Oscar Nominees: Who Will Walk Away With What?

The Artist has been hotly tipped to walk away with the best picture award at the Oscars this year but are the winners and losers really as predictable as it appears?

The black and white silent movie has 10 Oscar nominations and if it does win the big prize on Sunday it will be the first silent movie to win since Wings won in 1927 when the awards began.

The heart-warming melodrama follows the decline of a silent-film superstar played by Jean Dujardin and a rising 'talky' star, played by Berenice Bejo.

Dujardin has already won the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) honour and a Golden Globe for musical or comedy performance and hotly tipped to walk away with the prize again this weekend.

The nostalgic film has captured a lot of headlines, as has the talented Jack Russell called Uggie that stars in it, but that has not necessarily translated to big money at the box office.

Last year's big winner, The King's Speech, took £45.68m at the UK box office alone.

The total figure for The Artist is likely to be significantly lower - in the nine weeks since it was released it has taken over £6.8m in the UK.

Of the nine films nominated for best picture, two are set in Paris; Martin Scorsese's Hugo and Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, and The Artist is made by a French director Michel Hazanavicius.

It seems the romance of the city of love has captured the hearts of both directors and audiences this year.

The worst reviewed best picture nominee is Stephen Daldry's 9/11 drama Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Daldry has been nominated for, and won, Oscars with The Hours, The Reader and Billy Elliot but his latest film has not been well received by the critics.

The film with the most nominations, although more for its design than cast, is Hugo with 11.

Directed by Martin Scorsese the film centres on a boy and girl in 1930s Paris who unravel a mystery surrounding French film pioneer Georges Melies played by Ben Kingsley.

It also harks back to old-fashioned film-making and the origins of cinema.

Golden Globe and Bafta winner Meryl Streep looks like an early favourite to claim her third Oscar for her role as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.

Although she holds the record with 17 nominations in her lifetime, Streep hasn't won in nearly three decades - she last picked up a statue in 1987 for Sophie's Choice.

But at the SAG Awards, one of the most accurate forecasts for Oscar night, Viola Davis beat Streep for best actress for her role as a maid taking a stand against racial prejudice in 1960s Mississippi in The Help.

Dujardin won the SAG best actor honour and a Golden Globe for musical or comedy performance.

But in what has become a two-man race, he is up against George Clooney for his role in The Descendants. Clooney won the best actor gong at the Golden Globes for his portrayal of a father who has to learn to cope with his two daughters as his wife is in a coma.

Christopher Plummer, who at 82 is the joint oldest nominee this year, looks likely to walk away with the best supporting actor award for Beginners after winning at the SAGs.

Starring Ewan McGregor as his son, Plummer plays an elderly man who reveals he is homosexual after the death of his wife but is then diagnosed with terminal cancer.

If he wins he will become the oldest recipient of the award ever.

Max von Sydow, who stars in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is the other 82-year-old nominee.