Poor Colin Welland. The screenwriter won the Oscar for best original screenplay for Chariots of Fire in 1982, and ever since whenever the British, or any British-made film show even the slightest chance of doing well at the Oscars, his famous rallying cry returns to haunt us: “The British are coming!”

But now the Brit flame is genuinely burning bright. The beginning of the year is big-screen-awards season and we have films that not only should be in the running for the Golden Globes on Sunday, the Baftas on February 8 and the Oscars two weeks later, but - through their originality and virtuosity - would make worthy, and colourful, winners.

Slumdog Millionaire,which goes on general release today, is a fantastic stew of action, fairytale and love story set in Mumbai. Dev Patel excels as Jamal, the young “chai wallah” who goes on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? to connect once again with his lost love Latika (Freida Pinto). Danny Boyle deserves to be in line for Best Director.

The loudest buzz surrounds Kate Winslet for her two starring roles in Stephen Daldry’s The Reader and her husband Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road, which is out at the end of January. In one she plays a woman who has an affair with a young teenager, concealing her Nazi past; in the other she is stuck in an unhappy marriage with Leonardo DiCaprio.

For those who have seen it, Peter Morgan’s pin-sharp adaptation of his play Frost/Nixon, which goes on general release on January 23, starring Michael Sheen and Frank Langella, also deserves gongs. The film follows David Frost’s attempt to get the disgraced American President Richard Nixon to admit his culpability in the Watergate scandal. It’s rare for a film to escape, and transcend, the ghost of its theatrical origins but Frost/Nixonis a mischievous, unsparing analysis of two men’s egos and frailties.

If size matters, this month the winner of the commission to build the so-called Angel of the South at Ebbsfleet in Kent will be announced. The three shortlisted candidates for the colossal £2 million work are Mark Wallinger, Richard Deacon and Daniel Buren. Wallinger’s plan to build a horse 33 times life-size has excited the most comment, possibly because it reminds people of the chalk horses carved into the Wilt-shire hills. Wallinger says his horse derives from Anglo-Saxon mythology. (“Horsa” - from which we derive “horse” - was the semi-mytho-logical leader of the Anglo-Saxons who landed near Ebbsfleet in the 6th century and the reason the white horse became the symbol of Kent.)

Buren’s design is a tower of five open cabins constructed from white concrete, through which passes a single laser beam of light. Inside people will see the exterior landscape and sky reflected around them. Deacon plans to build a “nest” of 26 differently shaped polyhedrons, “which interconnect to create a skeletal framework suggestive of a giant crystalline structure”.

On a slightly less blowsy, but no less ambitious scale, Whitechapel Art Gallery, in East London, is set to reopen in April after a £10.5 million expansion. The long-awaited announcement on who will replace Sandy Bruce-Lockhart (who died last August) as chairman of English Heritage is expected in February or March. The decision on whether to list the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, the Lloyd’s Building in the City of London and BBC TV Centre will take place around the same time.

Arts Council England makes the news when it’s denying or cutting grants to organisations or when it emerges that it is funding the odd touring show about teenage necrophilia. Dame Liz Forgan, the new chief executive of the organisation, takes up the position at the beginning of February and has to work both to change the image of ACE and to define its purpose. Its headline initiative, which starts on February 16, will give 618,000 free theatre tickets to people under 26 over the next two years (see www.artscouncil.org.uk for details).

The arts world continues to brace itself for recession. Is sponsorship set to suffer? Will the art market crash? Will artists struggle to produce work? Will audiences struggle to afford to come to see it? Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery, intimated recently that the age of the blockbuster exhibition was over: the rising transport and insurance costs involved in lending works of art had led him to consider staging shows with just one or two pictures.

Despite this vexed atmosphere, the spring offers a wonderful range of film, theatre, art, music and dance. Milk (January 23), starring Sean Penn, is a stirring biopic of the assassinated gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk; on stage Judi Dench tackles Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade (Wyndham’s, from March 13). Van Dyck hits Tate Britain (from February 18). Morrissey returns with a new album, Years of Refusal(February 23). Priscilla: Queen of the Desert comes to the stage (Palace Theatre, from March 10). And the movie Lesbian Vampire Killers (March 23) . . . well, that does what it says on the tin.