The lead-acting categories are where the drama lies. Best actress shapes up as a two-woman race between Davis as a courageous maid leading an effort to reveal the hardships of black housekeepers' lives in The Help and Streep as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
The record-holder with 17 acting nominations, Streep has won twice and would become only the fifth performer to receive three Oscars. Jack Nicholson, Ingrid Bergman and Walter Brennan all earned three, while Katharine Hepburn won four.
Last night The Artist won best picture and three other prizes at the Spirit Awards honouring independent film, a possible prelude to a big night at the Academy Awards tonight for the black-and-white silent film.
The film also won for best director for Michel Hazanavicius and lead actor for Jean Dujardin as a silent-era star whose career crumbles as talking pictures take over in the 1920s. It earned the cinematography prize, too.
The Artist is the best-picture favourite at the Oscars. Michelle Williams won best actress as Marilyn Monroe in the filmmaking tale My Week with Marilyn.
Supporting-acting honours went to Christopher Plummer and Shailene Woodley as a troublesome Hawaiian teenager in The Descendants.
When the curtain comes up later tonight, producers of the awards show will be less worried about who wins than they will be about how many people tune-in on television.
The world's top film honours are in jeopardy of losing their status as the second most-watched TV event in the United States behind professional football's Super Bowl if they can't lure more than 40 million viewers.
Organisers hope the return of popular comedian Billy Crystal to host the program will lure viewers. He hasn't appeared since 2004 when Return of the King won best film.
And last week, a supposed controversy began brewing when the academy was reported to have banned comic actor Sacha Baron Cohen's "The Dictator" character from Oscar's red carpet. By the end of the week, however, Oscar producers had reversed their ban and the episode looked more like a publicity stunt to create drama than a real controversy.
Aside from hosts and promotional stunts, it will be the movies, stars and awards that truly draw movie fans to the show, and that is where the real drama lies.
Agencies