Movies

Best Picture✓ “1917”“Ford v Ferrari”“The Irishman”“Jojo Rabbit”“Joker”“Little Women”“Marriage Story”“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”“Parasite”As your Oscar-pool guru, I would be remiss in predicting any best-picture winner besides “1917.” The Sam Mendes-directed war movie has taken top honors from both the Producers and Directors guilds as well the director and drama prizes at the Golden Globes, and that’s the sort of awards-season war chest no other contender can compete with. Though it debuted late last year, “1917” is cresting at just the right time: After six weeks of release, it’s made more than $120 million domestically, and it occupied the No. 2 slot at the box office last weekend.But.I still can’t shake the feeling that “Parasite” could pull off an upset, in much the same way “Moonlight” vaulted over “La La Land” just three years ago. Bong Joon Ho’s widely loved South Korean thriller would be the first foreign-language film to win best picture, and by picking it, voters could help rehabilitate the academy’s reputation for being too insular and white. The film’s cast members garnered a standing ovation at the Screen Actors Guild Awards even before they won the top prize of the night. “Parasite” has passion, no doubt.Is that enough? I’m playing it safe with “1917,” but stay tuned: It’ll be close.Best Director✓ Sam Mendes, “1917”Martin Scorsese, “The Irishman”Todd Phillips, “Joker”Quentin Tarantino, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”Bong Joon Ho, “Parasite”Five of the last seven Oscar races have come down to a split in the top two categories, so is it possible that even if “1917” wins best picture, Bong could still be rewarded with the best-director Oscar? Yes, though I wouldn’t bet on it: When such a split occurs, the directing winner usually hails from the bigger, more technically audacious film, and that describes Mendes and his long-take war movie to a T.Best Actor✓ Joaquin Phoenix, “Joker”Antonio Banderas, “Pain and Glory”Leonardo DiCaprio, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”Adam Driver, “Marriage Story”Jonathan Pryce, “The Two Popes”Oscar voters are drawn to the tangible act of transformation, and though many of the nominees in this category are playing against type — including DiCaprio as a washed-up actor and Banderas as a quiet artist wrestling with pain — there is no more ostentatious act of transformation than Phoenix’s wrenching, intensely physical performance as the Joker. Considered by many to be the best actor of his generation, Phoenix has never won an Oscar. That will change on Sunday.Best Actress✓ Renée Zellweger, “Judy”Cynthia Erivo, “Harriet”Scarlett Johansson, “Marriage Story”Saoirse Ronan, “Little Women”Charlize Theron, “Bombshell”Sixteen years after Zellweger was awarded her first Oscar, a supporting-actress trophy for “Cold Mountain,” she will again return to the winner’s circle for playing a down-and-out Judy Garland in the last year of her life. None of the other contenders ever amassed enough momentum to truly compete with Zellweger, who’s been sitting pretty as the favorite all season. She’ll now become the 21st woman to win more than one Oscar for acting.Best Supporting Actor✓ Brad Pitt, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”Tom Hanks, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”Anthony Hopkins, “The Two Popes”Al Pacino, “The Irishman”Joe Pesci, “The Irishman”Though the 56-year-old Pitt already possesses an Oscar for producing the best-picture winner “12 Years a Slave,” he has never won an Academy Award for acting, and his confident performance in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” offers a full-throttle testimonial to his star power. After charming and unexpectedly funny acceptance speeches at the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards, there’s no way Pitt goes home on Oscar night empty-handed. Don’t you want to know what he’ll say?Best Supporting Actress✓ Laura Dern, “Marriage Story”Kathy Bates, “Richard Jewell”Scarlett Johansson, “Jojo Rabbit”Florence Pugh, “Little Women”Margot Robbie, “Bombshell”Dern has a clear path to victory here: The only supporting-actress contender who had earned a comparable amount of buzz was the “Hustlers” star Jennifer Lopez, and she didn’t even make the list of five nominees. For voters who enjoyed “Marriage Story,” a vote for Dern ensures the movie won’t go home empty-handed, and the 52-year-old actress is an enormously well-liked figure enjoying the sort of career resurgence that Oscar is always eager to reward.Original Screenplay✓ “Parasite,” Bong Joon Ho, Han Jin Won“Knives Out,” Rian Johnson“Marriage Story,” Noah Baumbach“1917,” Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” Quentin TarantinoTarantino has won the original-screenplay Oscar twice before, so he can’t be counted out here. Still, the path to best picture almost always goes through one of the screenplay categories, and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” has lost much of its momentum for the top award. The best-picture front-runner “1917” is probably too sparse a screenplay to win in this category, so I expect the win will go to twisty “Parasite,” the night’s other big contender for the top Oscar.Adapted Screenplay✓ “Jojo Rabbit,” Taika Waititi“The Irishman,” Steven Zaillian“Joker,” Todd Phillips, Scott Silver“Little Women,” Greta Gerwig“The Two Popes,” Anthony McCartenOscar voters caught a lot of flak when Gerwig failed to make the best-director race, and they may be tempted to make it up to her here. Still, I’d give the slim edge to Waititi, who won the Writers Guild Award in this category and whose performance in his own movie — as a jokey Adolf Hitler, no less — only lends him further star power that should put him over the top.International Feature✓ “Parasite,” South Korea“Corpus Christi,” Poland“Honeyland,” North Macedonia“Les Misérables,” France“Pain and Glory,” SpainOutside of the acting categories, this is one of the most foregone conclusions of the night: “Parasite” will surely prevail, giving South Korea its first victory in this Oscar race. The only question is whether some voters will deem this win sufficient, and then go on to choose a different movie in the best-picture category.Animated Feature✓ “Toy Story 4”“How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World”“I Lost My Body”“Klaus”“Missing Link”Oscar voters are loath to recognize a sequel in this category, and the last one to win was “Toy Story 3,” which may slow their enthusiasm for rewarding Pixar once more. Still, the field is scattered: “Missing Link” won the Golden Globe, “Klaus” swept the Annie awards, and Netflix’s “I Lost My Body” has highbrow fans, too. With votes all over the place and no singular, widely seen alternative to back, “Toy Story 4” is well-positioned to win.Documentary✓ “American Factory”“The Cave”“The Edge of Democracy”“For Sama”“Honeyland”“Honeyland,” about a beekeeper in North Macedonia, pulled off an impressive double nomination for documentary feature and international film. Still, this category is packed with powerhouse social-issues dramas, and the favorite has to be “American Factory,” which chronicles a culture clash between Chinese industrialists and hard-up American workers. The film has received a strong push from Netflix and counts no less than Barack and Michelle Obama among its backers.Visual Effects✓ “1917”“Avengers: Endgame”“The Irishman”“The Lion King”“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”Best-picture contenders typically have the edge over tentpole fare in this category, so while “The Lion King” certainly boasts the most effects, the ultimate contest should come down to “The Irishman” and its de-aging technology vs. the more seamless wartime enhancements of “1917.” Since Robert De Niro’s youthful C.G.I. makeover came in for some criticism, I suspect voters will choose “1917.”Film Editing✓ “Ford v Ferrari”“The Irishman”“Jojo Rabbit”“Joker”“Parasite”“Parasite” could pull this out if voters remember all those masterful sequences that track multiple character arcs as the suspense builds and builds, and if the film wins in this category, that would be a boon for its best-picture chances. But “Ford v Ferrari” is the obvious choice here, since its racing sequences would be nothing without fast and precise editing.Original Score✓ “Joker,” Hildur Gudnadottir“Little Women,” Alexandre Desplat“Marriage Story,” Randy Newman“1917,” Thomas Newman“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” John WilliamsThomas Newman has been nominated in this category 14 times without a win, and though “1917” could earn the most Oscars of the night, I don’t think its score will triumph. At least Newman won’t lose to his cousin Randy, the composer for “Marriage Story”: Instead, both Newmans will probably fall to the Golden Globe and BAFTA winner Gudnadottir, whose striking compositions for “Joker” give a voice to the main character’s madness.Original Song✓ “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again,” “Rocketman”“I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away,” “Toy Story 4”“I’m Standing With You,” “Breakthrough”“Into the Unknown,” “Frozen 2”“Stand Up,” “Harriet”“Let It Go” triumphed in this category seven years ago, but can the new Idina Menzel power ballad from “Frozen 2” win the same Oscar? It will face strong competition from Elton John’s end-credits “Rocketman” song, sung with the film’s star, Taron Egerton. Their duet, “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again,” has already won the Golden Globe, and the snub of “Frozen 2” in the animated-film category suggests that voters aren’t eager to rubber-stamp a retread. In a close race, I’d give this one to Elton.Production Design✓ “1917”“The Irishman”“Jojo Rabbit”“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”“Parasite”This is one of the night’s trickiest three-way races. “Parasite” gave us the most memorable location of the year with the ultramodern Park house, but contemporary films only win in this category when they’re impressively futuristic (“Black Panther”) or self-consciously retro (“La La Land”). “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” masterfully recreates 1969 Los Angeles, but the film seems to have lost awards momentum. “1917” turns every new location into a striking set piece and the camera’s constancy allows plenty of time to explore those sets, so that’s my pick, even though I hope “Parasite” can pull it off.Cinematography✓ “1917,” Roger Deakins“The