TWO SURE THINGS

It's been a good long while -- college days, in fact -- since I wrote a regular film column. So I haven't had the chance to predict any Oscar nominations, in public at least, for quite a time. But I'm going to do so now.

The obvious one, already pegged as a sure thing by many, is Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine. Despite the ravings of the critics, I found the movie itself something of a let-down after the whimsical brilliance of Midnight in Paris, rather uneven and forced. But Blanchett's performance as a mentally ill woman is a revelation, a modern-day Blanche DuBois, almost wholly reliant on the waning kindness of people who ought not be strangers, but who are.

And then, just last night, I watched the DVD of Behind the Candelabra, the Liberace biopic. And, my Lord, did Michael Douglas shine! That guy's come a good long way since Streets of San Francisco, let me tell you, capturing perfectly an extremely strange man (with a stage show like that, how could he not be?) who was neither a good person nor a bad one, but merely a person wholly detached from the normal world, inhabiting a universe that existed only in his mind.

Both are brilliant. Both are surely going to make the shortlist for that little golden statuette. And if there's any justice in the word, then they'll both win.