Once again the tension is mounting. Oscar Eve is upon us.

The Smart Money, we are told, is on Helen Mirren. She is one of maybe three Sure Things set to look up from the stage of the Kodak Theater this Sunday into the full glow of Academy acclaim. The Smart Money is also on Dreamgirl Jennifer Hudson and — until just recently — Eddie Murphy.

Now readers, we know you’re just like us: longtime Academy-Award watchers, the kind of people who started rehearsing their Oscar speeches in the mirror at age six. We Nightcharmers know that Smart Money predictions and Shoo-Ins are a tradition of Oscar Night.

So is The Major Upset.

Eddie Murphy is a case in point. The wind began to switch on Murphy in early February with the release of Norbit, a seedy crowd pleaser in which Murphy doubles as an in-yo-face sista in a fat suit. Ads featuring Murphy as the repellent female character, in shoulder-length cornrows and belly flopping over bikini bottom, flooded the airwaves right in the middle of Oscar voting season, exactly the worst time to be flogging a dog-tired Flip Wilson Era cliché that suggested quick money and bankrupt talent. (Norbit has been a moderate hit for Murphy.)

Yet in Dreamgirls, Murphy had been simply spectacular. His combustible James Brown pop star kept going off like a rocket in a series of thrilling stage performances. As with many comedians, who wear on the nerves when made to carry an entire picture, a little Eddie goes a long way. His short and sweet supporting role in Dreamgirls showcased what had been flashy and special about his younger SNL self, with the added dividend of a late emerging — surprisingly credible — soul-shouter voice.

Bad timing, though, may rob Murphy of a well deserved Oscar this Sunday night — as unfair as that is. But ah, to quote the High Priestess of Hollywood Mind Fucks, nobody said life was fair, Christina.

Thus The Major Upset is already in play. Might such an ill turn be in store for Helen Mirren, set to go up against a field of actresses, only one of which is in the same weight class? But what an actress that formidable rival is!

In this corner, weighing in at one ton, give or take crown, scepter and orb, is The Brit Who Is the Shit, Helen Mirren. And in this corner, in relentlessly marvelous mode, The Yank Who Never Stank, Meryl Streep.

David K. takes up the cause for Helen Mirren, after which John Calendo Streeps-out on Meryl.

Ironically, during the last four years before The Queen, Helen Mirren’s truly stellar work has taken place on television. I’m a rabid fan of her Prime Suspect series — a series so formidable it should have been divided up and released as separate theatrical films.

And also there was her Elizabeth I last year year for HBO — for which she took home an Emmy.

But my absolute favorite was her fascinating lead in Showtime’s 2003 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ novella The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, a TV movie that every youth-obsessed gay man in America should watch.

How do we cope with aging and the loss of sexual allure while still remaining erotically charged to all the up-and-coming beauties that surrounds us — especially if our eye has landed on the firm ass of a hot Italian gigolo? The drama was pure Tennessee but the ability to embody the paradox was 100% Mirren. Her portrayal was spellbinding and moved the literalness of an aging actress portraying an aging actress out of cliché and into a level of truth-telling that was brilliant. Such is Mirren’s command and range, which leads me to The Queen.

Here we have a story about a set of near mythological people that somehow managed to become a film. I’m still immensely impressed that someone actually thought to write this into a screenplay and it confirms my belief that great art and storytelling has an otherworldly compulsion about it that brings the project to life.

My awe for the film has less to do with Mirren’s uncanny performance — a performance so complete I kept wondering how they’d coaxed the real HRM onto a London sound stage — and more to do with the numinous experience that came from watching the movie.

There is, of course, Mirren — who must overcome our most caricatured associations of a queen. Everyone knows what the queen looks like but nothing of who she really is as a human being. In order to retain the queen’s remote and royal stoicism, Mirren had the difficult task of conveying all of this with a minimum of acting tricks. Her performance was more about projective telepathy than any sort of physicality.

But there are other levels of magic in this film that, combined with Mirren’s performance, might actually give The Queen a boost over Scorsese’s The Departed to win Best Film of the Year.

The Queen offered up a sort of healing process for the decade-old shock and trauma surrounding Princess Diana’s death. Certainly there was the mind-numbing frustration in the critical days following Diana’s fatal crash when the royal family all but ignored any sort of public response to the tragedy. And through The Queen we come to understand the machinations and errors of that mistake. Fair enough.

But Diana’s death was bigger than just a stellar tabloid moment. Her passing sort of blew the planet a little bit off its axis for a couple of days. The more I thought about The Queen the more I understood its importance as a healing balm to the worldwide psychic shock that eventually took on mythic proportions.

Diana carried the full load of the times as a sort of living archetype. She did this by embodying a slew of characters: mother, princess, abandoned child, estranged wife, glamor girl, humanitarian and adulteress. She was an emblematic figure pitted against the wax-like Royal Family and the old order they represented. She became a kind of young modern sacrifice caught in the middle of two worlds. Many of us sensed this at the time but The Queen allowed me to fully understand the impact of this.

The Queen not only addresses the long gray days after Diana’s death and the great mourning that took place in London, it also provides closure for present-day viewers in a dynamically cinematic way.

As the film’s central enigma, Mirren had to open up and do what she does so expertly: become transparent, become something akin to a psychic leading a séance. In The Queen she does this by simply sitting still and allowing the actual events of the time, which seem to hover over the production like a divine decree, to run their course.

