“Brokeback Mountain” ‘s stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway are the frontrunners to score big at the Oscars in 2011, according to the leading Academy Awards race website. The three stars are all tipped to claim leading actor and actress Oscars nominations for the films “Blue Valentine” and “Love and Other Drugs“.

Experts at the Los Angeles Times newspaper’s The Envelope blog also tips Angelina Jolie, Ben Stiller and Michael Douglas for Oscars gold for their roles in “Salt“, “Greenberg” and “Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps“. Douglas won a Best Actor Oscar for his role as Gordon Gekko in the original “Wall Street” movie.

The film experts also predict troubled moviemaker Roman Polanski will be among the Best Director favorites for his film “The Ghost Writer” – even though he’s fighting extradition from Switzerland to America for sentencing in a 32-year-old sex assault case.

And the early favorites for Best Film, according to the website, are Danny Boyle’s new movie “127 Hours“, “The Kids Are Alright“, Brad Pitt and Sean Penn‘s “The Tree of Life“, “Inception“, western remake “True Grit“, Clint Eastwood‘s “Hereafter (2010)” and Johnny Depp‘s movie adaptation of his late pal Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Rum Diary“.

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Coming from a family steeped in the business, Jake Gyllenhaal knows the routine. When it comes to promoting a film, you can never say enough good things about your co-stars.

“It’s true, actors do this stuff: ‘Oh, he’s great — he pisses lemonade and he shits rainbows,”‘ he says.

But no more. Such was the positive experience Gyllenhaal enjoyed with his new best buddy Tobey Maguire in Brothers, he’s committed to working on projects where the camaraderie is real.

“I don’t believe any more I can make a movie when I don’t care … about the other people in the process,” says the actor, whose father is a director, his mother a writer and sister is the Oscar-nominated Maggie Gyllenhaal. “I don’t think I’m any good when I don’t interact.”

Once poised to take over from Maguire in the Spider-Man franchise, 29-year-old Gyllenhaal credits his on-screen brother for initiating a meaningful and professionally rich relationship when the pair decided to do the film.

“We’d work out together, we’d play basketball together,” Gyllenhaal says. “Not only is he a great actor, he’s also a great producer in some ways.

“He’s 100 per cent always involved.”

Gyllenhaal’s career has remained buoyant since he was nominated for an Oscar alongside Heath Ledger for Brokeback Mountain in 2005, although he’s yet to become the next ubiquitous Hollywood star as many had expected. Ironically, Gyllenhaal turned down the lead role in the blockbuster Avatar but with a raft of diverse roles, including the big-budget Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, coming to screens this year, he is destined to reinforce his reputation as a marquee name.

“Working on a movie like Prince of Persia was awesome,” he says. “It was really great fun to be like an action hero, jump around and run off walls and fight bad guys, have great quippy lines. Wearing half your clothes is always really fun.”

Gyllenhaal worked furiously for seven months to hone his physique for the fantasy adventure movie, based on the video game series of the same name. The $US150 million ($164 million) film is scheduled for a May release.

He has other significant films in the can, among them Love and Other Drugs with Anne Hathaway and the comedy Nailed alongside Jessica Biel.

Gyllenhaal is now shooting sci-fi thriller Source Code, capping a hectic 12 months during which time he also split from his partner, Reese Witherspoon.

“Whatever I dreamed and hoped for in my career and life is not how it’s gone in a lot of ways and I love that.”

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#79. Love and Other Drugs

Director: Edward Zwick
Writer(s): Charles Randolph
Producers: Pieter Jan Brugge, Marshall Herskovitz, Scott Stuber, Randolph and Zwick
Distributor: 20th Century Fox.

The Gist: Based on the novel “Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Saleman”, this sees Jamie Reidy (Gyllenhaal) is to the pharmaceutical business what Jerry Maguire was to professional sports and Frank Abagnale (Catch Me If You Can) was to bank fraud. He’s the guy who’s been there, done that, and walked away with the insider stories….(more)

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Jake Gyllenhaal, Hank Azaria, Judy Greer, Gabriel Macht and Oliver Platt

Why is it on the list?: He certainly gets drawn to bigger-than-life characters, and while I can’t say I’m much of a Zwick fan and nor did I read the novel on which this film is based on, if Love and Other Drugs carries itself as a tale for “grown-ups” and Charles Randolph turns in a screenplay that flips pharmaceutical business on its back, then we may have an insider’s take combined with a side dish of romance a la Up in the Air. Looking forward in seeing how Brokeback Mountain‘s Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal play off of each other.

Release Date/Status?: In post-production, will be ready for a November 24th release.

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