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      9 Musicians Who Play a Role in This Year’s Oscars

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      Hear songs by Dua Lipa, Jarvis Cocker and yes, Bradley Cooper.Dua Lipa striking a “Barbie” pose.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDear listeners,Only two days until the Academy Awards! In Tuesday’s newsletter, we looked back at Oscar history and heard some tracks that won best original song. Today, we’re focusing on this year’s contenders — and the many musicians who make appearances in Oscar-nominated movies.I first had the idea for this playlist months ago, when I noticed how many musicians have roles in Martin Scorsese’s epic American tragedy “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The Americana icon Jason Isbell has a surprisingly major part, holding his own in scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro; the country crooner Sturgill Simpson also makes a memorable cameo.But then, as I caught up on the year’s most acclaimed films, I kept seeing — and hearing — musicians everywhere. That bowl-cutted court monitor who comes to assess a young boy’s safety in “Anatomy of a Fall”? That’s Jehnny Beth, a brooding solo artist and leader of the spiky rock band Savages. Is that guy sitting at the hotel desk for a fleeting moment in Wes Anderson’s whimsical “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” actually … Jarvis Cocker? (Yep, it was.)Consider today’s playlist a who’s who of musicians with connections to this year’s Oscar nominees. Some show off their acting chops; others, like Mica Levi and Jon Batiste, contributed indelible music to the recognized films. This marks the first time, though perhaps not the last, I have bemoaned the fact that Paul Giamatti (my personal best actor choice) was never in a band.You can’t make an entrance if you keep missing your cue,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Children’s Movies to Stream Now: ‘Soul,’ ‘Luca’ and More

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      This month’s picks include a space adventure from Richard Linklater and two critically acclaimed tales from Pixar.‘Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood’Watch it on Netflix.Stan (Milo Coy), a Texas fourth grader, is rounding the bases while playing kickball at recess one day when two NASA agents pull him off the playground to tell him they’re sending him to the moon. This being 1969, in a world before Apollo 11 took flight, Stan’s new mission is an extremely big deal. The agents, played by Glen Powell and Zachary Levi, tell Stan they were impressed by his science papers and by the fact that he won a Presidential Physical Fitness Award “three years running.” They need a kid to test an “accidentally smaller version” of the lunar module immediately, and so Stan is sworn to secrecy as he prepares for space. It’s tough for him to keep the training and planning from his mother (a droll Lee Eddy) and father (Bill Wise), and his gaggle of siblings, but he tries his best to act like a regular kid while covertly preparing for a lunar landing.The writer-director Richard Linklater uses similar dreamy rotoscope animation as his earlier films “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly,” and this nostalgic tale is narrated by Jack Black, who tells the story from the point of view of a grown-up Stan. The wall-to-wall narration and lack of fast-paced action may not hold every young viewer rapt, but older kids with a thing for space might fall under the film’s spell.‘The Willoughbys’Watch it on Netflix.Tim (voiced by Will Forte), Jane (Alessia Cara) and comically creepy twins both named Barnaby (voiced by Seán Cullen) are magenta-haired siblings who have the worst parents. Their mother (Jane Krakowski) and father (Martin Short) are selfish, narcissistic and neglectful. The couple sees their brood as a pure nuisance. The Willoughby kids devise a scheme to send their parents away on vacation in hopes of finding new parents who actually feed them.That might sound dark, but the cast and the writer-director Kris Pearn (“Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 “) bring so much humor, wackiness and heart to the film that it never feels like a downer. The story is narrated by a paunchy blue Cat (Ricky Gervais), and Maya Rudolph voices Linda, the kind nanny who watches them when their parents leave. Terry Crews plays Commander Melanoff, a loving, lonely bloke who owns a candy factory.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Oscar-Winning Concert Documentary That Speaks Volumes About America

