When it comes to predicting the winner of the Turner prize, I have appalling form. One year I was convinced that Phil Collins's brilliantly sardonic TV project about Turkish reality shows was going to win (it didn't). In 2008, I quite fancied Cathy Wilkes's chances (Mark Leckey went on to win). So when I tell you that my favourite for this year's award is Angela de la Cruz, who makes awkward, funny sculptures that don't quite do what they're meant to, my advice is: don't listen to anything I say.
The betting is, of course, hardly the point. And some would argue that, when the shortlist includes work as different as painting, film, sculpture and sound, choosing a winner at all doesn't make much sense. But that's prizes for you, and – like it or not – a winner will be chosen later this evening, in the full glare of the world's press, at Tate Britain.
A reminder about who's in the running. There's Dexter Dalwood, who paints scenes that many of us have imagined (the death of Dr David Kelly, Jimi Hendrix's basement, wartime Iraq) but never seen. Dalwood has his fans – you lot said he should win – but Britain's newspaper critics aren't among them: Richard Dorment of the Telegraph called his work "cack-handed paintings of imaginary landscapes and interiors", while our own Jonathan Jones said back in 2000 that "if this is what they mean by painting, I hope it goes away soon". Then there's The Otolith Group, Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, who make erudite, multi-strand work drawing on the history of cinema and social movements. Their room in the Turner prize exhibition contains a 45-minute film made of fragments of other films, a row of TV sets playing an obscure documentary about Ancient Greece, and a densely packed book. Easy to digest it certainly isn't; maybe that's the point.
The next room in the show is de la Cruz's, and contains a number of new paintings that have been torn apart or otherwise subjected to violence. They're called things like Deflated and Clutter, and squat anxiously in the gallery as if they're embarrassed to be there. I love her work – the wit as well as the sadness of it – but there's a feeling that perhaps this isn't her year. I guess we'll find out. The fourth artist to be shortlisted this year is Glaswegian Susan Philipsz, whose contribution to the show you hear long before you see it. Actually there isn't anything to see, just three loudspeakers and a bench; it is a piece of sound art, recordings of the artist singing slightly different versions of a Scottish medieval ballad. Mysterious and enticing, sorrowful and enigmatic, these songs overlap and intermingle, echoing around the room and out into the gallery beyond. The bookies tell us that Philipsz is the favourite to win – a good result, if only because it will be the first time that sound art has received this kind of recognition (and if you want to find out more about what she does, we ran a video interview with her last Friday).
The judges are meeting this afternoon to decide, and the waiting will be over for the rest of us at about 7.50pm when the ceremony is broadcast on Channel 4 News. Both Charlotte Higgins and I will be tweeting snippets live (follow us at twitter.com/andydickson and twitter.com/chiggi; we'll use the #TP2010 hashtag). We'll have news and reaction as soon as we can, pictures as soon as we get them, and tomorrow morning we'll have a video digest of the night's events. In the meantime, you could watch Adrian Searle's video tour around the exhibition, read Laura Cumming's astute review, or test your wits with our Turner prize quiz. And of course we want to know what you think. Have you seen the show? Did it pass muster? Who do you reckon should win?
Oh, one final thing: you haven't seen any of the artwork and still feel like posting that it's a load of old nonsense, I'm afraid Twitter's IanVisits has already got there: he suggests using #YouCallThatArt, #MyKidCouldDoBetter, #ItsRubbish or #WhatAWasteOfTime as tags. Enough said.
