With the Academy Awards underway, a win from either James Cameron's sci fi blockbuster Avatar or Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker will represent an Oscars first.
The two favourites in the expanded field of 10 best-picture nominees are the biggest modern blockbuster Avatar and the critical darling The Hurt Locker, which drew a tiny fraction of the audience its mammoth competitor pulled in.
James Cameron's Avatar would be the only science-fiction film ever to take home the best-picture prize.
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While war films have done well at the Oscars, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker would be the first winner centered on the fight against terrorism, a subject that has stirred little interest among movie audiences shell-shocked by news coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The other eight films competing for best picture: the football drama The Blind Side, the science-fiction thriller District 9, the British teen tale An Education, the World War II saga Inglourious Basterds, the Harlem story Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, the Jewish domestic chronicle A Serious Man, the animated adventure Up, and the recession-era yarn Up in the Air.
Waltz wins best supporting actor gong
Meanwhile Inglorious Basterd's actor Christoph Waltz has taken out the best supporting actor Oscar.
Waltz, 53, was the odds-on favorite after winning nearly 30 awards for his performance, including best actor at the Cannes Film Festival as well as a Golden Globe Award earlier this year.
Waltz was a virtual unknown when he was cast by Quentin Tarantino for the part of the diabolical SS colonel Hans Landa, which Tarantino has described as one of the greatest characters he has ever written.
Other nominees included Woody Harrelson for his part in "The Messenger," Christopher Plummer for "The Last Station," Matt Damon for "Invictus" and Stanley Tucci for "The Lovely Bones."
Oscar ratings slip
Oscar ratings fell to an all-time low two years ago and rebounded just a bit last year, when the show's overseers freshened things up with lively production numbers and new ways of presenting some awards.
The overhaul continues this season with a show that farmed out time-consuming lifetime-achievement honours to a separate event last fall and hired Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin as the first dual Oscar hosts in 23 years.
But Sunday's ABC Oscar broadcast could have several million fewer viewers in the US after the network switched off its signal to 3.1 million Cablevision subscribers in the greater New York area in a dispute over fees.