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      “Woodstock” involved filmmakers who figure in this year’s awards ceremony.The best documentary award became part of the Oscars in 1942, and the list of winners is genuinely fascinating. In the category’s early years, the State Department and various branches of the U.S. military were routinely nominated, and even won. As time wore on, films critical of the government and its policies — whether the focus was labor, nuclear war or the surveillance state — were more likely to take home the prize. At the Oscars, the documentary category might tell us more about America than any other.One of my favorite winners is from 1970: Michael Wadleigh’s “Woodstock” (for rent on major platforms). It ran more than three hours when it was first shown; a 1994 director’s cut stretched to nearly four. The film is a document of the seminal 1969 music festival near Woodstock, N.Y., which has in the decades since taken on almost mythic proportions in American culture, a touchstone for boomers and everyone after.What’s clear from the movie is how Woodstock was very nearly a catastrophe, logistically speaking. Far more people showed up for the three-day festival than anyone had expected. There wasn’t enough food to go around, and the whole unsheltered crowd nearly fried in an electrical storm. It’s easy to imagine violence breaking out, or some other terrible event that would consume cultural memory. In fact, that did happen a few months later, when a teenage Rolling Stones fan was stabbed and beaten to death at the Altamont Speedway, an event captured by Albert and David Maysles in their 1970 film “Gimme Shelter.” (“Everything that people feared would happen (but didn’t) at Woodstock happened at Altamont,” the New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote of that film.)“Woodstock” is a mesmerizing watch, as the cameras roam from the stage to the organizers’ chaotic approach to managing the crowd to the many ways that attendees figured out how to take care of one another. (And there is, of course, the music.) Just as the festival threatened to veer out of control at any moment, the filming was a skin-of-the-teeth operation, with a team populated by many young and relatively inexperienced filmmakers. Perhaps that’s why it ended up working.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How to Watch the Oscars: Date, Time and Streaming

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      An earlier airtime and an unusual presenter approach are among the changes at this year’s ceremony.Watching the Oscars doesn’t usually require an instruction manual.But this year, to make sure you catch the goodness of Ryan Gosling performing “I’m Just Ken” — in what we can only hope will be a faux fur coat — there are two crucial steps you must take.One: Be in your preferred watching position — popcorn popped, possibly in a “Dune” bucket, Snuggie on — an hour earlier on Sunday. In a break from the traditional 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific start, this year’s ceremony is scheduled to kick off at 7 p.m., an effort by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to stick to prime-time hours.And two: When we say 7 p.m., we mean what-was-until-2-a.m.-on-Sunday 6 p.m., because — that’s right — daylight saving time is here once again. Don’t forget to set your clocks — if you still have clocks — forward an hour.You may have heard that “Oppenheimer,” with a pack-leading 13 nominations, is a lock to win best picture. This is accurate. But even if we’re certain how the night will end, the getting there is the fun part. Here’s everything you need to know.What time does the show start and where can I watch?In a perk for those who like going to bed early, this year’s show begins at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. Sunday is also the start of daylight saving time, so remember to set your clocks an hour forward before you go to bed on Saturday night.On TV, ABC is the official broadcaster. Online, you can watch the show live on the ABC app, which is free to download, or at abc.com, though you’ll need to sign in using the credentials from your cable provider. There are also a number of live TV streaming services that offer access to ABC, including Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV, AT&T TV and FuboTV, which all require subscriptions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      When the Oscars Were Held Amid Another Divisive War

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      Three days before the 2003 ceremony, the United States invaded Iraq. Despite pleas to delay the awards, the academy went ahead with what became a politics-suffused evening.On March 23, 2003, as the rest of the world watched televised images of captives and corpses identified as American soldiers, limos carrying high-fashion-clad celebrities rolled up outside what was then known as the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles.The United States had invaded Iraq just three days before, and, until that morning, there was still the possibility that the Oscars wouldn’t go on.As A-listers like Nicole Kidman, Halle Berry and Steve Martin — the host — were herded through metal detectors amid a large law enforcement presence, a few blocks away, police officers holding clubs faced off with demonstrators trying to get closer to the theater (none did).This year, another war is in the headlines as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences mounts another Oscars. So far, almost no one has spoken out at precursor awards shows, but it was very different in 2003.“It felt weird to dress up and go to this thing while our fellow Americans were all overseas about to get involved in something that was very dangerous,” the director Chris Sanders recalled in a recent interview. Sanders was nominated that year for best animated feature film for directing “Lilo & Stitch.”Newly minted winners like Adrien Brody and Nicole Kidman, front left, joined past winners onstage in 2003. Kevork Djansezian/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Imaginary’ Review: Bear Necessity

