They won't win the Oscar, but in a just world, they might

Will there be any suspense left at all when the nominations for the 77th Oscars are announced on Jan. 25? After a solid month of critics' awards, 10-best lists, People's Choices, and Golden Globes, even the dark horses of the 2004 movie year -- such as Jeff Bridges for ''Door in the Floor" or Catalina Sandino Moreno for ''Maria Full of Grace" -- are under the spotlight.

Yet every year there are great performances and examples of craft that fall outside the box of Motion Picture Academy speculation. There are also entire fields of endeavor that go without recognition simply because there are no categories for them. Fair? Of course not, which is why Globe film critics Ty Burr and Wesley Morris have taken it upon themselves to praise those who, for one reason or another, are out of the Oscar race before it even starts.

Ty Burr's picks: Give some praise to action, music

Supporting actor: Mark Wahlberg, "I [Heart] Huckabees"

David O. Russell's yakkety philosophical farce irritated as many people as found it endearing, but please, regardless of how you feel about the film, at least acknowledge that the former Marky Mark hits a career peak as Tommy Corn: bike-riding firefighter, petroleum-obsessed anger-management candidate, and deeply perplexed spiritual seeker. In a movie where the entire cast strains to be funny, Wahlberg simply is, and the miracle of the performance is that you're never sure where the character's earnest dumbness stops and the actor's soft-spoken smarts kick in. I'd always enjoyed this actor without ever being quite sure why he's a star. At last I get it.

Director: Brad Bird,"The Incredibles"

It's a kid's movie -- it's a cartoon -- so there's a Frozone's chance in hell that the man who made it will be recognized by the Academy. Not when you have such filmmakers as Clint Eastwood and Alexander Payne pondering age and mortality. But isn't that what "The Incredibles" does, in its zippy computer-animated way? Doesn't the movie create as detailed an imaginary world as any live-action film -- maybe even more so? And taken with Bird's 1998 "The Iron Giant," which also imbues animated characters with unexpected humanity, isn't this what the auteur theory's all about? "Incredibles" is a lock for best animated feature, but Bird deserves to break out of the cartoon ghetto.

Supporting actress: Regina King, "Ray"

No disrespect to Sharon Warren, who is this film's official out-of-nowhere Oscar candidate in her role as young Ray Charles's mother, but her role begins and ends with noble stoicism. As Margie Hendricks, Charles's backup singer, mistress, and fellow heroin addict, the hardworking, perennially underrated King goes the full distance from wannabe starlet to pathetic junkie. The character's a heartbreaker -- Margie's savvy enough to know she can be a Raelette only if she'll "let Ray," but she's fatally blinded by ambition -- and King gets both the toughness and the vulnerability.

Music supervision: Liza Richardson, "Wicker Park"; Buck Damon, "Garden State"

Movies often double for mix tapes in this age of the iPod, and in some cases the soundtrack CD makes a stronger statement than the film. Oscar honors the score composer but not the music supervisor who chooses the tunes and whose taste can make or break a movie. "Wicker Park," for instance, is a silly post-college romantic suspense movie with a terrific compendium of recent pop-rock hits and should-have-been-hits by the likes of Snow Patrol, Broken Social Scene, and +/-. (Haven't heard of any of them? Doesn't matter, the CD's still great.) The "Garden State" soundtrack similarly compiles the Shins, Iron and Wine, Nick Drake, and -- how appropriate -- Simon and Garfunkel's "The Only Living Boy in New York." More than souvenirs, these discs encapsulate their movies' mental states.

Action choreography: Ching-Siu Tung, "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers"

Zhang Yimou is a great director with such bona fide classics as "Raise the Red Lantern" under his belt. But is it heresy to hazard the notion that the most striking parts of "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers" are the work of Ching Siu-Tung, a.k.a. Tony Ching, who has served as director, action director, stunt coordinator, and martial-arts instructor on more than 40 movies in a quarter decade, and who directed the action sequences in both films while Zhang, by his own account, sat and watched the video monitor like an assistant director? It's just a thought.

End credits: Jamie Caliri, Benjamin Goldman, Todd Hemker, "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events"

What was the purest example of visual elegance on the big screen in 2004? If you pushed for the final minutes of the Jim Carrey comedy, you'd get no argument from me. A miniature masterwork of mood, the end credits used paper cutouts, spectral graphics, and Thomas Newman's dancing-skeleton score to conjure up an entire giddy universe of disasters. And talk about unsung: they aren't even credited by name in their own credits.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.

