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Oscars Race

The Toronto film festival officially kicked off  Academy Awards season in Hollywood. Nicole LaPorte takes a look at the likely contenders, from Black Swan to The King's Speech.

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Considering the onslaught of buzz, it's hard to believe that David Fincher's film about the rise of Facebook, The Social Network, doesn't come out until October 1st. Oscarologists are already declaring it a shoo-in for a slew of Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Screenplay (for Aaron Sorkin) and performance awards for Jesse Eisenberg (who plays Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg) and Justin Timberlake, who portrays his partner in crime, Sean Parker. Chatter is also mounting for The Fighter, David O. Russell's biopic of boxer "Irish" Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and his relationship with is trainer brother (Christian Bale). The film doesn't come out until December, but is already considered an Oscar heavyweight.

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Ever since the summer release of Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, Annette Bening—who plays an uptight lesbian in the film—has been declared a shoo-in for this year's Best Actress Academy Award. Besides her pitch-perfect performance, Bening has never won an Oscar, despite three nominations; two for Best Actress ( American Beauty, Being Julia), and one for Best Supporting ( The Grifters). But with the arrival of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, starring Natalie Portman as a ballerina gone mad, Best Actress is suddenly a two-horse race. At the Toronto film festival, critics and bloggers alike were breathless over Portman's unflagging intensity and athleticism. Let the betting begin!

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Until now, all the Oscar talk was about how strong the Best Actress category is this year. But with fall films beginning to unspool, suddenly it's the men who are crowding each other in a wide range of performances, from Leonardo DiCaprio as a cool-headed dream thief in Inception to Colin Firth as a stuttering monarch in The King's Speech. Although there's no clear frontrunner at this point, expect to see these actors also picking up nominations: James Franco as mountain climber Aron Ralston in Danny Boyle's 127 Hours; Ryan Gosling as a brooding husband in Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine; and Javier Bardem as an illegal hustler and father, who's diagnosed with cancer, in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful.

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For all of the early certainty over what's hot and what's not, some films' futures remain fuzzy. Writer-director Sofia Coppola's latest, Somewhere, was met with lukewarm reviews at the Venice Film Festival, but went on to win the Golden Lion award, leaving awards pundits scratching their heads as to whether the film is on par with her Oscar-winning debut, Lost in Translation. Meanwhile, critics are divided over Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go and Clint Eastwood's Hereafter. While neither film is being dismissed in the Oscar conversation, they have lost some early steam—even though Hereafter is being championed by Roger Ebert as "a film for sensitive, intelligent people."

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Best Documentary is another Oscar race that's shaping up as a showdown between two films: Oscar-winner Davis Guggenheim's unsparing look at the American public education system, Waiting for "Superman" and Charles Ferguson's inside look at the financial crisis of 2008. Beyond being critically lauded films, they both have a timely zeitgeist-y quality that is capturing the nation's attention. Thomas L. Friedman was inspired to write an op-ed in The New York Times about Waiting for "Superman," and the film was recently the subject of a Time cover story.

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With the Best Picture list again expanded to 10 films, a broad range of films is expected to complete the lineup, from Christopher Nolan's Inception—the blockbuster that feels smart enough to win a nomination, in the vein of last year's District 9—to Toy Story 3, one of the best-reviewed films of the year. Meanwhile, the fall festival circuit has validated The King's Speech, Black Swan, and 127 Hours, which all have the heft and pedigree of solid contenders. Over the summer, The Kids Are All Right became an indie darling, and boasts some of the year's finest performances. And Blue Valentine has been showing up on Oscar lists since it debuted at Sundance.

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Not very many people saw Animal Kingdom, David Michôd's small Australian film about a young man caught up in his family's crime ring. But those who did were struck not just by the film, which is terrific, but by Jacki Weaver's performance as a deceptively loving matriarch who will sacrifice anything for her cubs (whom she prefers to kiss on the lips). Weaver has been acting on the stage and screen for 48 years in her native Australia, appearing in everything from racy 1970s films ( Alvin Purple) to Neil Simon plays. With Animal Kingdom, her profile is growing much wider, and her name is being discussed as an Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actress.

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With all of the films gaining momentum this time of year, some are inevitably losing it. Julian Schnabel's Miral—about a motherless Palestinian girl raised in Jerusalem—was expected to be a major contender in this year's Oscar race, following the trajectory of his 2007 film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But with mixed reviews, it's starting to fall of the radar. Conviction, which stars Hilary Swank as real-life Betty Anne Waters, who put herself through law school to extricate her wrongly incarcerated brother, is also failing to generate significant buzz. Ditto for The Whistleblower, in which Rachel Weisz plays a Bosnian peacekeeper who cracks down on a prostitution ring. While all the films are well-made and have noteworthy performances, they seem to lack the certain something that's needed to go all the way.