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      An imaginary friend causes real trouble in this creepy haunted-house picture.Past and present trauma fuse in Jeff Wadlow’s “Imaginary,” the latest in the Blumhouse catalog of reliably creepy horror movies whose fans typically expect well-executed jump scares, fun plot twists and the occasional rubbery monster. What they probably don’t expect is the sophisticated allegory that “Imaginary” appears to be flirting with — and comes close to pulling off — before losing its nerve.Or maybe it’s my imagination gone supernova alongside that of little Alice (a delightful Pyper Braun) and her stepmother, Jessica (DeWanda Wise), a writer and illustrator of children’s books. After Jessica’s father is settled in a care facility, she and her family — including a rebellious teen (Taegen Burns) and a guitar-playing husband (Tom Payne) who smartly buzzes off on tour when things get hairy — move into her childhood home. Almost immediately, Alice is conversing with a stuffed teddy bear she finds in the basement, an imaginary friend whose increasingly sinister games stir memories Jessica has long suppressed.On one level, then, we have a mildly embellished haunted-house picture, entertainingly realized mainly with puppets and other practical effects. There’s also the familiar eerie neighbor (here played by the wonderful Betty Buckley) whose job is to help us make sense of the story’s woo-woo logic. What’s also playing out, though, are the lonely struggles of a stressed-out second wife, who is Black, to connect with the distant, sometimes resentful white stepdaughters whose mentally ill birth mother is not entirely out of the picture.In that sense, the movie’s devolution into, by my count, at least three attempted endings suggests some dithering over whether to deliver the logical conclusion to Jessica’s sacrificial trajectory, or ease the transition to a possible sequel. As to which prevails, you’ll have to use your imagination.ImaginaryRated PG-13 for weaponized scissors and a gargantuan spider. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Damsel’ Review: Yet Another Strong Female Lead

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      Millie Bobby Brown is a daring princess in a fairy tale that unspools its surprises far too soon.“There are tales of chivalry, where the heroic knight saves the damsel in distress,” a young woman’s voice intones as “Damsel” begins. “This is not one of them.”Oh, well, thank goodness, I thought, sarcastically and, perhaps, a bit uncharitably. Somewhere in my head I heard Miranda Priestly: Strong female lead? Groundbreaking.I like a scrappy heroine as much as anyone, but leading with that foot — we’re not like the other girls, we’re the cool girls — is starting to feel stale. “Damsel” isn’t bad, but it feels a bit gnawed upon. Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (“28 Weeks Later”) from a screenplay by Dan Mazeau, it’s an action movie starring Millie Bobby Brown as Elodie, a princess from a poor kingdom ruled by her father (Ray Winstone) and stepmother (Angela Bassett). She consents to marry the handsome prince from a much wealthier realm, only to discover something far darker is at play here.There are elements of “Damsel” — including a few shots — that remind me of one of the best feminist action movies in recent memory: “Ready or Not.” In that film, released in 2019, the heroine marries into a rich family, only to discover their family traditions include a pretty horrific ritual that she must endure to survive till morning. This plot runs along similar lines, but in a fairy-tale kingdom where Robin Wright is the queen and also there are dragons. (One bit also echoes “Eyes Wide Shut,” but this is not that kind of movie.)Elodie is a princess in the latter-day Disney mold: a smart girl who can ride horses, read books, decipher a map and outsmart a trap. She is resourceful and strong and spends a lot of time figuring out how she can escape. At the beginning of the film, she is obedient and obliging and corseted; by the end, she is in a much smaller skirt and taking no guff. In short, she has become self-actualized.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Oscars 2024: Print Your Ballot to Make Your Predictions

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      Best Picture

      ☐ “American Fiction” ☐ “Anatomy of a Fall” “Barbie”

      ☐ “The Holdovers”

      ☐ “Killers of the Flower Moon”

      ☐ “Maestro”

      ☐ “Oppenheimer”

      “Past Lives”

      ☐ “Poor Things”

      “The Zone of Interest”

      Best Director

      Jonathan Glazer,

      “The Zone of Interest” Yorgos Lanthimos, “Poor Things”

      Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer”

      Martin Scorsese,

      “Killers of the Flower Moon”

      DJustine Triet,

      “Anatomy of a Fall”

      Best Actor

      Bradley Cooper,

      “Maestro”

