Oscar hopefuls.

The Oscar nominations are coming up this Tuesday, and Newsweek has a nice long interview with a bunch of the actors that are supposed to get the nominations. It will be embarrassing if they don't all get nominated, but look who it is: Hilary Swank, Annette Bening, Paul Giamatti, Jamie Foxx, Kate Winslet, and Leonardo DiCaprio. They're all going to get nominated. It will be a terrific upset if they aren't. It's not the Newsweek piece that created the expectation.

Catty thing I feel like saying: Annette Bening looks like Clay Aiken in these pictures.

Funniest person in the room: Giamatti. Example:

Is there always a physical thing that unlocks a character for you all? If you figure out, say, the walk, does everything else fall into place?

BENING: For me, a lot of it is the clothes. Just like in real life, you feel different if you're wearing a tux or if you're in jeans. When you're acting, that feeling is magnified. And shoes! Shoes are huge!

SWANK: It's true. If you change shoes you sit differently, you walk differently.

WINSLET: I start with the bra. If the bra's right, everything falls into place.

GIAMATTI: Me too. [Laughter]

Embarrassing fact about Giamatti: he got fired from a small role on "Frasier." ("I wasn't funny. They kept tinkering with the script, and it sucked, and I was having a bad time.")

Even more embarrassing, for Swank: she was fired from "Beverly Hills, 90210." ("I thought, 'If I'm not even good enough for this, I'm never going to make it.' So I was coming off this one-hour show, and I was testing for another one-hour show with this very well- known executive ... And he said, 'I would hire you, but you're just too "half —hour."'")

Jamie Foxx coins a phrase: "fame face." It's something you want to avoid getting.

Trite question that is asked so often that the celebs think it's been asked when it hasn't, that they always answer the same way, and that they always answer as if they are imparting new information: How has having a child changed you? Just for once, I'd like somebody to say: I'm really exactly the same as I always was. Or, better: It's brought out the selfish bastard in me.

DiCaprio displays an adorable touch of grandiosity: "This art form is only 100 years old, and I am truly curious to see how the medium is going to change in the next couple hundred years."