One Best Actor, So Many Possibilities Christian Bale more or less looks like himself in "Out of the Furnace," which is something of a feat. As an ex-con mill worker in Scott Cooper's working-class drama, Mr. Bale, a performer capable of extreme physical transformation, sports longish hair and a goatee, as he often does off screen. And, on his neck, a tattoo of the ZIP code of Braddock, Pa., where the movie is set. "He's somebody who, in a different time, would have been absolutely considered to be the backbone of America," Mr. Bale said of his quiet, loyal character. Then there's "American Hustle." To play Irving Rosenfeld, a con man turned F.B.I. informant, in David O. Russell's caper, loosely based on the 1970s Abscam scandal, Mr. Bale gained some 50 pounds and sports a comb-over that's a plot point and a punch line. The look was inspired by the real-life swindler Mel Weinberg, on whom Irving is based. "He just is so unlike what I was thinking," Mr. Bale said, "and seems to have this vulnerability and rawness to him that I didn't see coming from a con artist. I just became obsessed with that look. Both roles offer Mr. Bale a coveted shot at a best actor Oscar nomination, with "American Hustle" the showier, and more lauded, film. But the competition for the best actor prize is exceedingly tight this season, with a dozen leading men altering their bodies, enduring rigorous shoots and bringing harrowing and often true stories to the screen. After the Screen Actors Guild announced its nominations on Wednesday, the new conventional wisdom among Oscar watchers is that there are at least six shoo-ins for only five slots: Chiwetel Ejiofor, for his turn as a free man sold into bondage in "12 Years a Slave"; Matthew McConaughey, as an AIDS patient supplying H.I.V. drugs to fellow sufferers in "Dallas Buyers Club"; Tom Hanks, the skipper of a ship attacked by Somali pirates in "Captain Phillips"; Robert Redford, as a solo sailor in dire straits in "All Is Lost"; Bruce Dern, an elderly man on a quest in "Nebraska"; and Forest Whitaker, a witness to civil rights history in "Lee Daniels" The Butler." Only Mr. Dern's and Mr. Redford's characters are entirely fictional. The guild, whose membership overlaps with the Academy's actor branch, cemented those hopefuls, anointing Mr. Whitaker and leaving off Mr. Redford in its nominations. Voters for the Golden Globes, whose nominations are to be announced on Thursday, have more options, since their categories are split between drama and comedy/musical. But there are still plenty of comers for each. The race for what might be, at most, one or two spots on the Oscar list is now full of valiant dark horses. As the down-and-out titular folk singer in "Inside Llewyn Davis," Oscar Isaac sometimes did 30 full-length takes of each of his songs, all recorded live. He roughed up his voice with cigarettes and beer, and tried to carefully steer the story in this Coen brothers movie, in which, by their own admission, nothing much happens. "The big challenge, and, in retrospect, what I think I was able to do successfully, is to never be ahead of Llewyn," said Mr. Isaac, a Juilliard-trained actor. And Llewyn himself is never ahead, to the point where it's almost a heightened situation how behind he is. All he's doing is experiencing, and it's very simple every single time - you know, "There's one thing that I need, I need money, and nothing else matters." " As soon as he was cast, Mr. Isaac saw other doors open for him in Hollywood - a sudden assurance, he said, that "you're bona fide, kid." Michael B. Jordan is experiencing similar leaps as he makes the rounds for "Fruitvale Station," based on the life and death of the 22-year-old Oscar Grant III in Oakland, Calif. "Sundance is a blur," Mr. Jordan said. I remember the premiere, I remember talking to Oscar's family, and that was about it. More memorable, perhaps, are the many accolades the film and its young director, Ryan Coogler, have already earned, positioning Mr. Jordan as an underdog candidate for a best actor spot. Were he to make it, he may compete against a producer of "Fruitvale," Mr. Whitaker. In portraying historical or newsworthy figures, Mr. Jordan; Mr. Whitaker; Mr. Ejiofor; Mr. McConaughey, as the AIDS treatment crusader Ron Woodruff; and Idris Elba, star of the biopic "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom," tackle the kind of weighty subjects that the Academy loves to reward, and that audiences are quick to debate, or champion. Mr. Ejiofor, a respected British stage and screen actor, has encountered people in tears after seeing "12 Years a Slave." "In listening to people talk about it, or in listening to what they ask about," he said, "I'm being informed about the film that we made. That's been a really amazing part of it. Even established stars go places fans wouldn't expect. As Jordan Belfort, the infamous financier who built an ill-gotten empire on penny stocks, Leonardo DiCaprio gives a no-holds-barred, drugs-hookers-and-dollars show in Martin Scorsese's "Wolf of Wall Street." Dialogue was improvised, and sex scenes were nearly pornographic, leaving Mr. Scorsese's longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, 73, mildly shocked (in a good way). Mr. DiCaprio, a producer of the film, who championed Mr. Belfort's story to Mr. Scorsese, can't say he was surprised by the long shots of him twitching and stroking: He watched the edits as the film was shaved from its original running time of four hours to three. And this is a burnished partnership; Mr. Scorsese has directed him to nominations before, for "The Departed" (a Golden Globe nod) and "The Aviator" (a Golden Globe win and an Oscar nod), a film Mr. DiCaprio also produced. In the dark drama "Prisoners," Hugh Jackman - the singing, dancing, Oscar-nominated superhero - is a father moved to violence by the abduction of his daughter. His research included reading police interrogations of parents in similar situations, and studying survivalism and the effects of sleep deprivation. "The common thing in cases like these is the ticking clock," he said. Your hands start to shake, you forget things, you become unreasonable. The director, the French Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, pushed away from a lot of rehearsal and to "a place that is instinctive and primal," Mr. Jackman said. What he encouraged was a sense of abandon. It was ultimately very freeing. Oscar-wise, Mr. Jackman may be the longest long shot, but he has a good idea of what it would take to win: He was making "Prisoners" as he was campaigning last year with "Les Misérables," drinking Champagne and chit-chatting in Los Angeles and New York, then jetting back to the set in Georgia. "I was really worried about that," he said. But the breaks helped, he added: "Every day was challenging, but ultimately felt very fulfilling and weirdly O.K. to leave." Though the awards race can be exhausting, even Hollywood eminences like Mr. Redford have taken part. His contemporary, Mr. Dern, as voluble in person as his "Nebraska" character, Woody, is taciturn, has been ever-present, charming potential Oscar voters with his firsthand recall of film history and praise for his latest director, Alexander Payne. "He leaves the camera on you and lets the behavior develop," Mr. Dern said at a recent lunch. Mr. Hitchcock would occasionally do stuff like that, but you weren't as aware of it. At 77, Mr. Dern has refused suggestions to run in the less-crowded best supporting actor title, saying he wanted to be known, at last, as a leading man. "I've made a lot of movies," he said in an interview. This is a film.