Full list of Academy Award nominations I Chief film critic James Christopher's verdict

If the experts are to be believed, the winners of the most highly prized Oscars are all but decided this year – and half of them are British. Slumdog Millionaire, Kate Winslet and Danny Boyle are homegrown odds-on favourites in the Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Director categories.

Mickey Rourke’s glorious, quasi-autobiographical comeback in The Wrestler puts him in pole position to win the Academy Award for an Actor in a Leading Role.

Then there is the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, which has apparently been reserved for the late Heath Ledger ever since word of his mesmerising performance as The Joker in The Dark Knight started to seep out after his death a year ago yesterday. Josh Brown, Michael Shannon, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert Downey Jr, Ledger’s rival nominees, can probably forget about preparing an acceptance speech – William Hill makes him 1-10 for the award, the shortest odds it has offered at this stage of an Oscar campaign.

Among the six principal awards, only the Best Supporting Actress category looks like a fair fight. Penélope Cruz, spitting blood in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is narrowly favoured over Amy Adams, Viola Davis, Taraji P. Henson and Marisa Tomei.

The 2009 awards, to be presented on February 22, have a lot to prove, and a procession of sure things is not what Hollywood hopes for when the industry is haunted by the twin spectres of economic gloom and increasing competition from other media.

Last year’s ceremony had the lowest viewing figures since records were first made available in 1974, with an average audience of 32 million. Pundits blamed the preponderance of European stars and gritty, low-budget films that did not succeed at the box office.

The 81st Academy Awards will have a new host (the Australian actor Hugh Jackman) and plenty of star power, but Europeans – specifically Britons – still look best-placed to triumph.

Winslet, a five-time Oscar-night loser, is nominated for her performance in The Reader – which has already secured her a Golden Globe and a Bafta nomination – but not for Revolutionary Road, for which she also won a Golden Globe and a Bafta nomination.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a $150 million (£108 million) studio movie that pushes back the boundaries of special-effects technology, picked up the most nominations, with 13.

Slumdog Millionaire has ten nominations, and The Dark Knight and Milk have eight each.

Other British contenders include Stephen Daldry for directing The Reader, David Hare for adapting it from the bestselling German novel, Peter Morgan for the Frost/Nixon screenplay and the team behind Man on Wire, nominated for the Documentary award.

Alist acting nominees include Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (for Benjamin Button and the otherwise barely acknowledged critical favourite Changeling), Meryl Streep (for her nun in the very serious Doubt, not her dancing queen in Mamma Mia! The Movie), Sean Penn (as the gay rights activist Harvey Milk) and Downey Jr (as a blacked-up Australian method actor who will not step out of character “until I done the DVD commentary”).

Damian Smee, William Hill’s film expert, has been compiling Oscar odds for 27 years, watching most of the contending films, scrutinising all the latest industry buzz and poring over every minor award ceremony in the interminable build-up to the main event at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles.

He picks the Best Picture winner “eight times out of ten” and has a similar success rate for the leading actor and director categories.

“The biggest prizes have never looked as settled as they do this year,” a spokesman for the betting company said last night. “There’s normally at least two contenders for each award but this year the favourites are all nailed on.”

Not that the 6,000-odd members of the academy always vote predictably. There have been two shock winners of the Best Picture award in the past four years: Million Dollar Baby, which beat The Aviator (widely expected to be Martin Scorsese’s first win) in 2004, and Crash, which edged out Ang Lee’s gay cowboy film, Brokeback Mountain, the following year.

The smart money

Best Motion Picture
Slumdog Millionaire 2-7; The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button 4-1; The Reader 10-1; Milk 12-1; Frost/Nixon 14-1

Best Director
Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire, 4-9; David Fincher, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button 7-2; Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon 8-1; Stephen Daldry, The Reader 8-1; Gus Van Sant Milk 10-1

Best Actress
Kate Winslet, The Reader, 8-15; Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married, 5-2; Meryl Streep, Doubt, 8-1; Angelina Jolie, Changeling, 8-1; Melissa Leo, Frozen River, 14-1

Best Actor
Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler, 4-6; Sean Penn, Milk, 6-4; Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon, 9-1; Brad Pitt, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, 14-1; Richard Jenkins, The Visitor, 20-1.

Best Supporting Actor
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight, 1-10; Josh Brolin, Milk, 8-1; Michael Shannon, Revolutionary Road, 10-1; Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Doubt, 12-1; Robert Downey Jr, Tropic Thunder, 20-1

Best Supporting Actress
Penélope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, 4-5; Viola Davis, Doubt, 5-2; Taraji P. Henson, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 11-2; Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler, 13-2; Amy Adams, Doubt, 10-1

Sources: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences/William Hill

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