This week the first 'For Your Consideration' film adverts have appeared in Variety, the showbiz bible. These are aimed at members of the American Academy, who will soon be deciding the nominations for next year's Oscars. Those three words invariably appear above the ads in hope as much as expectation.

Two British films appear to have a fair chance. They are Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth, doing very nicely in the States, and John Madden's Shakespeare In Love, which not only previewed exceptionally well there but has just been well reviewed in Variety itself.

So much for the advice given to British film-makers that we make too many period films and ought to be getting on with something more contemporary. In fact, the Americans love our period pieces, as Madden's Mrs Brown showed last year, perhaps since they seldom do them decently themselves.

Curiously, Judi Dench, who came close to an Oscar last year as Queen Victoria, plays the Virgin Queen in Shakespeare In Love, so there is a very real prospect of two Queen Elizabeth I's being nominated this year - Cate Blanchett as Best Actress for Elizabeth, and Dench as Best Supporting Actress in the Madden picture.

Shakespeare In Love is an intriguing film, balancing precariously but successfully between silliness and brains. Joseph Fiennes's Shakespeare gets writer's block but falls in love with Gwyneth Paltrow's Viola, a rich girl determined to act even if it means dressing up as a boy, and pens Romeo And Juliet.

As history, of course, the whole thing is bunk. But then so was Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, even in relation to Hamlet, and that proved a nice little earner for Tom Stoppard, who wrote this screenplay with Marc Norman. As romantic drama, tinged with farce, it at first shocks you with its temerity and then begins to work very well.

You must, of course, suspend your disbelief. But then, most Hollywood films make you do that, and they don't have a screenplay as good as this, nor actors as capable of pulling it off. Oscar-winners Richard Rush and Ben Affleck, together with Dench, make up an able supporting cast.

The danger is that some Americans will believe every word of the thing. If you think that's far-fetched, a teacher friend of mine who showed Branagh's Henry V to his students in New York was taken aback when one of them asked: 'Is this a new script by William Shakespeare?' Still, who cares, if they are entertained as much as the critic who called Shakespeare In Love a 'literate crowd-pleaser' and gave it Grade A? Another 'For Your Consideration' advert was accorded to Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, which swept the board at last weekend's European Film Awards, winning not only Best Film but Best Actor (Benigni himself).

It must now be hot favourite for the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar, but I wouldn't be surprised if this concentration-camp comedy, now winner of 14 international awards, squeezed into the nominations for Best Picture, along with Saving Private Ryan and the rest.

On the whole, the awards were pretty sensible this year. Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (Denmark) and Erick Zonka's The Dream Life Of Angels (France), two excellent films, jointly won the European Discovery Prize, and Goran Paskaljevic's The Powder Keg, one of the best films to come out of the Balkans in recent years, won the European Critics' Prize.

Unfortunately, the public's main award brought us all down with a bump. The best film made by a European was judged to be German director Roland Emmerich's Godzilla - which means either that the voters hadn't seen the best of Europe's movies, or Hollywood remains triumphant even at its silliest.