The curtain goes up tonight on the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. (OK, so there's not really a curtain at the Eccles Theatre - just a short animated loop on the screen. It's a metaphor. Deal with it.)

Before Sundance begins, the air in Park City is thick with anticipation for what will come out of the movies and madness to come. Here are 10 questions that should be answered by the time it's all over.

1 - Will tonight's opening film, "Friends With Money," produce as big a paparazzi circus as the last time Jennifer Aniston was here, in 2002 with "The Good Girl" - when the crush to get the four billionth photo of Jen and Brad Pitt delayed the movie 25 minutes?

2 - Which celebrity will be the first to try the "don't you know who I am?" routine on an unimpressed Park City cop?

3 - Will Ralph Nader get booed when he shows up for the documentary about him, "An Unreasonable Man"?

4 - If the answer to No. 3 is "yes," will the heckler later be revealed to be Al Gore (also the subject of a Sundance doc)?

5 - What movie will be the festival's designated train wreck - the one so bad people will go see it just to bear witness to the carnage? (Last year it was the "Memento"-ripoff thriller "Between"; before that, it was the Bob Dylan all-star vanity piece "Masked and Anonymous.")

6 - What movie will be the transcendent work, the one that has viewers walking a foot off the ground as they leave the theater? (Last year, it was "Me and You and Everyone We Know.")

7 - How long will the average person stand shivering outside Harry O's before deciding that 15 minutes at a lame party isn't worth this?

8 - When will people learn that the documentaries are, top to bottom, the best part of Sundance?

9 - How many people will kvetch that "Sundance has become so crowded/commercialized/celebrity-driven"?

10 - How many of those same whiners will be back next year?