Ireland hasn't had too much to shout about in recent years at the Oscar ceremonies, which makes it doubly sweet this year as we have five nominations in the Animated Film category.
Darragh O'Connell of Brown Bag films was behind Give Up Yer Oul Sins, the surprise Oscar contender of some years back, and Brown Bag are also behind the short film Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty, which has been nominated in the Best animated Short Film category.
The Door, a short film about a father and his daughter in Russia in 1986, has also been nominated, as has The Secret of Kells, a short film about an orphan named Brendan who's been set the task of completing the Book of Kells.
For any of these shoestring-budgeted films to threaten the might of megabucks Hollywood would be akin to David slaying Goliath in Hollywood on March 7, but sometimes independent films shock more mainstream works in winning gongs at the annual beano so we'll keep our fingers crossed.
On the Best Film front another irony threatens to unfold as the main threat to James Cameron's much-lauded sci-fi romance Avatar (the highest grossing film ever made at the time of writing, having made more than $2 billion at the box office) comes from his wife Kathryn Bigelow with her sensitive anti-war movie The Hurt Locker.
When I reviewed that film on this page some months back I mentioned that it was unusual that a woman would tackle a subject like the plight of a bomb disposal unit in the Iraq war.
We might find it equally unusual that it was left to her husband to make a gentle love story like Avatar. But it would be sexist to think like this. Both women and men should be entitled to make any kinds of movies they like as long as they make them well.
The idea of a 'woman's picture' (as weepies used to be called when I was a child), or a 'man's picture' (war, adventure, etc.) are outmoded examples of tunnel vision.
It would be great to see Ms Bigelow topple her ex-husband considering his budget was $400 million and hers the proverbial 'two bob and a lollipop'.
Jeff Bridges is favourite to take the Best Actor gong for playing an alcoholic country singer in Crazy Heart. Sandra Bullock is a surprise contender for Best Actress with her turn as a housewife adopting a black orphan and seeing him go on to become a football star in The Blind Side. But she has to face tough opposition from Meryl Streep (Julia and Julia) and Helen Mirren (The Last Station).
2010 is perhaps the year of the underdog because another work up for Oscars, Precious, is the first film directed by an African-American (Lee Daniels) to be honoured thusly.
It tells the story of an abused black teenager in Harlem in the 1980s, so maybe 2010 is also the year that social consciousness came back to the movies. Here's hoping it gets rewarded - and that the Irish don't go home as empty-handed as they've been doing since the glory years of Jim Sheridan, Neil Jordan et al.
