Unseen on screen

In the Academy Award-nominated film

The Wrestler

, Randy the Ram has sacrificed all of his personal relationships (not to mention his health) to stay in the ring - and, boy, does he look it.

The Ram, played by Mickey Rourke, wears tattered jeans, a ratty black nylon puffer jacket, and sneakers with holes. He wrestles in 20-year-old spandex. And if you look closely at the cream-colored fur vest he wears to his final bout, you can see it's spattered with blood - the fake, syrupy kind, of course.

It's this authenticity that has given the movie's wardrobe stylist, Delaware County-raised Amy Westcott, a shot at winning the statue for excellence in a contemporary film, awarded by the West Coast's Costume Designers Guild. Winners will be announced late tonight.

"I love what I do so much, I live it," Westcott said during a recent telephone interview from her Los Angeles apartment. Westcott - who splits her time between there and New York - is in preproduction for the HBO series Entourage; she's the lead costume designer for the show.

"I'm taking in information every day about what people wear and how they wear it. . . . Even when I'm on vacation in Hawaii. You never know, I may have to do a movie set in Hawaii."

In the costume-design industry, Westcott's nominations - she's also been recognized for her work on Entourage - at the 11th annual awards ceremony are like Anna Wintour offering a young designer a fashion spread in Vogue. It's a pretty big deal.

Westcott is up against the style goddess herself, Patricia Field, nominated for her work on Sex and the City: The Movie. Also in the mix is Suttirat Anne Larlarb, for the impoverished looks she gave to another Oscar-nominated film, Slumdog Millionaire.In the television category, Westcott also faces Field and partner Eduardo Castro, for their work on Ugly Betty.

Westcott grew up in Springfield, Delaware County, and attended Springfield High School before earning a bachelor's degree in fashion design at Syracuse University.

After graduation, she worked as a designer for several small Seventh Avenue labels before deciding the cutthroat business wasn't creative enough for her taste.

"I'm not really a fashion person," said Westcott, who favors an eclectic personal style. "I like when people show their personality through clothing. What I do has little to do with fashion and more to do with style."

Mary Rose, the president of the Costume Designers Guild, noted Westcott's extreme talent for dressing men, a feat because men's dress focuses more on details than trends.

"She understands the script, and she helps the viewer connect with the characters quietly. That's a real gift," Rose said.

So what's the big deal about the clothes in The Wrestler? There's nothing exciting about tawdry spandex tights, flat wrestling boots, and jeans that belong in the trash. Sparkly G-strings on a stripper are not too creative. A navy-blue peacoat? A shiny green jacket? Come on. Doesn't Joe Regular own both?

That's exactly the point. Unlike Patricia Field, whose wardrobe choices make us want to shop, shop, shop, Westcott's talent, Rose said, is in choosing pieces so germane to the character that the clothes go unnoticed.

"If [movie director] Darren Aronofsky noticed costumes all the time, I would have gotten fired," Westcott said.

When Westcott, 38, was hired to work on The Wrestler, she admittedly didn't know much about the sport. She watched movies and documentaries, went to wrestling events, and looked at old photos of Lex Lugar and Rowdy Roddy Piper. (Hulk Hogan was too cliche.)

She then created dozens of preliminary sketches for Randy the Ram's costumes. All were shirtless with a bevy of tights - some with diamonds, others with stars and stripes.

Eventually, Rourke, Aronofsky and Westcott decided on two pairs. One, for his modern-day competitions, was full-length black, green and silver spandex. Westcott designed a ram's head with silver piping on each hip. (Rourke had the ram's head made into a necklace with turquoise eyes, which he wore on-screen as well.)

She also designed a pair of retro lime-green and blue tie-dyed tights the Ram wore in the movie's final wrestling scene.

"We tied those colors together because they were central to the 1980s," Westcott said. "We wanted something that would stand out in the ring and felt like the time."

When Randy the Ram wasn't wrestling, Westcott determined he would wear jeans that had every inch of style beaten out of them. He wore them with white T-shirts and underwear that Westcott had yellowed - or "teched" - to look extra-grungy.

"Making everything look bleak is a lot more work than it looks," Westcott said. "We beat his coat to death. We ripped it. We put tape on it to stop the holes. Our staff took turns just pummeling it."

The most challenging part was working around sportswear companies' refusal to consider product-placement requests. The Ram visits strip clubs. In one scene, he is shooting steroids in his arm.

"He had to wear sneakers with no label," Westcott said.

This is never an issue when she's outfitting the Queens-meets-L.A. characters on Entourage.

In fact, she has so many labels vying for her attention, it's tough to keep it all straight: Turtle has to have on the right custom-designed Air Force Ones, Ari should be rocking the most high-end Italian-made power suit, and Vincent is casually dressed in Gucci dress pants and a T-shirt.

"One time I used a Robin Rhodes necklace on Carla Gugino's character, Amanda, and the company told me they did about $300,000 in sales afterward," Westcott said "Anything featured on an HBO show does well."

Her coworkers on Entourage praise her choices.

"Amy has an innate sense of style that she uses to tell the truth of her character," said Mark Mylod, the show's producer. "Most importantly, she understands the East-Coast-meets-West-Coast fashion vibe."

Westcott's first job in the film industry was as a wardrobe assistant on Cop Land, released in 1997, starring Sylvester Stallone.

She was the costume designer for the 2001 horror film Campfire Stories. That gig was followed by work on The Secret Lives of Dentists and The Squid and the Whale. The Wrestler has done the best at the box office.

For now, the low-key Westcott is satisfied with her career. She just finished a movie with the working title Thirteen about Russian roulette, also starring Rourke, Jason Statham, and Sam Riley.

"If I could work on movies like The Wrestler for the rest of my life, I'd be pretty excited about that," she said.