Irishman,” Rodrigo Prieto“Joker,” Lawrence Sher“The Lighthouse,” Jarin Blaschke“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Robert RichardsonFor more than two decades, Deakins was one of Oscar’s most famous bridesmaids, but now that he’s in, he’s really in: After winning his first Academy Award, for “Blade Runner 2049,” just two years ago, the veteran cinematographer will earn a second statuette, for his fluid work on “1917.” If all those complicated long takes weren’t enough to clinch it for Deakins, the bravura nighttime sequence halfway through the film surely would be.Costume Design✓ “Little Women”“The Irishman”“Jojo Rabbit”“Joker”“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”With the recent exception of the world-building winners “Black Panther” and “Mad Max: Fury Road,” this Oscar almost always goes to a period film set in the distant past. That nixes “Joker,” “The Irishman” and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” as films set in the 1960s and ’70s haven’t scored here since … well, the 1960s and ’70s. In the face-off between the colorful “Jojo Rabbit,” which won with the Costume Designers Guild, and BAFTA’s choice, “Little Women,” I’m picking the latter: When in doubt, go with the one that has the most frocks.Makeup and Hair✓ “Bombshell”“Joker”“Judy”“Maleficent: Mistress of Evil”“1917”It’s the first time that this category has expanded the number of nominees to five from the traditional three, but that hardly makes the contest any less of a blowout: “Bombshell” is guaranteed to win for its uncanny, prosthetics-aided transformation of Charlize Theron into the angular Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.Sound Mixing✓ “1917”“Ad Astra”“Ford v Ferrari”“Joker”“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”“1917” seeks to place the viewer in the same impossible situations as its protagonists, and all those you-are-there long takes wouldn’t work half as well without a top-tier soundscape. Whizzing bullets, roaring waterfalls, the fairway footsteps of a potential friend or foe: “1917” has everything it needs to succeed here. War films and best-picture nominees are typically the best positioned in this category, and “1917” is both.Sound Editing✓ “1917”“Ford v Ferrari”“Joker”“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”An idea was recently floated within the academy to combine both sound categories because many voters still don’t understand the difference between them. For the record: Sound editing has more to do with the creation of sounds, while sound mixing is about weaving those disparate sounds together. Whether voters know that or not, they will almost certainly pick “1917” to prevail in both races.Animated Short✓ “Hair Love”“Dcera”“Kitbull”“Memorable”“Sister”The two heaviest hitters here are Pixar’s “Kitbull,” which tracks an alley cat’s bond with an abused pit bull, and Sony’s “Hair Love,” about an African-American father struggling to do his young daughter’s hair. “Kitbull” benefits from being a little more rough around the edges than your usual Pixar short, but adorable animals are still a familiar sight in this category, and the specificity of “Hair Love” distinguishes it as a fresher pick.Live-Action Short✓ “The Neighbors’ Window”“Brotherhood”“Nefta Football Club”“Saria”“A Sister”Last year’s winner in this category, “Skin,” was an English-language short with recognizable actors that culminated in an obvious but effective twist. That pretty much describes this year’s front-runner, “The Neighbors’ Window,” which stars the Tony nominee Maria Dizzia as a harried New York mom who envies the young, glamorous couple in the apartment across the way until … well, I won’t spoil it. Though I found the eventual twist rather trite, it’s exactly the sort of thing that clicks with Oscar voters, and Dizzia is so committed that you’re inclined to just go with it.Documentary Short✓ “Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (if You’re a Girl)”“In the Absence”“Life Overtakes Me”“St. Louis Superman”“Walk Run Cha-Cha”“Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (if You’re a Girl)” has the best title in the field and also the best odds: This charmer about a skating school for young girls in Afghanistan is politically relevant enough to score with Oscar voters, but even more crucially, it sends the viewer out with a smile. More

In “Horse Girl,” Sarah (Alison Brie) is a mousy young woman undergoing a paranoid breakdown. As she spirals further from reason, the movie follows suit. We plunge into a prolonged nightmare of instability, both in terms of Sarah’s hallucinations and the movie’s reckless evocation of them.Streaming on Netflix, “Horse Girl” opens in a lucid reality, if a quirky one. It’s Sarah’s birthday, and her plans are nonexistent. Shy and a little socially off, she fails to connect with her Zumba classmates, likewise her cool-girl roommate. She wards off loneliness through peculiar obsessions, particularly a fantasy TV series called “Purgatory” and the horse she once owned, which she visits frequently enough to annoy its new owner and stablemen. The director Jeff Baena, who co-wrote the script with Brie, gently lingers on Sarah’s hobbies, helping us understand how they serve as armor against an emotionally taxing world.