Come February, white T-shirt sales shoot up ahead of spring break. Thon posters break out like a rash all over the HUB. And, in Los Angeles, workers start to dust off giant golden men, preparing to install them outside the Shrine Auditorium for the annual Oscar bash in March.

The list of nominees, released by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Tuesday, was the final green signal for full-fledged hype parties, film promotion and nail biting by the grand panjandrums of Hollywood film studios.

This year, films will need all the hype they can get; each nominee vies for the statuette with one of the toughest set of competitors to have come out in recent years.

The Best Picture category is one example of a primed-to-explode contest.

Gladiator, possibly the most successful film of 2000, finds itself in a four-way duel with a cocoa-obsessed woman, a law clerk, drug agents and Chinese martial artists, a fight any self-respecting Coliseum spectator would pay good money to watch.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee's film of furious fights and swift swords, is virtually poetry in motion and a rare case of a foreign-language film being nominated in the Best Picture category. Rarer still would be a victory. Crouching Tiger also stands a chance to win Best Foreign Film; a double victory would be phenomenal.

A complete contrast to Crouching Tiger's whirlwind fury is Chocolat's serenity. Juliette Binoche, nominated for Best Actress, plays a woman who moves to France and sets up a chocolate shop. Chocolat is the only nominee that shows any traces of the Academy's preference in recent times for artsy movies.

Recently released Traffic is a fast, bring-extra-adrenaline story of a drug agent's mission to bust an operation. Benicio Del Toro, a much-underrated actor, gets his reward for brilliance in Traffic with a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

The final Best Picture nominee is Erin Brockovich, a film that sets Best Actress nominee Julia Roberts as a single mother who finds success as a law clerk and brings down a firm guilty of environmental pollution.

Both Traffic and Erin Brockovich were directed by Steven Soderbergh, who suddenly finds himself with double the chances of taking home the Oscar by being nominated for two films. He is bracketed with Gladiator's Ridley Scott, Crouching Tiger's Lee and Billy Elliot's Stephen Daldry.

One notable omission in the two categories is Cast Away. Audiences all over the US in love with Wilson the volleyball must have firmly believed that the Robert Zemeckis-Tom Hanks combination would repeat its Forrest Gump success. It must be that darned box-of-chocolates effect again.

Hanks does earn a chance to add to his Best Actor Oscar collection with a record third.

He will, however, have to beat out Russell Crowe as Maximus in Gladiator, Javier Bardem as a persecuted Cuban writer in Before Night Falls, Ed Harris as the expressionist artist in Pollock and Geoffrey Rush as the delightfully perverted Marquis de Sade in Quills.

The Best Actress nominees, beside Binoche and Roberts, include Joan Allen for The Contender, Ellen Burstyn for Requiem for a Dream and Laura Linney for You Can Count on Me.

Analysts and film buffs are going to have a tough time over the next few weeks as they predict winners.

This Oscar race might provide more drama than all of its Best Picture nominees combined.