LOS ANGELES – Shivering weather has greeted celebrities on the Oscars red carpet but cloudy skies and the threat of rain failed to dampen spirits ahead of the movie industry’s biggest night.

French best actress contender Isabelle Huppert, “Hacksaw Ridge” star Andrew Garfield, and “Loving” supporting actress nominee Ruth Negga were among the early arrivals in Hollywood, where temperatures were some 8 degrees Celsius below normal for late February.

In pre-show drama, pregnant lead actress contender Natalie Portman bowed out of the ceremony because of her advanced condition, and Meryl Streep on Saturday accused Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld of spoiling her Oscars by falsely accusing her of being paid to wear a gown on the red carpet.

The Academy Awards get underway torn between escapism and reality. The conflict is reflected in the wide range of best picture Oscar hopefuls and an awards season marked by fiery outbursts from Hollywood A-listers on immigration, civil rights and the rhetoric of US President Donald Trump.

Several celebrities, including Negga and best original song nominee Lin-Manuel Miranda, wore blue ribbons in support of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) rights advocacy group.

With a leading 14 nominations, romantic musical “La La Land” looks set to dance away with an armful of Academy Awards, including best picture, for its love letter to artistic ambition and Los Angeles itself.

“It’s a movie that has a powerful emotional pull and the most emotional movies tend to do best at the Oscars. This one has an infectious enthusiasm and spirit that is irresistible,” said Tom O’Neil, founder of awards website Goldderby.com.

If fantasy prevails, “La La Land,” starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as a jazz pianist and a struggling actress, would be the first musical to win best picture at the Academy Awards since “Chicago” in 2003.

Black coming-of-age tale “Moonlight” is also expected to do well in a year that produced a record seven nominations for actors of color and film stories that ranged from overlooked African-American female math geniuses (“Hidden Figures”) to interracial marriage (“Loving”), Indian street children (“Lion”) and black incarceration rates in modern US society (“13th”).

“If anything is a dark horse winner on Sunday (local time), it would be ‘Hidden Figures’,” said Variety awards writer Tim Gray.

– Reuters