The Golden Globes, trade unions, film critics and just about everyone else in Hollywood have weighed in on 2006’s best film achievements, helping to solidify the Academy Awards picture — and muddy it up a bit, too.With Oscar nominations due out next Tuesday, a few clear front-runners and some intriguing wild cards have emerged, along with an unusually open race for the top prize.

Still to come are honours by the Directors Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild, whose nominations came out earlier this month. Those awards should help sort out much of the Oscar outlook, but unlike most years, when a solid favourite often emerges, the best-picture category could remain up for grabs right up to awards night February 25.

Heres a look at how Oscar season is shaping up:

The sure things?

Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker seemingly sewed up the best-actress and actor categories from the minute their films debuted last autumn.

A grand dame of British drama, Mirren looks unbeatable for her turn as prim Elizabeth II in The Queen. Mirren brings marvellous haughtiness and humanity to the maligned monarch as she blindly ignores — then awkwardly acknowledges — her subjects’ pleas for royal reassurance and comfort over the death of Princess Diana in 1997.

If there’s a best-actress dark horse, it’s Penelope Cruz, who delivers a career performance full of heart and humour in Volver<$>, playing a woman coping with bizarre — and possibly supernatural — crises in her domestic life.

But with Mirren in the mix, Cruz almost certainly has to settle for runner-up status.

The quiet, even-keeled Whitaker, known more for hushed menace or gentle humour, explodes on screen as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, presenting a figure of towering passion and depraved cruelty.

The fictionalised story casts the bombastic, big-hearted and brutal Amin first as mentor — later as tormentor — of a young Scottish doctor seeking adventure in Africa.

The only actor with an outside chance at usurping Whitaker’s Oscar crown is Peter O’Toole. All the hard, hedonistic mileage of O’Toole’s life — and that of his character, a frail but still lecherous old actor — shows clearly on his face in Venus, a portrait of a man whose libido still functions, even if his body doesn’t.

O’Toole is tied with Richard Burton — his co-star in 1964’s>Becket<$>, which earned them both best-actor nominations — for the Oscar-futility record among actors, each was nominated seven times but never won.

Another loss would make O’Toole the all-time biggest acting loser at zero-for-eight.

With other best-actor nominations for such films as Lawrence of Arabia, My Favorite Year anI>The Lion in Winter, <$>O’Toole was given an honorary Oscar four years ago, a prize he almost turned down, saying he felt he still had a chance to win the award outright.

There’s an outside chance that still could happen, despite Whitaker’s dominating performance.

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