The Country Music Association Awards will celebrate its golden anniversary on Wednesday, and the live broadcast (ABC, 8 p.m.) will fulfill all the promise of such a venerable milestone.

Great performances. Surprise presenters from across the celebrity vista. (Watch for Olympic gymnasts and Hollywood stars.) And heritage attendants — from Roy Clark to Charley Pride — whose careers span the entire history of the ceremonies themselves.

“It’s obviously a huge year.” — Carrie Underwood

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“Certainly the CMA awards are the flagship of the country music award shows,” said Sarah Trahern, CEO of the Country Music Association. “We call them the Oscars, basically.”

Here’s what we can guarantee Wednesday night: lots and lots of downhome performers, including Garth Brooks with Trisha Yearwood (who will sing classic country duets), Dierks Bentley, Miranda Lambert, Alan Jackson, Little Big Town, Vince Gill, Tim McGraw, Keith Urban, and relative newcomers Kacey Musgraves and Maren Morris.

Watch also for Jason Aldean, Jennifer Nettles, Randy Travis, Kelsea Ballerini, Keith Urban, and Dwight Yoakam. And look for performances from past winners of the Entertainer of the Year award, the night’s most coveted trophy — including Alabama, Brooks & Dunn, Reba McEntire, and George Strait.

“It’s obviously a huge year,” Carrie Underwood said in a recent press conference. She characterized it as “a celebration of our genre of music: the past, the present, and the future.”

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Precisely what’s in store is top secret, of course, but based on how the awards have conducted themselves in the past, LifeZette has a pretty good idea of a few things that will happen.

For the ninth time, Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood will co-host the show, and Paisley claims he’ll even shed his ever-present jeans for a tux. Underwood, still the fairy tale princess of the genre, will look dazzlingly elegant.

You can bet that the two will trade on their engaging chemistry together — Underwood playing straight man to Paisley’s incorrigible joker — and reprise their roles as exasperating big brother and annoyed little sister.

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You can almost count on some last-minute changes that result in big surprises, since they happen more often than you might think. Last year, less than 24 hours before the show, when two minutes of the script was cut, Paisley had to call actor William Shatner to ask him to come wear a Stormtrooper outfit for the “Star Wars” opening.

“Things get different when there’s high stakes,” said Paisley.

“We were sitting around going, ‘How do we end this?'” Paisley told this reporter. “‘What in the world are we going to do now?'” That’s when he made the call to Shatner. “He was my lifeline.”

“We were definitely left in a bit of a pickle,” Underwood added. “Brad has a lot of friends that he can call upon, but who would have thought, ‘Will Shatner to the rescue,’ right?”

Paisley, who co-writes much of the material with Underwood (David Wild is the official writer on the show), is fond of sprinkling political jokes throughout the broadcast — especially since the show is so close to election time. Underwood prefers to stay away from politics, she said in September, and hinted the show would do that in general this year.

In June, Paisley also sounded as if politics might be too much of a hot issue. “One year, we avoided the political things. And that was a little bit excruciating for somebody who fancies himself an amateur comedian. But at the same time, things get different when there’s high stakes. When it’s down to two, people get sensitive.”

Instead of lots of political jokes, then, look for the show to take lots of walks down Memory Lane and play up the nostalgia factor that poured out from the moving “Forever Country” video, created for the anniversary, which features 30 artists singing to a medley of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.”

Related: ‘Forever Country’ Makes Fans Cry

Parton herself is the recipient of one of the night’s most prestigious honors, the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award. She is the first woman to receive the nod, which was established in 2012 to recognize “an iconic artist who has attained the highest degree of recognition in country music … through concert performances, humanitarian efforts, philanthropy, record sales, and public representation.”

Past honorees include Kenny Rogers, Johnny Cash, and Nelson himself. Parton’s current album, “Pure & Simple,” debuted at No. 1, her first record in 25 years to come in at the top spot.

Kenny Chesney will also receive a special trophy, the Pinnacle Award, created in 2005 to spotlight an artist who “has achieved global prominence through concert performances and record sales at levels.” The award is rarely bestowed, with only Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift receiving it in the past.

The CMAs, of course, are instrumental in building careers, where newer stars move up the ladder to prominence, increased radio play and sales, and larger tours, and older stars see a bit of resurrection. This year, Maren Morris, Chris Stapleton, and Eric Church are tied for the most nominations, with five each, and Keith Urban, Dierks Bentley, and Underwood — who scored her first Entertainer of the Year nomination — come in with four.

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It’s not surprising to see some older names — four-time winner Garth Brooks and 2005 winner Keith Urban — in the Entertainer category this year. (Brooks, especially, had a phenomenal year, coming out of retirement in 2013.) The lineup is a nice mix, with first-time Entertainer nominee Stapleton, who turned in an unforgettable star-making mash-up with pop’s Justin Timberlake last year, and Luke Bryan, the reigning title holder.

In a sense, those nominees are emblematic of the entire night.

“I think that we will see a lot of old friends,” said Robert Deaton, executive producer. “We want to bring as many former winners and artists as we can. It will be an opportunity to toast the past and the present.”