Will Birdman fly? Will American Sniper's Bradley Cooper take down the best actor favourites? Will a little Aussie battler visual effects company cause a major upset and claim Oscar gold?
The answers will be revealed at the 87th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, scheduled to begin at 12.30pm (AEDT) on Monday.
The world's most beautiful people will walk down one of the world's longest red carpets, about 200m, into the theatre, but instead of designer gowns and suits, raincoats and gumboots might be more apt with rain forecast.
Australian nominee Tim Crosbie, representing his Adelaide visual effects company Rising Sun Picture's stunning work on X-Men: Days of Future Past, won't be worried if rain gets on his new Hugo Boss suit.
The 47-year-old can't wait for the limousine to take him to Hollywood's biggest party.
"The nerves are building and I didn't quite realise just how big it is," Crosbie, who flew in from Adelaide on Thursday, told AAP.
"You see it on telly and you read stories in the press, but to be part of it is pretty overwhelming."
Rising Sun won a bid with X-Men's Hollywood studio, Twentieth Century Fox, to undertake the mind-blowing time-stands-still Pentagon kitchen scene involving mutant Quicksilver.
The other visual effects nominees are the teams from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Guardians of the Galaxy and Interstellar.
Crosbie won't have fellow Aussie nominee David Lee alongside him at the ceremony, with the veteran sound mixer confirming to AAP he will be back in Australia working on the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie with Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom and Geoffrey Rush.
The 58-year-old surfer from Scotts Head on the NSW mid-north coast, nominated in the sound mixing category for the Angelina Jolie-directed Unbroken, is no stranger to the Oscars, winning a gold statuette in 2000 for his work on The Matrix.
While Julianne Moore (best actress for Still Alice), JK Simmons (supporting actor for Whiplash) and Patricia Arquette (supporting actress for Boyhood) seem to have their categories locked up, best picture, actor and director are open contests.
Most of the late money is being thrown at Birdman, starring Michael Keaton as a washed-up former Hollywood superhero attempting to make a comeback via a Broadway play, to win best picture, with its odds shortening to around $1.50.
Its main rival, Boyhood, shot intermittently over 12 years with the same actors, has drifted to about $2.60 while the rest are long-shots, with third-ranked American Sniper at $21.
Eddie Redmayne, playing theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, remains the best actor favourite at around $1.30, while Birdman's Keaton has drifted a little to $3.75 and American Sniper's Cooper has dropped from a $100 no-hoper back in January to the $10 third favourite.
Director is a race between two: Birdman's Alejandro Inarritu, at $1.62, and Boyhood's Richard Linklater, at $2.20.
Share
