Everyone all over the world who has seen "The Sixth Sense'' came out talking about the kid.  Haley Joel Osment is extraordinary.  Haley is also now the single youngest actor to receive a nomination for a SAG (Screen Actors Guild) award.

Every critic agreed that if this isn't the single best performance ever by a preadolescent male in a motion picture, then it's tied for whatever is first. 

Now, we send our salutations to the Academy Awards for Haley's nomination. Despite his age, the Academy rightfully gave him the credit he truly deserves-- to be ranked among the greatest in the field.

While critics were overwhelmed by Haley's performance, most noted that the movie itself is not Oscar-caliber.  Indeed, ''The Phantom Menace'' was not good enough to earn a nomination for best picture but surprisingly, ''The Sixth Sense'' was!

It seems that Haley has single-handedly won for the whole film tickets to red carpet.

Young Osment sees dead people, and he's not hallucinating.  Invisible to everyone else, dead people present themselves to the boy and, without so much as a hello, pour out their frustrations.  They died violently. They were murdered.  They're angry. 

The most distressing thing is, as the boy says, ''they don't know they're dead.'' 

Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan, who was also nominated, wrote himself into what easily could have been a hopeless situation.  He created a screenplay that depended on finding a child actor as talented as the 50-year-old James Stewart. 

Haley gave him more than that.

Osment conveyed the outer limits of inner anguish and torment, a kid whose manner suggests that he already knows more about human extremes than a priest, a doctor or a front-lines soldier. 

Bruce Willis, who was first on credits was ironically the only one who was not nominated.  As a sympathetic child psychiatrist, he had more screen time, but his role is reactive.  Osment alone carried the drama. 

Whether one credits precocity, intuition or a freakish natural gift, the boy gets every drop out of this character.  He played Cole, a boy who is more than scared.  He doubted his sanity, felt guilty and insecure, and he was in despair, knowing that no one will believe him. 

In the first scene, Willis was shot by a now-adult former patient who then kills himself.  Once recovered, Crowe sees in Cole a chance to succeed where he failed with the first boy.  Willis played Crowe in a soft-spoken mode.  No smirking.  His acting is subdued, heartfelt and full of loneliness.  Never has psychiatry been presented as such a melancholy calling.  Crowe devoted all his resources to making a connection with the boy, and his personal life suffered. 

When the dead appeared to Cole, they came with great urgency, as though they've finally managed to establish a line of communication and need to talk fast before the line cuts out.  This element added to the frightening aspect of these visions, not just for the boy but for the audience. 

A dead girl appears before his eyes, vomiting.  A dead woman stands in the kitchen, screaming about her husband. When Cole turns his head in school, he sees hanging victims from 100 years earlier, staring at him. 

''The Sixth Sense'' is scary in two ways. It's scary in its suggestion of a world within our world, one that our minds choose to ignore.  Cole tells his psychiatrist that when the hair stands up on your neck, that is the dead trying to connect. 

There's no doubting Osment when he says these lines. 

But just as scary, or at least as unsettling, is the film's presentation of human existence as an endless series of tragedies and agonies, relieved only by foolish distraction. 

Shyamalan, in his first major feature, built and sustained an eerie mood made up of equal parts tension and despair.  Unlike 90 percent of films, ''The Sixth Sense'' got better as it goes along. 

Willis and Osment are beautifully supported by Toni Collette as Cole's mother, who also got a nomination.  After years of being known for being heavy, Collette has pulled a Maria Callas and turned svelte.  She plays a working-class mom without the usual Hollywood notes of condescension or nobility.  She's just a matter-of-fact good mom, and Collette plays her with every nerve frayed, every emotion on the surface of her face.

Whatever the results will be on March 26,''The Sixth Sense'' has already earned a niche among the best and most remembered films in history. 

And Haley Joel Osment, has already gained what most actors are still striving for after all their years in the business.  For him, it's only the beginning.

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