Buoyed by last month's quadruple Oscar win for No Country For Old Men, Hollywood top brass have prodded the multi-garlanded film-makers Joel and Ethan Coen back on to the awards season carousel.

Burn After Reading, a darkly comic account of a CIA agent who loses his unpublished memoirs, stars Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton and George Clooney, who teamed up with the Coens on O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty.

Fans will have to wait six months before they see the brothers' film, however, since the distributor Focus Features fancies its chances in the 81st annual Academy Awards next year and has chosen to release the film in the awards season gateway month of September.

Many studios have already plotted the release of their early contenders in the 81st annual Academy Awards - and the Coens aren't the only ones who'll get a second crack at the big prizes.

Keira Knightley missed out on an Oscar nomination for Atonement and is already being positioned as a potential nominee in 2009 for her role as the outspoken 18th century Duchess of Devonshire opposite Ralph Fiennes in The Duchess.

Meanwhile Philip Seymour Hoffman, a supporting actor nominee for Charlie Wilson's War who won the lead actor trophy for Capote two years ago, stars in the Catholic Church sex scandal tale Doubt with Meryl Streep and rising star Amy Adams.

Other heavyweights expected to be ready in time are Ron Howard's stage adaptation Frost/Nixon with Martin Sheen and Frank Langella, Baz Lurhmann's sweeping epic Australia with Nicole Kidman and High Jackman, a lavish big-screen treatment of Brideshead Revisited and biographies on the political figures Harvey Milk and Che Guevara.