Actor Tobey Maguire in Seabiscuit. (Reuters)

Los Angeles, Feb. 26 (Reuters): Will the Oscars this Sunday be a ho-hum affair or will a dark horse named Seabiscuit come bounding out of the gate to beat hundreds of glory hungry Hobbits by a nose?

Frankly, the bookmakers are saying don’t waste your money by betting on the nag because the odds are hugely against this happening.

But film experts think a couple of surprises are possible at the 76th annual Oscars even if The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, is almost certain to race off with the major prize of the night, best picture, leaving Seabiscuit and three other films biting the dust.

The biggest chance of an upset is expected in the best actor category which Tom ’Neil, the host of the online awards site GoldDerby.com., calls a “cliff-hanger in which three bad boy actors — Sean Penn, Bill Murray and Johnny Depp — are racing neck-and-neck and in which one of them will probably win by a nose”.

Going into the home-stretch of the Oscars race, Penn was the favourite for his performance as ex-con anguished by the murder of his teenage daughter in Clint Eastwood’s powerful crime thriller Mystic River.

But ’Neil said Penn made a huge tactical error when he failed to attend the Golden Globe awards in January and gave Hollywood the impression that he wasn’t interested in competing for filmdom’s top prize, the Oscar.

The British film industry’s equivalent of the Oscars honoured Murray for his performance as a lonely middle-aged actor adrift in Tokyo in Lost in Translation and the US Screen Actors Guild unexpectedly gave its top award to Depp, who plays a flamboyant buccaneer in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: the Curse of the Black Pearl.

Robert Osborne, author of 75 Years of the Oscar: The Official History of the Academy Awards, says that “when the Oscars seem pat, that’s when the surprises come” and his choice of this year’s upset is, like ’Neil, the best actor’s race.

“There is so much talk about Johnny Depp right now. Bill Murray gave a comedy performance which Oscar voters often don't go for and Penn is disliked in part because ... people get upset over his politics — he did go to Iraq,” Osborne said.

Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel also thinks that Depp has a strong shot at the award which last year went to Adrian Brody for The Pianist in an upset victory.