All four acting winners from last year’s Academy Awards are returning to this weekend’s Oscars as presenters.

Organizers say Colin Firth, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale and Melissa Leo will be there to hand out awards Sunday.

Last year’s lead-acting prizes went to Firth for “The King’s Speech” and Portman for “Black Swan.” Bale and Leo won the supporting honors for “The Fighter.”

Among this season’s contenders are lead performers George Clooney for “The Descendants,” Viola Davis for “The Help,” Meryl Streep for “The Iron Lady” and Jean Dujardin for “The Artist.”

The supporting favorites are Octavia Spencer for “The Help” and Christopher Plummer for “Beginners.”

By DERRIK J. LANG

At least one person on the Oscars red carpet won’t have to worry about what to wear: Mother Dolores Hart.

The 73-year-old nun, who left Hollywood in 1963 to join a monastery after starring in films with the likes of Elvis Presley and George Hamilton, is among the nominated documentary film subjects slated to attend Sunday’s 84th annual Academy Awards. Hart, who will be sporting her nun’s habit, is chronicled in the short film “God Is the Bigger Elvis.”

Rebecca Cammisa and Julie Anderson, the short’s filmmakers, said at a panel discussion at the motion picture academy’s Beverly Hills headquarters Wednesday that Mother Dolores, who is a voting member of the academy and attended the ceremony three times before she became a nun, will walk the red carpet outside the Hollywood and Highland Center on Sunday.

Other nominated documentary film subjects expected to attend the Oscars include Bill Courtney, the white coach of an all-black, inner-city high-school football team featured in “Undefeated,” and Sgt. Nathan Harris, a Marine injured in Afghanistan whose emotional struggle to transition back to life in North Carolina is depicted in “Hell and Back Again.”

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The Academy Awards will be coming to you live from the same place — but with a different name.

Oscar organizers have agreed to drop mentions of the Kodak Theatre from Sunday’s broadcast. The move follows bankruptcy proceedings for Eastman Kodak Co., which has received court approval to end its expensive naming-rights deal for the venue that’s been home to the awards show for a decade.

In an interview aired Wednesday on KABC-TV in Los Angeles, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences President Tom Sherak said the show will refer to the venue as the Hollywood & Highland Center — after the retail and entertainment complex where the theater is located.

Sherak says the complex’s landlord had asked that Oscar organizers drop the Kodak Theatre name from the ceremony.

See the full video at Oscars.com.

Before The Artist hit theaters, very few Americans had heard of Jean Dujardin.

But with his charm and grace coming through in the silent Oscar front-runner, Dujardin has stepped up in fame in a big way.

What we’ve learned about Jean is that not only is he an old-school handsome movie star, he’s also extremely funny. He appeared on Saturday Night Live in a sketch that played off The Artist and its silent style, and now he’s in a video from Funny or Die.

In it, Dujardin tries to answer the question: What will Jean Dujardin do next? The answer: Play a villain.

Anyone who knows their Oscars knows that nominees’ fashion plans are strictly top secret until the big day. They seem to be more revealing about their designer undergarments, though.

While it may fit into the too-much-information file, some of the year’s most celebrated actors and directors aren’t afraid to talk about the product placement underneath those tuxes and gowns.

“What I do, because I get chilly, I like to wear long johns. The full one with the trap door in the back,” said a joking George Clooney, a double nominee for his leading role in “The Descendants” and his adapted screenplay for “The Ides of March.”

Nominated “Descendants” director Alexander Payne declined to describe his planned underwear, so Clooney spoke for him.

“Garanimals,” he said, referring to the children’s clothing brand. “Underoos.”

“It’s what I bargain for from the Indian salesman on Orchard Street,” Payne said.

Octavia Spencer, supporting actress nominee for “The Help,” will not be repeating the triple-Spanx approach she took at the Golden Globes.

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Aerialists, acrobats and contortionists are among the guests at this year’s Academy Awards.

Telecast producers Don Mischer and Brian Grazer say they’ve invited Cirque do Soleil to perform during the Oscar show.

The three-minute performance will be among the international troupe’s biggest yet, said Cirque du Soleil special events director Yasmine Khalil, featuring more than 50 artists. Most Cirque shows employ 75 to 80 artists over two hours, she said.

Cirque du Soleil has a show in residence at the Kodak Theatre, where the Oscars will be presented on Feb. 26, but the performance planned for the awards telecast is “unique for this one evening” and not taken from any of the troupe’s 22 productions playing around the world.

Performers from those shows, however, are heading to Hollywood. Khalil says artists from Japan and Russia are flying in to participate in the Academy Awards segment.

Khalil wouldn’t reveal any specifics about the performance other than to say “the theme is very much in line with paying tribute to the movie-theater experience” and different from “Iris,” Cirque’s regular show at the Kodak Theater, which is billed as “a journey into the world of cinema.”

Like “Iris,” the music for the troupe’s Oscar performance was composed by Danny Elfman.

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Oprah Winfrey is the latest celebrity to join Jimmy Kimmel’s seventh post-Oscar special.

ABC had previously announced that Oscar host Billy Crystal will help kick off “Jimmy Kimmel Live: After the Academy Awards.” The show will also include Meryl Streep, George Clooney and Martin Scorsese.

A performance by Coldplay will wrap up the show.

The 84th annual Academy Awards will be presented Feb. 26. in Los Angeles and broadcast on ABC.

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Eastman Kodak Co. wants to end its contract for naming rights to the glamorous Los Angeles theater that hosts the Academy Awards as it tries to improve its financial position enough to move out of bankruptcy.

The photography pioneer’s financial advisers say in a U.S. Bankruptcy Court filing this week that the benefits of having the upstate New York company’s name on the 3,300-seat Kodak Theatre aren’t worth the cost.

Details of the contract with CIM Group of Los Angeles weren’t disclosed. But the company says it pays a significant amount annually for the naming rights at the venue. It opened in 2001.

Rochester-based Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Jan. 19. The 132-year-old company is required to produce a reorganization plan by early 2013.

By MESFIN FEKADU

The race for the best original song Oscar is a slim one with two songs up for the honor, a first for the Academy Awards.

Sergio Mendes’ “Real In Rio” from the animated adventure “Rio” will compete with Bret McKenzie’s “Man or Muppet” from “The Muppets,” despite having a bevy of all-star musicians like Elton John, Mary J. Blige, will.i.am and Pink in contention for nomination.

Charles Bernstein, the former chairman of the Academy Awards’ music branch, says he “personally was surprised” that only two songs are up for the honor.

In the past, the number of nominees for best original song has ranged from three to 14. Only up to five songs are eligible for nomination.

“I personally felt that there may have been more than two that I personally would have championed,” he said in an interview after the Oscars nominations were announced Tuesday. “But it is a majority vote situation.”

This year, 39 songs were eligible for nomination for best original song, including tracks from Brad Paisley, Robbie Williams, The National, Zooey Deschanel, Zac Brown, Chris Cornell and others.

Members of the music branch can rank songs using 10, 9.5, 9, 8.5, 8, 7.5, 7, 6.5 or 6, and a song must have at least an average score of 8.25 to be nominated. If only one song gets that score, it and the song receiving the next highest score will be the two nominees.

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