WILD CARDS IN OSCAR’S DECK

THERE’S no membership card, but there is a statue. There’s no clubhouse, but there is an annual meeting at the Kodak Theatre.

Welcome to the Oscar Club.

It’s no secret that Oscar voters seem to favor certain performers over others, nominating people such as Judi Dench, Kate Winslet and Jack Nicholson time and again.

But all that may be changing given the broadband speed with which Oscar odds now rise and fall. Campaigns that might once have seemed worth little more than a scoff now stand a legitimate chance. Emilio Estevez as best director? Sacha Baron Cohen for best original screenplay? “Dreamgirls” supporting star Jennifer Hudson a front runner based largely on a brief clip reel screened in May? Someone like Jessica Biel may sound like a fanciful long shot, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover between now and nomination day in January. As once-supposed locks fall by the wayside and unlikely contenders emerge, the most dangerous campaign tool this year may be a simple question: Why not?

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The outside man

RYAN GOSLING’s performance in “Half Nelson” is arguably the year’s best reviewed. Yet Gosling isn’t at the top of many Oscar lists. He could probably be a bigger star -- a leading-man, Hollywood-actor type. Rather, with performances such as his startlingly alive turn in “Half Nelson” as a drugged-out high school teacher taking tentative first steps toward changing his life, the actor is charting a path entirely his own.

“There is this idea in Hollywood,” Gosling says, “and I’ve seen it work for people, where the unspoken rule is ‘Do two for them and one for yourself.’ And that’s kind of considered a fact. I’ve never really found that to be true for me. I’ve gotten more opportunities out of working on things I believed in than I ever did on things that weren’t special to me.”

Gosling is unabashedly direct as to why he has become so specific about the roles he’ll take on.

“Listen, I’ve done a lot. I’ve been working since I was 12. I worked a long time without any freedom, where I was just selling ad space on TV and saying the lines I was supposed to say and trying to please people. And it took me a long time to get to a place were I felt I could work for myself and work for the experience.”

The changeling

MUCH like Cate Blanchett, it can be hard to recognize actress Vera Farmiga from one part to another. Her turn in “Down to the Bone,” a barely released independent film that garnered her rave reviews and numerous awards, served as a calling card, helping her to land roles in “The Departed” and “Breaking and Entering.”

In “The Departed” Farmiga plays a state psychiatrist who finds herself torn between two lovers, who are themselves unknowingly engaged in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. Farmiga goes for integrity and complexity in a role that could just as easily have been “the girl” in a gangster story.

“It was horribly convenient, right? That she does fall for the two leads,” Farmiga says. “But it’s true that was the challenge, to make it believable. I didn’t want it to seem like an easy decision.

“Most of all what I dwell on with all my characters, what interests me, are the contradictions, the inconsistencies of characters and the insecurity and confusion and fear which we all have..”

Since filming “The Departed” and “Breaking and Entering,” Farmiga has shot several films, working almost nonstop. With her ability to disappear into her roles, Farmiga is perhaps the quintessential character actress. Oscar often has trouble recognizing such talent. But unlike some, she doesn’t mind the label.

“As opposed to what -- leading lady? I giggle because I think they’re such archetypical characters. Absolutely I would prefer being considered a character actress than a leading lady, quote unquote. But those are such Hollywood terms from the ‘40s. I don’t know if they’re even applicable anymore.”

The biographer

IN “The Queen,” Michael Sheen plays British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the period just after the death of Princess Diana. The film uses the great outburst of emotion following the death of “the people’s princess” -- a term cannily used by Blair -- to examine the British national character and the collision between tradition and modernity represented by the monarchy.

“It’s such a film about the country,” says Sheen, “more than any I can think of.”

Sheen had played Blair previously in the television movie “The Deal.” He is also in the middle of a London run as television journalist David Frost in “The Queen” screenwriter Peter Morgan’s play “Frost/Nixon,” which will be coming to Broadway in the spring.

In the delicate sparring matches depicted between the queen and the prime minister, the film puts a human spin -- fallible, uncertain and stubborn -- on figures that might normally be portrayed as near-mythic.

“For people to truly empathize,” explains Sheen, “you can’t just show people in a good light. So you do see different sides to everybody in the film ... you see them struggling. You realize they’re doing their best, that they’re three-dimensional.”

That’s the time of complex role awards’ voters often embrace -- especially when it comes with a British accent.

The mutable starlet

ONE doesn’t necessarily think of the “sexiest woman alive” in high-necked, turn-of-the-century finery or combat fatigues. Yet that’s just how Jessica Biel, given the “sexiest” title in 2005 by Esquire magazine, has appeared on-screen this year in “The Illusionist” and “Home of the Brave.”

Though she is known for her running, jumping, jiggling roles in such pictures as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Blade: Trinity,” one can draw parallels between Biel’s career and that of tomb-raiding Oscar winner Angelina Jolie. Granted, Jolie nailed quality roles from the beginning. Biel has had to fight for hers.

Biel actively and aggressively pursued her role in “The Illusionist.” She says the film’s producers just couldn’t picture her as a tamped-down duchess in a period drama, but they finally gave her a shot when another actress dropped out just before shooting began. Biel hurriedly spent a day preparing and arrived for her reading with eventual costar Edward Norton in a hastily assembled costume.

“ ‘The Illusionist’ was such a coup for me. I fought so hard for it, because I really needed something so different from everything I had done in the past to really show, ‘See, I promise you I can do this, please take a chance with me.’ I can be much more than just the hot, tough, kick-ass girl,” she recalls, using finger-quotes when referring to herself as “hot.”

“I think I’m in the middle of the turn. Taking that long, slow turn. It takes time, I think, to build an awareness of you as something different, something a little more versatile. It takes time for people to really get that.”

The comeback

“I think it’s just that people relate to the performance, and as an actor it doesn’t get any better than that.”

Oscar rarely likes ugly, but Jackie Earle Haley brings an unsettling air of sympathy to his role in “Little Children” as a sex offender recently released from prison and struggling hard against his own dark impulses.

“It wasn’t a character designed for sympathy,” says Haley. “The main focus was to try and make the character real ... I think we accomplished what we set out to do, to judge him and not judge him.”

Haley has been away from Hollywood for many years (he was in the original “The Bad News Bears”), and so to reemerge amid supporting-actor chatter makes the moment all the sweeter, if also that much more fraught with anxiety.

“It’s thrilling, it’s exciting and it’s fearful,” he says. “It’s great fodder for nail biting.”