Gloom is descending over North American cinemas this Christmas and will arrive in the UK in the new year.

Cinemagoers looking for a fun night out at the movies will face a daunting menu of subjects such as the mass slaughter of Jews (Defiance, Jan 9); the German psyche during those genocide years (Valkyrie, Jan 23; The Reader, Jan 2); a suicidal depressive (Seven Pounds, Jan 16); a marriage on the rocks (Revolutionary Road, Jan 30); the murder of a gay activist (Milk, Jan 23); an ageing wrestler battling heart trouble (The Wrestler, Jan 16); an addict fighting with her family (Rachel Getting Married, Jan 23); and a case of suspected child abuse by a priest (Doubt, Feb 6).

Such intense drama is of course customary as the annual crop of “prestige” films is released for consideration for the Academy Awards, which take place on February 22. It’s Hollywood’s time to pat itself on the back for making worthy films, now a rarity in an industry that is now relying on comic-book heroes and sequels to stay in the black.

This is a vintage prestige year, with heavyweight actors such as Sean Penn, Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet and both Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in the running, not to mention directors such as Ron Howard, David Fincher and Clint Eastwood.

The benefits of securing an Oscar are obvious. The golden statuette immortalises its winner and cranks up his or her asking price many times over. The free publicity generated by the awards and their attendant hoop-la can add many millions of dollars to a film’s gross.

The three-month awards season leading up to the Oscar ceremony is a marathon. From the start of December, a different set of critics and awards groups each week declares what they think are the year’s best movies. Studios leap on these citations to build support for their own Oscar chances, slapping each win on their advertising in the hope that they can move their films to the next round. Understandably, an army of pundits and consultants has grown up, which, with so much money at stake, has become viciously competitive.

Actors in the running make themselves highly visible, attending countless dinners and parties in Los Angeles organised by their film’s studio. Every day Hollywood trade papers and The Los Angeles Times are stuffed with pictures of these events and ads reminding the voting bodies of the year’s films and performances.

It’s not just the prospect of making small films reach bigger audiences that prompts such lavish campaigns. This year, for example, one of the year’s biggest films, a Paramount/Warner Bros co-venture called The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Feb 6), is banking on awards success to break through to the mainstream and recoup its $200 million-plus budget. Starring Pitt and Cate Blanchett and directed by Fincher, it’s a Forrest Gump-style odyssey about a man who is born old and who lives his life backwards. Whimsical and leisurely, the 165-minute film faces an uphill battle to reach a wide audience. With a few key Oscars under its belt, however, it will be a must-see movie.

So far, so good. Benjamin Button has already been nominated for five Golden Globes, the second biggest awards event of the season, which announces its winners at its annual banquet on January 11, almost two weeks before the Oscar nominations are unveiled. The Globes, now in their 66th year, are voted on by the 91 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of international journalists based in LA.

Other big Globe nominees include Howard’s Frost/Nixon (Jan 23), Revolutionary Road by Mendes, starring Winslet and DiCaprio, and another Winslet film The Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry. Winslet scored two nominations, one as lead actress for Revolutionary Road, one as supporting for The Reader. Although many argue that her role in The Reader is a leading one, the films’ distributors worked together to make sure that the two performances wouldn’t cancel each other out.

At the moment one film is taking the lead in the race for the coveted Best Picture Oscar, and that, surprisingly enough, is Danny Boyle’s Indian crowdpleaser Slumdog Millionaire (Jan 9), which is neither an American film nor even entirely in English. Already on release in the US, it has accumulated that most precious of commodities in Hollywood marketing circles — extremely strong word of mouth.

Slumdog has already won awards from the New York and LA critics’ associations, as well as four Globe nominations including Best Picture and Best Director. It will take a remarkable upswing from another film to overtake it, although with more than two months of Hollywood politicking, hype and spin still to go, anything is possible.

Mike Goodridge is a voting member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and US editor of Screen International

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