      Colman Domingo, “Rustin”

      Paul Giamatti, “The Holdovers”

      Cillian Murphy, “Oppenheimer”

      Jeffrey Wright, “American Fiction”

      Best Actress

      Annette Bening, “Nyad”

      Lily Gladstone,

      “Killers of the Flower Moon”

      Sandra Hüller,

      “Anatomy of a Fall”

      Carey Mulligan,

      “Maestro”

      Emma Stone,

      “Poor Things”

      The New York Times

      2024 Oscars Ballot

      Best Supporting Actor

      Sterling K. Brown, “American Fiction” Robert De Niro, “Killers of the Flower Moon”

      Robert Downey Jr., “Oppenheimer”

      Ryan Gosling, “Barbie”

      Mark Ruffalo,

      “Poor Things”

      Best Supporting Actress

      ☐ Emily Blunt,

      “Oppenheimer” Danielle Brooks, “The Color Purple” America Ferrera, “Barbie”

      Jodie Foster, “Nyad”

      Da’Vine Joy Randolph, “The Holdovers”

      Original Screenplay

      ☐ “Anatomy of a Fall”

      ☐ “The Holdovers” ☐ “May December”

      “Maestro”

      “Past Lives”

      Adapted Screenplay

      “American Fiction”

      ☐ “Barbie”

      ☐ “Oppenheimer”

      “Poor Things”

      “The Zone of Interest”

      Animated Feature

      ☐ “The Boy and the Heron”

      O “Elemental”

      ☐ “Nimona”

      ☐ “Spider-Man: Across

      the Spider-Verse” “Robot Dreams”

      Production Design

      □ “Barbie”

      “Killers of the Flower Moon”

      ☐ “Napoleon”

      ☐ “Oppenheimer”

      “Poor Things”

      Costume Design

      ☐ “Barbie”

      ☐ “Killers of the Flower Moon”

      ☐ “Napoleon”

      ☐ “Oppenheimer”

      ☐ “Poor Things”

      Cinematography

      “El Conde”

      ☐ “Killers of the Flower Moon” ☐ “Maestro”

      ☐ “Oppenheimer”

      “Poor Things”

      Editing

      “Anatomy of a Fall”

      “The Holdovers”

      “Killers of the Flower Moon”

      “Oppenheimer”

      “Poor Things”

      Makeup and Hairstyling

      ☐ “Golda”

      ☐ “Maestro”

      ☐ “Oppenheimer”

      “Poor Things”

      “Society of the Snow”

      Sound

      “The Creator”

      “Maestro”

      “Mission: Impossible. Dead Reckoning Part One”

      ☐ “Oppenheimer”

      ☐ “The Zone of Interest”

      Visual Effects ☐ “The Creator”

      ☐ “Godzilla Minus One” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”

      00

      “Mission: Impossible. Dead Reckoning Part One”

      ☐ “Napoleon”

      Original Score

      “American Fiction”

      “Indiana Jones and

      the Dial of Destiny”

      ☐ “Killers of the Flower Moon”

      “Oppenheimer”

      “Poor Things”

      Original Song

      “The Fire Inside”

      (“Flamin’ Hot”)

      “I’m Just Ken” (“Barbie”) “It Never Went Away” (“American Symphony”)

      ☐ “Wahzhazhe (A Song For My People)”

      (“Killers of the Flower Moon”)

      “What Was I Made For?” (“Barbie”)

      Documentary Feature

      “Bobi Wine:

      The People’s President” “The Eternal Memory” “Four Daughters” “To Kill a Tiger”

      “20 Days in Mariupol”

      International Feature “The Teachers’ Lounge,” Germany

      “lo Capitano,”

      Italy

      “Perfect Days,”

      Japan

      “Society of the Snow,” Spain

      “The Zone of Interest,” United Kingdom

      Animated Short

      “Letter to a Pig”

      ☐ “Ninety-Five Senses” “Our Uniform” “Pachyderme”

      “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko”

      Documentary Short

      “The ABCs of Book Banning” “The Barber of Little Rock” “Island in Between” “The Last Repair Shop”

      “Nai Nai & Wai Po”

      Live-Action Short

      “The After” “Invincible” “Knight of Fortune”

      “Red, White and Blue” “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” More