An Oscar winning performance may bring an actor 15 minutes of fame, but how many have then slipped into obscurity? Film Writer Steve Pratt scans the credits for the best nobodies.

AS winners hold the gold-plated Oscars triumphantly aloft at the 75th Academy Awards ceremony tomorrow, they'll be hoping and praying that their moment of glory won't be restricted to just 15 minutes of fame.

Nowadays, wearing a eye-catching frock on the red carpet is more likely to get you noticed more than actually winning an award although this year, with Hollywood dressing down out of respect for the Iraq situation, commentators may be forced to consider the real value of Oscar.

He's not worth much as he's only gold-plated, which may be why winners do odd things with Oscar. There are tales of the statuette being used as a door stop or hat stand, as well as being stored in the smallest room in the house.

Never mind that an actor gives their all emotionally on screen or suffers for their art by spending three hours in the make-up chair having a false nose stuck on. Everyone realise that awards are as much about the millions poured into swaying voters through publicity campaigns as the quality of the performances and technicial aspects.

What a best picture win guarantees is a boost to box office income. A victory peps up audience interest in the weeks after the televised awards have been seen by millions around the world.

Once the applause has died down and the media has lost interest, the actors must ensure they make use of this new-found honour. The big stars, the Nicholsons and the Streeps, are guaranteed work and more award-worthy roles. Some previously-unknown winners capitalise on this success, achieving bigger and better things, financially and artistically.

Others sink back into obscurity or the other hell known as TV movies or straight-to-video films. The list of past winners is littered with those who failed to use Oscar as a helping hand to greater success. For every Jack Nicholson, there's a Cliff Robertson. For every Katharine Hepburn, there's a Mira Sorvino.

You can be best actor one year and best nothing the next. In 1984, F Murray Abraham beat his nominated co-star Tom Hulce to win best actor as Salieri, the composer jealous of Mozart's success, in Amadeus. Since then he has, to quote one reference book, "found effective film roles hard to come by". The medieval murder mystery In The Name Of The Rose was fine but his credits include roles - and not even starring ones - in flops including Bonfire Of The Vanities, Mobsters and National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon. Not much Oscar-worthy material in there.

It's interesting to wonder if Hulce had won instead of Abraham, whether he would have managed to capitalise on his Oscar win any more than his rival.

Most problems occur for those in the best supporting categories. Everyone tipped Tom Cruise as best actor in 1996 for Jerry Maguire, but his co-star Cuba Gooding Jr was the winner, as best supporting actor - only the third black actor to win this prize. His excitable speech accepting the award for his performance as hot shot footballer Rod "Show me the money" Tidwell got him noticed. He should have shown the door to producers brandishing scripts for three of his recent movies, the lame comedies Boat Trip and Rat Race, and the family comedy Snow Dogs.

Louise Fletcher was part of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest sweeping the board and taking all four main awards in 1975. Her portrayal of nasty Nurse Ratched earned her the best actress Oscar. Like Gooding Jr, her acceptance speech was memorable with this daughter of totally deaf parents using sign language to say thank you.

She's hardly stopped working since then in an instance of 'never mind the quality feel the width'. Among the TV movies and soft porn trash such as Two Moon Junction (and, even more embarrassingly, Return To Two Moon Junction) is little sign of a role worthy of the talent of the woman who proved Nicholson's equal in Cuckoo's Nest.

Sometimes a performer is so associated with a role that no one's willing to let them try something different. Joel Grey was a worthy winner in 1972 as the Master of Ceremonies in the seedy pre-war Berlin Kit Kat Klub at the heart of Cabaret. As well as a best supporting actor Oscar, he won a Tony for his stage performance in the same role. Thirty years on, he's still searching for a screen role that's as good.

There never was much hope that Linda Hunt would find anything to equal her win for The Year Of Living Dangerously. As the Chinese-Australian press photographer Billy Kwan, she became the first - and probably last - woman playing a man to win an Oscar. Director Peter Weir cast her after failing to find an actor small enough (Hunt is 4ft 9ins) or talented enough for the role.

Since then she has worked steadily, everything from playing a judge in US TV series The Practice to voicing a character in the Disney cartoon Pocahontas, but roles requiring a woman to pose as a small Chinese-Australian man are few and far between.

Timothy Hutton was just 20 when he took him the best supporting actor Oscar for his screen debut as an adolescent tormented by his brother's death in Ordinary People, a drama that netted Robert Redford an Academy Award for his directorial debut. Afterwards Hutton opted for supporting roles in projects with people he admired rather than the leading role in Risky Business that eventually went to Tom Cruise.

"My agents and manager said I was crazy," he recalled. "But I looked at it and asked myself, 'what was the experience going to be like? what will I learn?'. And looking back at myself at 23, being able to work with Sydney Lumet and EL Doctorow, I have absolutely no regrets. I learned stuff that will stay with me forever."

George Chakiris is one of the most travelled stars in movies, working all over the world, but has never attained the heights that earned him the best supporting actor Oscar in 1961 for playing Bernardo, leader of the Puerto Rican gang in the screen version of the musical West Side Story.

He took other film roles, including war drama 633 Squadron, but concentrated on stage and music rather than movies. The former dancer appeared in theatre over here, appearing in a production of the gender-bending drama M Butterfly which toured to Billingham Forum.

Hollywood to Billingham is a pretty strange journey - so was Brenda Fricker's move into the spotlight. One minute she was tending the sick in BBC TV's hospital series Casualty, the next she was the toast of Tinseltown for her best supporting actress Oscar-winning turn as the mother of cerebral palsy sufferer Christy Brown in My Left Foot. Subsequent roles in US movies, including Home Alone 2 and So I Married An Axe Murderer (in which the Irish actress played Mike Myers's Scottish mother), have been less noteworthy.

Another supporting winner, Louis Gossett Jr, "made a hackneyed character seem almost fresh" in An Officer And A Gentleman as the tough, gruff sergeant putting Richard Gere's military man through his paces. Since then he's played the same tough guy roles, with less effect, in films like Iron Eagle, The Punisher and Toy Soldiers.

Occasionally, you thank your lucky stars an actor doesn't repeat his Oscar-winning success. In 1998 Italian actor and director Roberto Benigni proved a big embarrassment as he clambered on seats and behaved as if he'd just scored the winning goal in a World Cup final after being named best actor for his holocaust comedy-drama Life Is Beautiful.

He'd already been on stage to collect the best foreign language film Oscar, and told the audience: "Thank you. This is a terrible mistake, because I used up all my English!". So far, Benigni hasn't had the opportunity to over-react again. His follow-up film, a new version of Pinocchio, has hardly been released outside his native Italy. Let's hope he doesn't get his hands on Oscar again.

* The Academy Awards Ceremony takes place in Los Angeles tomorrow. Coverage begins on BBC1 at 12.50am.

And Steve's winners are...

TRADITION dictates that predictions are made, although forecasting Oscar victors gets no easier. You can study form, through winners of the critics' and industry awards already announced, but it's probably simpler picking winning National Lottery numbers. It comes down to the quirky tastes of Academy voters, and which distributors mount the best For Your Consideration campaigns.

Best picture: Chicago. Best director: Stephen Daldry, The Hours. Best actor: Jack Nicholson, About Schmidt. Best actress: Nicole Kidman, The Hours. Best supporting actor: Christopher Walken, Catch Me If You Can. Best supporting actress: Julianne Moore, The Hours. Best animated feature: Ice Age.