Sunil Sethi: And my Oscars go to

AL FRESCO

It's Oscar weekend coming up""and though Indian viewers will catch the excitement only on Monday evening""it's worth reflecting how easy and engrossing the life of avid film-watchers has become ever since bulky video cassettes were replaced by magical, slimline DVDs and expanded home theatre systems and plasma and LCD screens have truly expanded the world of movies. In fact, nothing has changed so much in a lifetime as the habit of spending an evening at the cinema. Film-lovers now stop by to pick up a DVD at the local parlour on their way home.

For me the 79th Academy Awards are different because I've seen most of the nominations in prime categories""and at home. Here's my choice of the winners:

Best Picture: American director Martin Scorsese should get it for The Departed, his layered, fast-paced and scorchingly violent thriller simply because he's missed it six times. After path-breaking films such as Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Gangs of New York and The Aviator, this cult filmmaker takes us into a familiar war in the down-at-heel streets of Boston. But the world of double-crossing moles planted in the police department and the criminal underworld has been plotted as densely as a complicated, enthralling jigsaw. The twists and turns are both rapid, surprising and you may think Scorsese's lost the plot. Like a master director he's ahead of the game until the very last piece falls into place. The film also ends on a wry moral note hinging on the oldest question in the cops-and-robbers genre: does crime pay?

Best Director: Mexican director Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu's much-talked-about film Babel, which links four rapidly developing and ultimately tragic situations in far-flung corners of the world to a single incident, is a hot favourite for this prize. The filmmaker's technique of holding moments in long sequences shot in cinema verite technique is admirable but exhausting. I also find the chance incident too slender a thread to hang a chain of consequences so complex. Actor-turned-director Clint Eastwood's double bill, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, is extraordinary for the sheer ambition of making two features based on the same incident in World War II, one from the point of view of American soldiers, who won, and the other from the position of the defeated Japanese. It is as if a sub-continental filmmaker would present two sides of the Kargil conflict from the Indian and Pakistani sides. But Eastwood has won loads of Oscars as actor and director (Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River and Unforgiven). In my opinion the award for best director should go to British filmmaker Stephen Frears's The Queen.

Best Actress: Almost everybody is agreed on this one. Helen Mirren playing Queen Elizabeth II""in the immediate few days following Princess Diana's death""will come to be regarded as a benchmark of fine-tuned performance by legions of actors everywhere. To enact the inner emotion of a living and widely recognised public figure at the centre of conflict between what the government wants, and what sovereign duty demands, is a challenge. The English actress triumphs through a combination of acting technique and virtuoso leap of the imagination. The drama in The Queen is superbly controlled by the aforementioned Stephen Frears.

Best Actor: Forest Whitaker, who plays Idi Amin Dada, the Ugandan dictator who threw out thousands of citizens of Indian origin in the 1970s in The Last King of Scotland. With acquired bulk and a big laugh, Whitaker puts the brutal horrors of the strongman's regime in stark relief.

Best Foreign Film: I doubt if the third part of Deepa Mehta's trilogy Water, although a Canadian entry and for all the terrible trouble she went through to complete it, stands a chance.