[embedded content]Then, in a dizzying change of mood, Sarah loses control. Her sleepwalking habit escalates into dangerous stretches of amnesia, and black magic from “Purgatory” worms its way into her perception of the real world. Sarah plainly scans as a woman with a psychiatric illness, and the few characters we trust — her sympathetic colleague (Molly Shannon) and refreshingly sweet love interest (John Reynolds) — share our concern.It would be tactful, at this point, for “Horse Girl” to show how Sarah’s hallucinations are causing her suffering; instead, it indulges them. When Sarah believes she’s being abducted by aliens, the movie unsettlingly takes her delusion at face value. The more time we spend inside her visions, the more we are invited to enable her, to shrug off our worry in favor of an absorbing paranormal mystery. “Horse Girl” delves into a troubled mind only to get lost among its oddities, forgetting the sensitivity that drew it there in the first place.Horse GirlRated R for nudity, drugs, and distress. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. More

Debates persist about the appropriate ways to depict World War II onscreen, but “stodgily familiar,” which describes “Waiting for Anya,” is probably not the most historically sensitive mode.This child’s-eye view of Occupied France is set in a village in the Pyrenees, where, at the outset, Jo (Noah Schnapp), a shepherd’s son, spots a bear and alerts adults. The bear, a mother, is killed (the better to be used as a metaphor).Soon after, Jo discovers that at a nearby farm, a woman (Anjelica Huston) is hiding a Jewish man (Frederick Schmidt) and a growing number of children. His ability to keep that secret, even while he goes eagle-watching with a Nazi corporal (Thomas Kretschmann), is a test of mettle.[embedded content]“Waiting for Anya” is not so sentimental that it imagines every character can escape death. But it has little use for complexity. If there are Nazi collaborators among the French here, for instance, they don’t have notable speaking parts. And making the most prominent German officer sympathetic to saving Jewish children avoids reckoning with the depths of the Third Reich’s evils.Based on a novel by Michael Morpugo (author of “War Horse”), this film suffers from other deficits of verisimilitude. Characters speak English with such strong accents it’s odd that the director, Ben Cookson, didn’t opt for French and German. And as harrowing as Jo’s ordeal may be, the movie doesn’t fail to provide the obligatory uplift.Waiting for AnyaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. More

In “Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made,” streaming on Disney Plus and based on the first book in Stephan Pastis’s children’s series, the amateur gumshoe Timmy (Winslow Fegley) uses a gargantuan vocabulary to indicate his precocity, his work as a detective tantamount to his sense of self. As he runs a little agency out of the cramped home he shares with his two-job-juggling single mother and a C.G.I. polar bear named Total as his sidekick, “normal is for normal people” becomes one of his mantras to explain his idiosyncrasies.The elementary-schooler would probably be at home in a Dashiell Hammett novel on the trail of a chocolate Maltese Falcon, as he speaks semi-exclusively in detective/cop dialogue, saying things like, “affirmative,” asking about Russian operatives (read: Portland hipsters) and repeating his other mantra: “Mistakes were made.” When a backpack goes missing, a hamster turns up dead and the “Failure Mobile” (his mother’s Segway) disappears, Timmy Failure is on the case, an imagined Holmesian intuition on hand.[embedded content]Yet, in spite of the cutesy little mystery threads that the film initially begins weaving, the director Tom McCarthy’s focus is more on the boy’s outsider status. His grades are bad, his family is lower income, the kids at school think he’s weird and he easily exasperates adults. The film could have contrasted the absurdities of Timmy’s world with the reality around him by using the clichés of film noir to create a smoky, illusive fantasy, while occasionally popping that bubble, like in Rian Johnson’s high school-set mystery “Brick.” Instead, it prefers outsized “30 Rock”-like asides that illustrate Timmy’s imagination straightforwardly, but not interestingly or with charm.There isn’t enough in the way of good jokes or clever references to investigators of yore to make the film appealing, and the flatness of Timmy’s delivery, which is supposed to scan as deadpan, doesn’t contain enough nuances to make much of the humor land. Maybe in a few years, the detective can dive into another mystery that deserves to be solved.Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were MadeRated PG for some language, thematic elements and a child being rude in the name of private investigation. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. More

