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      Will These Be the 10 Best Picture Oscar Nominees?

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      Now that critics’ laurels and box office results are in, the race for the top honor is clearer. But there’s still room for an outside contender to slip in.Earlier this week, I got a text from a harried colleague. “I’m not ready for Oscar season,” she wrote.I blinked for a second before responding. Ready? This season has been going for months!Of course, I took her point: January ramps things up considerably, since we’re about to get televised awards shows (the Golden Globes on Tuesday followed by the Critics Choice Awards the following Sunday), nominations from the acting, directing and producing guilds, and then the all-important Oscar nominations, which will be announced Jan. 24.But we can already make an educated guess about the titles we’ll hear that day, since your Projectionist has spent the last few months weighing valuable factors like voter buzz, box office battles, laurels from critics groups, below-the-line Oscar shortlists, and influential citations like the Gothams and the American Film Institute Awards. With all that in mind, I’ve arrived at a list of 10 movies that I think currently have the greatest shot at making the best picture lineup.Still, this is an unusual year when even the strongest movies come with significant debits, which means there’s still room for big-budget entertainments (like “Babylon,” “Nope,” “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”), foreign-language films (including “RRR,” “Decision to Leave” and “All Quiet on the Western Front”), and indie films with strong performances (like “The Whale,” “Till,” “She Said” and “Aftersun”) to pull through. At this time last year, “CODA” looked like a middle-of-the-road contender, but a few consequential weeks later, it won enough hearts to clinch the best picture Oscar.So consider these 10 films to merely be the starting lineup, ranked in descending order according to their certainty.Steven Spielberg Gets Personal in ‘The Fabelmans’The director’s latest movie, starring Michelle Williams, focuses on Sammy Fabelman, a budding filmmaker who is a lot like Spielberg himself.Review: “The Fabelmans” is “wonderful in both large and small ways, even if Spielberg can’t help but soften the rougher, potentially lacerating edges,” our critic writes.Michelle Williams: With her portrayal of Mitzi, Sammy’s mother, the actress moves from minor-key naturalism to more stylized performances.Judd Hirsch: The actor has been singled out for his rousing performance in the film. It’s the latest chapter in a career full of anecdotes.Making ‘The Fabelmans’: In working on this semi-autobiographical movie, Spielberg confronted painful family secrets and what it means to be Jewish in America today.‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”Allyson Riggs/A24After making a film with sci-fi trappings and outlandish dildo fight scenes, the directors of “Everything Everywhere” never expected it to become an awards-season sensation. Still, if you look under the hood, this movie has everything Oscar voters typically spark to: It’s a critically acclaimed box office hit with a veteran star in a showcase role (Michelle Yeoh), a wildly rootable actor making his long-awaited comeback (Ke Huy Quan), and an original, inventive story that concludes with a series of heartwarming scenes. The only downside (and it could prove to be a potent one) is that many older voters just can’t get past the aforementioned sci-fi trappings and dildo fight scenes, and the film’s appeal is therefore lost on them. Will the passion of the academy’s younger and hipper voters be enough to make up that shortfall and push “Everything Everywhere” to the top?‘The Fabelmans’Though we may think of Steven Spielberg as an Oscar staple, it’s been more than two decades since he won his last statuette, for “Saving Private Ryan” (1998). If voters consider the most successful director of all time to be overdue for another little gold man, they might think it fitting to reward him for “The Fabelmans,” the most personal project he’s ever made. This semi-autobiographical family drama was hobbled by headlines about its meager box office take, but it’s hardly the only prestige drama to struggle in theaters this year. And once the nominations are sorted, the film should fare very well on the preferential ballot for best picture, which favors consensus crowd-pleasers.‘The Banshees of Inisherin’Could nearly half of the 20 acting nominations be sewn up by just two movies? If “Everything Everywhere” overperforms, Yeoh, Quan, and supporting actresses Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis could all be nominated. Ditto Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin,” which I think has an even better shot at earning nominations for all four of its principal actors: leading man Colin Farrell and his supporting co-stars Brendan Gleeson, Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon. (Sadly, Jenny the donkey was not eligible last time I checked.) And though McDonagh failed to make it into the best director lineup for his last film, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” the stunningly photographed vistas of “Inisherin” ought to put him over the top this time.‘Tár’Don’t be fooled by the recent best picture wins for simple-pleasure dramedies like “CODA” and “Green Book”: There is still a significant bloc of highbrow voters within the academy, and I suspect “Tár” will serve as their standard-bearer. Todd Field’s ruthlessly contemporary drama about a disgraced conductor has already entranced critics: The New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association both awarded Cate Blanchett’s lead performance and voted “Tár” the best film of the year (though the West Coast group split the difference on the latter, claiming a tie between “Tár” and “Everything Everywhere”). Field made the best picture lineup back in 2002 for his first film, “In the Bedroom,” and voters will be pleased to see that their early bet on him has more than paid off.‘Avatar: The Way of Water’From left, Tsireya (Bailey Bass), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) in “Avatar: The Way of Water.”20th Century StudiosJames Cameron’s first “Avatar” was presumed to be the runner-up in 2010’s best picture race, which ultimately crowned his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s military drama “The Hurt Locker.” Can “The Way of Water” succeed where the first film failed? I don’t think it’s got much of a chance at actually winning best picture, since Cameron has often said that the franchise is mapped out over five movies, and voters will probably wait until the far-off denouement to decide the ultimate worth of the series, as they did with the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Still, a long list of nominations is all but certain, since the movie is both a blockbuster triumph and a dazzling auteurist work that only Cameron could have pulled off.‘Elvis’It’s been 21 years since director Baz Luhrmann scored an Oscar breakthrough with the musical “Moulin Rouge” — which was nominated for eight Oscars and won two — and I expect he’ll be welcomed back in a big way for this glittery biopic of the iconic singer, played by surefire best actor nominee Austin Butler. One of the year’s only adult dramas to succeed in theaters, “Elvis” plays as though “Bohemian Rhapsody” were executed with actual panache, and Luhrmann’s maximalist aesthetic could even push him into the best director lineup, since that branch goes gaga for technical audacity.‘Top Gun: Maverick’If a well-reviewed action sequel becomes the biggest movie of the year and helps bolster struggling theaters, shouldn’t that be enough to cram it into the best picture race? Well, that argument didn’t get “Spider-Man: No Way Home” into last year’s lineup, but domestic box office champ “Top Gun: Maverick” is already off to a better start, picking up best film nominations from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards that eluded Marvel’s web-slinger. But is this Tom Cruise star vehicle actually about something, or is it just a high-flying entertainment? Oscar voters tend to turn their nose up at action sequels — the only one nominated for best picture in the last 15 years was George Miller’s astonishing “Mad Max: Fury Road” — and the next phase of this awards campaign will have to convince them that there’s more to “Top Gun: Maverick” than meets the eye.‘Triangle of Sadness’After “Parasite” won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival nearly four years ago, the upstart film studio Neon successfully leveraged the movie’s international appeal and turned it into an awards-season darling. Can the studio pull off the same feat for Ruben Ostlund’s social satire “Triangle of Sadness,” which also took the Palme and similarly mines class warfare for big laughs and shocking set pieces? It helps that this cruise-ship comedy has a secret weapon in supporting-actress contender Dolly de Leon, who plays a maid-turned-despot: At a time when most contenders are still wary of ascribing too much weight to the controversial Golden Globes, the Filipina actress has drawn headlines for discussing how much the Globe nomination means to her, and many Oscar voters will be eager to extend her awards-season moment.‘Women Talking’Judith Ivey, left, and Claire Foy in “Women Talking.” Michael Gibson/Orion PicturesAfter a big fall-festival launch, Sarah Polley’s well-reviewed Mennonite drama may have waited a little too long to come out in theaters: It was swallowed in limited release over the Christmas weekend, and will have a rough go expanding into new locations until the Oscar nominations are announced. Still, Polley is a respected actress-turned-director, the ensemble is filled with awards-friendly ringers like Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Frances McDormand, and the film’s bracing conversations about gender and sexual assault make a strong case for its relevance.‘The Woman King’Gina Prince-Bythewood’s well-mounted action epic about female warriors in 19th-century Africa has an Oscar-winning star in Viola Davis and a lot of handsome tech elements, though I’m concerned that it didn’t manage to make the Oscar shortlists for its superlative costume design and hair and makeup. (At least Terence Blanchard’s thundering score made the cut in its category.) Next week’s Producers Guild nominations could foretell the film’s ultimate fate, since that group likes to recognize rousing theatrical successes and “The Woman King,” which earned a worldwide gross nearly double its $50 million budget, will almost certainly show up there if it’s got the mettle to impress awards voters. More

