FACES OF THE OSCARS Robert Duvall

Even if Duvall doesn't get enough votes for another Academy Award, he says The Apostle has been "the highlight of my career, in many ways. I've done a couple jobs since, and I can't hardly remember them." Among those gigs: a backwoods eccentric in ex-M*A*S*H cohort Robert Altman's The Gingerbread Man ("I wanted to work with him one more time before we both hung it up," Duvall says); an aging astronaut trying to save the earth from a comet in DreamWorks' summer-event movie Deep Impact; and an attorney opposite John Travolta in Steven Zaillian's A Civil Action. He's also producing a Thornton-coscripted Merle Haggard biopic for United Artists and wants to direct another movie he's penned about a not-so-secret passion he shares with Argentinean girlfriend Luciana Pedraza: the tango.

That sounds like a lot of work for a senior citizen, but Duvall says he's ready for action: "I bloom later. People retire young today. It'll be a long time before I want to retire." Amen to that.