More than one set of male genitals appears to be savaged in “Come to Daddy” (others, happily, are displayed without penalty), but not until the midpoint of this dementedly comic thriller do we recognize the means of reproduction as its driving force.Of course, any movie that features the line “Semen contains more protein and nutrients than an ear,” and opens with paired quotations from Shakespeare and Beyoncé, might not be entirely on the level. So thinks Norval (Elijah Wood), a music-industry poseur, of his out-of-the-blue summons to the isolated shoreside home of his long-estranged father. His misgivings only deepen when the drunken, mercurial man who greets him (Stephen McHattie) provokes a confrontation that leaves Norval facing more mayhem and mounting gore than his sensitive soul can comprehend.[embedded content]The first feature from the New Zealand director Ant Timpson, “Come to Daddy” initially exhibits an endearing strangeness that’s reinforced by Daniel Katz’s quirky camera angles and airily elegant framing. As the action narrows to an underground cell and, later, a series of swinger-stuffed motel rooms, the atmosphere becomes more claustrophobic and the plot substantially more nutty. Enjoyable performances from Wood and Martin Donovan (whose character prefers to remain unidentified) hold the film to its redemptive goals, even as it descends into what can only be described as bloody bedlam.Absurd yet bold, lurid yet a tiny bit touching, “Come to Daddy” drags poor Norval from hopefulness to horror to a wickedly literal form of closure. More than a few audience members might even be happy to accompany him.Come to DaddyRated R for foul language, a feces-smeared pen and a lethal roll of plastic wrap. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. More

Watching an attractive young male-female couple go through a complicated routine, a bearded, older instructor (Kakha Gogidze) glowers. They should not be looking at each other; their gaze should be to the floor, he says. “There is no sexuality in Georgian dance,” he almost growls. The rehearsal is interrupted by the arrival of a new dancer, Irakli (Bachi Valishvili), who’s told to remove his earring almost immediately. Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani), the young male dancer who had been at work, looks at the new guy with trepidation and something else.[embedded content]In the event you needed more foreshadowing, there’s a subsequent scene in the female changing quarters where dancers gossip about a male member of the troupe who was kicked out for being gay. Tbilisi, where this movie, written and directed by Levan Akin, is set and was shot, looks like a pleasant place to live, but also like a land out of time. The young members of the Georgian dance group all smoke like chimneys, and their world, and the world around them, has seriously retrograde ideas about human relations. This means trouble for Merab, who has more than a socially unacceptable new love on his plate: his family is struggling in poverty.Gelbakhiani, the lead actor, has a lean physique, striking red hair and certain facial features that suggest he’d actually make a great Alfredo Linguini in a live-action remake of “Ratatouille,” not that such a thing should happen. He and the rest of the cast perform with conviction, and the whole movie is attractively, solidly put together. But its dramatic components, fraught as they are, are tepidly delivered. The movie catches fire only in its final scene, in which Merab expresses his rebellion in the language of dance, not words.And Then We DancedNot rated. In Georgian, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. More

You’ll want nothing so much as a woolly sweater when you see “The Lodge,” a film so wintry in tone and setting that no movie-theater thermostat will banish its chill. Even so, the directors, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (the Austrian pair who made “Goodnight Mommy” in 2015), have coaxed only a disappointingly timorous horrorscape from that marvelously glacial mood.There’s no denying their competence — they have style to burn — and their cinematographer, Thimios Bakatakis, is a wonder at painting dark and dread-filled interiors and ominously snow-blanketed surroundings. Both distinguish the titular remote lodge where Richard (Richard Armitage) has dumped his two children, Aiden (Jaeden Martell) and Mia (Lia McHugh), a few days before Christmas. While Richard, a successful nonfiction author, works in town, his recently traumatized kids must get to know their soon-to-be stepmother, Grace (Riley Keough) — who just happens to be the sole, pill-popping survivor of a religious cult that committed mass suicide.[embedded content]More unsettling than terrifying, the story (by the directors and Sergio Casci) builds to a leisurely, irresolute and unsatisfying climax. As a snowstorm hems them in, the children watch Grace with unconcealed suspicion. Aiden, the older of the two, knows her history from reading one of his father’s books; but though Grace may be fraying from gruesome flashbacks and hideous dreams, it’s Aiden who’s by far the creepier.Despite its visual flair and unrelentingly taut atmosphere, “The Lodge” is more successful in sustaining unease — like the eerie, unexplained shots of a spooky dollhouse — than in building a convincing narrative. Ultimately, its message seems to be: Just because you’re bonkers doesn’t mean the specters of your past aren’t out to get you.The LodgeRated R for guns, ghosts and a little nudity. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. More