theOneliner.com Oscar Nominations 2004: ROTK picks up 11 nominations, but what chance Peter Jackson finally winning?

So it's that time of year again, and actors, actresses and studios will be whoring themselves silly to get their grubby mitts on one of those little shiny statues that they all make such a fuss about. And who have the Academy deigned to favour with a nomination this year?

After last year's disappointing exclusion (again) of a Lord of the Rings film in the Best Picture category, the magnificent The Return of the King leads the field with eleven nominations including, most importantly, Best Picture and Best Director. Other films nominated in the Best Picture category include Clint Eastwood's Mystic River , for which Eastwood also picks up a Best Director nod, alongside Sofia Coppola's superb Lost In Translation and horse-racing drama Seabiscuit. The nominees for Best Actor are all much as expected, with Sean Penn nominated for Mystic River , Bill Murray, for his career-best turn in Lost In Translation (though due to his previous, well-publicised comments about the Academy Awards, and the good chance of him not showing up, Murray is likely to miss out, though this non-attendance didn't stop kiddy-fiddler Roman Polanski walking off with last year's Best Director prize) and Ben Kingsley for House of Sand and Fog. A surprising, but very pleasing, inclusion here is Johnny Depp, nominated for his supremely entertaining role as Captain Keith Richards (sorry, Jack Sparrow) in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

After once more having very few films to choose from, the Best Animated Feature Category is again limited to only three nominees, with the smart money being on Pixar's Finding Nemo, though Sylvain Chomet's Belleville Rendez-vous (released as The Triplets of Belleville in the US) is in with a chance. Nominations of note in other categories include Charlize Theron in Monster and Samantha Morton in In America, both nominated for Best Actress (with no much-anticipated nomination for Julia Roberts' role in Mona Lisa Smile. Yay!), with the bizarre omission of Scarlett Johansson (who received two BAFTA nominations) for Lost In Translation . A surprising nomination is Brazilian film City of God (Cidade de Deus) in the Best Direction category (picking up four nominations in total), though all the other nominees in this category are unsurprising. Disappointingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, Oliver Stone's documentary on Fidel Castro, Comandante is not nominated in the Best Documentary Feature category, won last year by Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine .

There are few obvious favourites in most of the categories this year, but if justice is to be done, then we must hope that The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King finally gets Peter Jackson the Best Director and Best Picture awards he so richly deserves. We'll find out on February 29th, when the little gold fellas are dished out. Scan your eyes over all the nominees below.