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Question: This year, The Help’s Octavia Spencer hopes to beat her co-star Jessica Chastain to win the best supporting actress Oscar. Who was the first man or woman to win an acting Oscar over a co-star who was also nominated in the same category?

Prize: The first person to Tweet the correct answer to this question to @ScottFeinberg will win Alexandre Desplat’s soundtrack to — and a booklet featuring George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s script for — The Ides of March!

(To be eligible, your mailing address must be in the United States, and you must be following @ScottFeinberg on Twitter so that we can direct message you, if you win, and tell you the email address to which you should send your mailing address.)

Photo: Evan Rachel Wood in The Ides of March. Credit: Sony.

By Sean O’Connell

The Producers Guild revealed the talents who would be presenting awards at its dinner on Saturday, Jan. 21, and it’s the usual celebrity suspects of this ongoing Oscar season.

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The following list and remarks reflect my personal opinions and do/will not in any way impact my projections or analysis on this site, wherein I strive above all else to correctly forecast what will happen, not what I believe should happen.

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By Samuel Negin

Who wouldn’t want to see Lea Michele as Eponine in the much-buzzed-about upcoming film version of the megahit musical Les Miserables? Given the latest piece of news I just read, it may be that film’s producers. I have just read that, while she gave a knockout audition for the role, but that the producers are still considering strongly such Hollywood favorites as Scarlett Johansson and Evan Rachel Wood, as well as recording star Taylor Swift.

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If the Academy’s image was a bit dusted up by the Brett Ratner and Eddie Murphy controversies of the past week, it was polished off like a shiny new Oscar by Saturday night’s third annual Governors Awards, at which honorary Oscars were presented to actor James Earl Jones (in absentia) and makeup artist Dick Smith and actress/producer/philanthropist Oprah Winfreyreceived the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

EXCLUSIVE AUDIO: Oprah Winfrey, James Earl Jones and Dick Smith on Governors Awards

I felt truly privileged to be in the room for the ceremony, which several awards show veterans in attendance described to me as one of the most powerful and moving that they can remember.

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Among the things that factored into this week’s projections (which appear further down on the page) …

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Over the past decade (2000-2009), only 24 of 200 nominations for acting Oscars have gone to individuals who were 30 years old or younger (at the time of the nominations announcement); of those, only 6 went to men (4 for best actor and 2 for best supporting actor), while 18 went to women (11 for best actress and 7 for best supporting actress); and in no year did more than 5 of the 20 nominees fall into that demographic (that happened once, but in most years the number was 1 or 2). There is, however, reason to believe that these trends will be halted, if not reversed for the long-term, when this year’s nominations are announced on January 25, 2011.

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