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Politics have always been an awkward but occasional bedfellow with the Oscars, Hollywood's annual salute to itself and, after the Super Bowl, the most ballyhooed event on network TV.

At a time when the U.S. is so riven by its involvement in Iraq, when even Ricky Martin of Livin' La Vida Loca fame is attacking President George W. Bush in words and song, you can't help but wonder whether Sunday night's 79th Academy Awards show will see its share of pointed political content.

The answer may be in this year's guidelines for acceptance speeches, in which the political impulse has traditionally surfaced.

Faced with declining viewership (last year's show was the second-least-watched ceremony by Americans in more than a decade) — and previous Oscars that have clocked in at more than three hours — the academy this year is insisting that individual acceptance speeches be, above all, “interesting and memorable.”

If a winner “pulls out a list and starts to read it,” that's pretty much a guarantee that he or she is going to be cut off right away, an Oscar spokesperson said Wednesday.

Even without a list, the famous musical cut-off — when the orchestra drowns out a winner's speech — “still could happen,” she said, particularly if the speech is felt to be going on too long. Winners are being told they have 45 seconds to make their speeches.

This year's host, Ellen DeGeneres, said on her own program this month that she didn't want to hear any musical nudges, just people “speaking from their hearts.”

Unlike this year's Grammys, which were construed as a kind of vindication for the politics of the Dixie Chicks, the 2006-07 Oscars are beholden to the same “strangely cautious, apolitical mood” The New York Times entertainment writer Caryn James claims to have seen at pretty much all the awards programs that have preceded it.

Of course, contributing to this are the movies and the artists the 6,000-member academy has chosen. None of the best-picture nods — Little Miss Sunshine, The Departed, Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, The Queen — has a politically charged message that can be easily referenced to the U.S. war effort.

The one category offering at least the opportunity for a political moment is that of best documentary feature.

Two Iraq-themed films are up for the documentary Oscar this year as is An Inconvenient Truth , the hugely popular ecology essay featuring Al Gore, Mr. Bush's nemesis in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Martin Grove, columnist for Hollywood Reporter Online, thinks An Inconvenient Truth has “a very good chance of winning. But if [Gore] prevails and he makes it to the stage, I have a feeling he'll have the good taste not to be an overwhelmingly partisan speechmaker. If anything, I'm betting he'll be rather self-deprecating.”

James Longley, director of one of the nominated Iraq movies, Iraq in Fragments (the other is My Country, My Country by Laura Poitras), said in an interview this week that he thinks “it's great when a winner talks about something more important than an awards show. It's certainly more interesting than a list of thank yous, more fun to watch.”

However, Mr. Longley wasn't sure what he will say or do if his documentary wins. “I'm of various minds. ... All the time people are telling me who I have to thank and what I should be saying and you have, like, 45 seconds! There is,” he acknowledged, “a contingent of people — usually old people who've won a couple of times — who say to me, ‘This is your chance to say something to the world.' But I'm not sure, I don't know. I'm a shy person; I'm not Michael Moore; I'm not going to start inviting people up on stage from the audience.”