Wesley Morris's picks: Small roles and a big cast

Actress: Tea Leoni,"Spanglish"

Suddenly, it's the performance no one wants to touch with a 20-foot SUV. But while James L. Brooks's class-conflict comedy has its flaws, Leoni isn't one of them. It would be normal for an actor to bristle at the notion of playing a married Beverly Hills mommy like Leoni's Deborah Clasky. Her heart is the needle in a haystack of self-obsession (but it's there), and a less secure star might have cut back on the stridency and played up the maternal warmth. But Leoni understands that Deborah is somewhat less ideal than Claire Huxtable and certainly more high-strung. Yet despite that, the woman retains her humanity. What's probably hurting Leoni in the eyes of Academy voters, at least the Los Angelenos, is that the character is a mess of problems, and the achievement of Leoni's brave, funny, and true performance is that it might bring that mess too close to their homes for comfort.

Supporting actress: Irma P. Hall, "The Ladykillers"

Hall plays Marva Munson, the unsuspecting old lady whose house Tom Hanks and his criminal crew use as their base of operation. On the page and probably in the minds of Ethan and Joel Coen, she was intended as a caricature. Someone less redoubtable might have stooped to the stereotype she'd been assigned, but Hall steamrolls by making her character recognizably human and understandably perturbed. Better yet is her shrewdness even with the hoariest gags. (The perfection of her casting makes it look easy, but you try putting up with Marlon Wayans!) What she does is the essence of support: Without her, the movie would collapse.

Actor in a role with less than 10 minutes of screen time: Lynn Redgrave, "Kinsey"

Remember the days when people like Jane Alexander could get an Oscar nomination basically for a single scene? A byproduct of our super-size culture is that now even the supporting acting has to be extra-strength. You know things have reached a critical point when Jamie Foxx's fine lead performance in "Collateral" is being crammed into the supporting category.

In 2004, several actors were impressive in small, one-or-two scene roles, some more than once: Jean Smart in "Garden State" and "I [Heart] Huckabees," Richard Jenkins in "Shall We Dance," a lovelorn Jodie Foster in "A Very Long Engagement," Javier Bardem in "Collateral," the abusing and enthrallingly pulverized Daryl Hannah in "Kill Bill, Vol. 2." But the winner would have to be Redgrave, who arrives at the end of "Kinsey" to deliver the film's eye-watering closing argument. It's simple what she has to do, and she does it simply, and by "simply" I mean so well that it's tough to forget.

Cinematography: Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron, "Collateral"

Michael Mann's great hit-man thriller contains a number of cliches (mostly toward its finale), but thanks to Beebe and Cameron's vivid digital camerawork, they never look like cliches. Hollywood still seems uncomfortable with the digital format, but Mann's movie makes a breathtaking case for it. Los Angeles has rarely appeared more alert and enticing, yet dangerously alive. The photography dances between creating a vast depth of field (even in Jamie Foxx's cab) and capturing superficial reflections of light, all of which give the movie tremendous visual meaning. The images are as fresh as wet paint, and watching it dry has rarely been more exciting.

Editing: Jonathan Caouette, Brian A. Kates, "Tarnation"

The magic trick of film editing consists of whittling hundreds of hours of footage down to two. Caouette made an 85-minute movie out of 20 years. Never mind that, quite famously, he did it using Apple's iMovie program. By any standard, this is a Herculean triumph: an assemblage of found pop-culture stock clips hot-wired to Caouette's home videos to form a rendition of the subject's own frazzled psychic state. The chaos of his life is repackaged with inspired technical control.

Cast: "Vera Drake"

Other organizations have awards for acting ensembles, and they're often drawn to starry casts or ones that don't seem all that ensemble. With a great cast, each performance is part of a larger framework in which individuals strive together for the larger good of the film. Great casts of 2004 include the actors in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Dogville," "Kinsey," "Moolaade," "Million Dollar Baby," and "I [Heart] Huckabees."

The cast of the abortion drama "Vera Drake," though, was a wall-to-wall revelation. Director Mike Leigh's realism is jarringly precise, with each member playing to plausibly real social and familial dynamics. It's hard to imagine Alex Kelly's painfully introverted Ethel as anything other than the daughter of Vera (Imelda Staunton) and her husband, Stan (Phil Davis). All her cues are taken from the behavior of her costars. Staunton has been singled out for her quavering work in the title role, but watching the film, it's hard to find a cast better integrated into the invisible fabric of a director's vision.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.