Oscars Betting Odds: Clint Eastwood To Win Best Director?

The Oscars are now so close that we can smell the fresh shampoo on the red carpet, hear the orchestra practising playing Oscar winners off after three seconds and taste the starch in Ellen DeGeneres' tux, but only because we thought it belonged to Portia.

And so we're continuing our rundown of Oscars betting odds like things possessed. We've decided - somewhat controversially - that Helen Mirren might win Best Actress and Forest Whitaker might win Best Actor, but here comes our first unclear Oscars category - Best Director. There are so many phenomenally gifted directors involved in the Oscars race this year that literally any of them have it in them to come second to Martin Scorsese.

Here's part one of our Best Director Oscars betting odds - for Stephen Frears, Paul Greengrass and Clint Eastwood - with betting odds from Paddy Power…

Stephen Frears, The Queen - The Queen is a weird little film. In the UK the Queen is everywhere - on TV, on stamps, on funny little pictures that Rolf Harris paints - so nobody really seemed that fussed about watching a film about the woman from the back of money being all sad and confused because a bulimic woman died in a car crash on it's release. Fast forward a few months, though, and The Queen is everywhere. Helen Mirren has literally won every award available for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth and people are calling The Queen a masterpiece. But not much of that love is directed at Stephen Frears, the director of The Queen. He knows his stuff - he directed Dangerous Liasons and My Beautiful Laundrette - but it's hard to see Stephen Frears winning the Best Director Oscar this year, not least because his two big instructions to the cast seemed to be "Hey you, smile less" and "Can you make your portrayal of Tony Blair a bit more cartoony please?" Current Best Director Oscar betting odds - 12/1

Paul Greengrass, United 93 - Even though Little Miss Sunshine is in the running for Best Picture, this isn't really an Oscar year for laughs. If directors like Alejandro Gonz‡lez I–‡rritu aren't inventing miserable events to make films about, then Clint Eastwood and Paul Greengrass are mining the past for horrific events that they can refilm and charge people to go and see. United 93, as if you need telling, is about the passengers on the 9/11 flight that didn't make its target and crashed into a field. Unlike the other 9/11 film of last year - Oliver Stone's World Trade Center - United 93 doesn't descend into TV movie sappiness and keeps the recollection of events as searingly realistic as possible. Paul Greengrass has some giant competition in the Best Director Oscar category this year but that he deserves recognition for United 93 goes without saying, if only because he's helped wrestle the phrase "Let's roll" away from a million dreadful country music songs. Current Best Director Oscar betting odds - 10/1

Clint Eastwood, Letters From Iwo Jima - When Clint Eastwood makes a film, you can be guaranteed of three things: 1) it'll be SERIOUS, 2) it'll be IMPORTANT and 3) it'll do QUITE WELL at the Oscars. And Letters From Iwo Jima is certainly all of those things - it's not often that an American-made pro-Japanese World War II gets made, which is what Letters From Iwo Jima is. With this new film Clint Eastwood hasn't received the blanket adulation he got for Million Dollar Baby - maybe if the entire Japanese Army chewed their tongues off at the end it would have fared better during awards season - but it's still Eastwood-y enough to earn him a Best Director Oscar nomination, even if the chances of him winning an award are distant at best. Current Best Director Oscar betting odds - 8/1

Tomorrow - MORE! But if that's too long to wait - or you feel like making more money than you know what to do with - head right over to the Paddy Power Oscars betting odds page to see the latest, and best, betting odds.