OSCAR season is prime time for period dramas – and that’s an excuse for Hollywood to play dress-up.

Over the next weeks, such glamour pusses as Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett will grace screens in everything from 1950s cinched-waist hoop skirts to the petticoats and bonnets of the Wild West.

WHAT WHO WHEN

“Mona Lisa Smile” Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst,

Maggie Gyllenhaal, Julia Stiles, Marcia Gay Harden Boston in 1953

“Cold Mountain” Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger North Carolina during the Civil War

“The Missing” Cate Blanchett, Evan Rachel Wood New Mexico in 1886

“Girl With a Pearl Earring” Scarlett Johansson 17th-century Netherlands

“Big Fish” Alison Lohman the South in the 1950s