Jennifer ConnellyJennifer Connelly
A Beautiful Mind
  Last year the dream may not have come true for Jennifer Connelly when her stunning performance in Requiem for a Dream was all but ignored come Oscar night. This year is a whole different story. Not only has she received a nomination, but she's also got to be considered one of the frontrunners to take the golden doorstop home. In A Beautiful Mind, she plays a woman with a humanizing effect on John Forbes Nash Jr., (Russell Crowe). Throughout the film, Connelly's quiet grace and obvious passion for a man driven by demons, grounds the film that otherwise might have slipped into something altogether darker and less appealing.

Helen MirrenHelen Mirren
Gosford Park
  In Gosford Park, Helen Mirren's Mrs. Wilson has a secret that ultimately leads to murder in the grand country estate that she presides over as the head housekeeper. As the film opens, Mrs. Wilson is so buttoned down she's like a hermetically sealed building wrapped in plastic. But slowly we start to see the tiny chinks in the armor, until, in the end, she becomes a quivering mass of uncertainty, an uncertainty that also serves to soften her rough edges. Mirren has been this way before when she won a Best Supporting Oscar nomination for her delicious performance in The Madness of King George.


Maggie SmithMaggie Smith
Gosford Park
  This dame (as in Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) can really act. In Gosford Park, Robert Altman's finely tuned tragicomedy of manners, Smith takes obvious pleasure in throwing off the delightful barbs the script affords her. She plays the Countess of Trentham - someone who's never met an insult she couldn't put to good use and who makes sure no one is spared her withering tongue. These are the kind of roles Smith was born to play as she sparkles in every scene she's in.
  Smith has been Oscar-bound before, taking home statues for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and California Suite as well as being nominated for Othello, Travels with My Aunt and Room with a View.

Marisa TomeiMarisa Tomei
In the Bedroom
  'Tawkin like dis here' earned Marisa Tomei her first - and to some, a very surprising Oscar victory. That was back in 1992 when she played the street-wise (and car knowledgeable) Brooklyn girlfriend of wanna-be lawyer Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny. This time Tomei takes on the role of Natalie Strout in In The Bedroom. Tomei's character is dealing with single parenthood after leaving her extremely temperamental husband. She falls in love with a younger man, but the last thing Natalie wants is for the mistakes she's made in her life to be visited upon her new lover. But tragedy finds them and changes her life as well as the life of her lover's family.

Kate WinsletKate Winslet
Iris
  As the young Iris Murdoch, Kate Winslet helps bring to life a literary legend. Winslet plays Murdoch during the 1950s when she was a teacher at Oxford University and had her first novel published. It is also the years before Alzheimer's disease robbed her of the mind that once placed her on the literati A-list. Winslet brings to the role a vivaciousness that makes what happens to Murdoch all the more devastating. As for her Oscar odds, Winslet says she doesn't really care as she's already received the highest compliment an actor can have from Murdoch's widower who wrote that he felt he was seeing his late wife once again on the screen.

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