Simply put: she made herself available to the Fates. And those Fates will be rewarding her on Sunday night.

Though I have little hope she’ll win, I’m backing the scrappy underdog in this fight.

There was a measured beauty to Meryl Streep’s sleek comic turn in The Devil Wears Prada, a wit and precision that made it a spoof without being a cartoon. Still, it’s a Hollywood home truth that in a contest between an actor in a comedy and an actor in a drama, the comic actor is fighting with one arm tied behind her back.

This almost sounds like a slight on Helen Mirren. It isn’t. To give Mirren her very considerable due, she too was handicapped by the nature of her role, that of a restrained, deeply aristocratic queen. It was Acting by Reaction Shot, and Mirren had to convey what was really going on in her mind through an almost unchanging mask of dignity, depending for the most part upon slightly arch facial expressions.

Of course, this was a bravura trick Meryl Streep had pulled off several seasons earlier in The Hours. In that film, though pitted against the showy histrionics of Nicole Kidman as a mentally disintegrating Virginia Woolf (a meatier and I would argue easier illusion to simulate), it was Streep who made the indelible impact. Doing it all with subtle tensions around the mouth and eyes, the marvelous Meryl conveyed the moment-by-moment circumspection of Woolf’s famous stream-of- consciousness technique in Mrs. Dalloway, the prime source of The Hours’ inventive reimagining.

Thus, both Meryl and Mirren come to the red carpet this year trailing a long pedigree of plu-perfect performances. Such is the superb quality of their work, they are no longer expected to top themselves, merely to be consistent. And it is likely that whoever brings home the golden muscleboy, the award will be for a cumulative body of work, rather than a single role. For one of the other truths of Hollywood — its rather mischievous sense of karma — is that actors often receive awards for performances they gave in a previous year. An award, so to speak, on the rebound.

If that is to be the case, Meryl and Mirren are again at parity. In both cases, their most amazing recent work was done on the small, not big, screen. For Mirren, it was her tough-minded Prime Suspect “copper.” For Meryl … well, on a trajectory of high after high, something like a Personal Best was achieved by the trifecta she ran in HBO’s Angels in America where she appeared in three strongly demarcated roles, each one relying on a different kit of acting tools, none more surpassing than her dark and weirdly comic Ethel Rosenberg. The repartee between Al Pacino’s death-bed Roy Cohn and the avenging ghost of Streep’s Rosenberg often had the timing of a Gracie Allen routine.

All of which brings us to the role in question, Streep’s “boss from hell,” Miranda Priestly in the Devil Wears Prada. I think what I loved most was her weary, much-put-upon line readings, the soft voice, calculated to be a decibel too soft so you had to lean forward and incline your head — to bow, in effect — to hear it, the sheer imperiousness of such a tactic.

So many of her lines began “I don’t understand why …” and this would be followed by a laundry list of fatal disappointments, of impossible deadlines not met, of people jumping, however high, not quite high enough. Her sense of entitlement, even in Manhattan, is rather staggering and quite dwarfs the royal rights enjoyed by, well Elizabeth II herself, who in Mirren’s hands seems both magnificent and accommodating. But Miranda is a somewhat steelier queen. All meetings with her are audiences, which she cuts off at will, abruptly, with a dismissive “that’s all.”

Certainly the Boss from Hell is as much a staple of routine farces as Eddie Murphy’s fat suit. But Streep steps fleetly through the role. Aided by a bright, funny script glittering with quips, her devil lady is not the usual fatuous A-hole, flinging about with broad, campy gestures. Her Miranda Priestly is a disciplined perfectionist, intelligent and sharp edged. The humor comes not from hollow punch lines but from Miranda’s acute x-ray vision, her perverse observations that are all the more deadly for being spot-on. (Think Simon Cowell on American Idol.)

Strange as it sounds, Miranda (which is really to say Meryl) gives The Devil Wears Prada its heart — a tiny, stunted heart it’s true but a living, beating one nonetheless. She is the film’s only real character, the only mind ever exhibited in depth.

Without Miranda, the film would be just another Chick Lit fairytale: the ugly ducking klutz-girl who sails off in the end a swan. Anne Hathaway in the klutz role (seen with Meryl at left) does a bit better than that, sailing off finally onto a Manhattan street as a reborn and fabulously mascaraed Ye-Ye girl, an update on the very French, very hip Jane Birkin.

Hathaway, you will remember, made many interesting and unexpected choices as Jake Gyllenhaal’s emotionally estranged wife in Brokeback Mountain, particularly during the phone-call finale where her level voice, intended to convey boredom, was betrayed by a stray tear rolling down a powdered cheek. How fitting then that this clever young actress is cast here as the resourceful and true heir not merely of the impossible Miranda but, seemingly, of the Marvelous Meryl herself.

With this nomination, Meryl Streep holds the record for most Best Actress tries. In fact, she has won only two Oscars, and the first one, for Kramer vs. Kramer, was in a supporting role, so I’m hoping, I’m wishing this will be her third. Perhaps it will be a tie. Both Meryl and Mirren taking that long gauzy walk down the aisle, up the stair and onto the stage of the Kodak theater.

Yes, I do believe this will happen. Just like I believe that Al Gore’s global warming documentary will lose out to Jesus Camp.

Rrrr-right.