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      Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams

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      With “The Fabelmans,” the Oscar-nominated actress moves from minor-key naturalism to more stylized performances: “I wanted to make work that an audience member had to deal with.”“I’ve been working as hard as I know how to make myself ready for a moment when I would meet a role like this,” Michelle Williams said of her performance as Mitzi in “The Fabelmans.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“You’re really organized,” I said to Michelle Williams.“I’m a Virgo,” she replied.On a rainy, late-November afternoon, Williams sat opposite me in a Brooklyn cafe, beaming with the kind of pleasure you can only get from plotting your day out to perfection. As we spoke, her three children were all occupied and accounted for: Her teenage daughter Matilda was at school, her toddler Hart was napping, and her newborn wouldn’t need to be fed for the next hour and a half.For all those things to come together at the same time was nothing short of a mothering miracle, and though her husband, the director Thomas Kail, was out of town, her own mother had come to New York to pitch in with the kids, freeing Williams to arrive at the cafe with the wide-eyed, can-hardly-believe-it expression of someone who had just pulled off a heist.“This is the perfect guilt-free time because nobody needs me,” Williams said, though she noted it isn’t easy to meet the demands of a press tour while breastfeeding: “I’m on somebody else’s timeline, because I’m the food.”Still, she’s doing all she can to promote “The Fabelmans,” a semi-autobiographical family drama from Steven Spielberg where the 42-year-old actress plays Mitzi, a character Spielberg based on his own mother. Though her dreams of being a concert pianist were put aside to raise her family, Mitzi treats child-rearing as a brand-new creative playground: One day, she’ll pack the kids into the car to go chase a tornado, while another time, she’ll impulsively buy a monkey as a family pet.People might look at the eccentric character and think she’s too much, but Mitzi looks at her life and knows it’s not enough. She’s married to dutiful, dull Burt (Paul Dano) but pines for his best friend (Seth Rogen), a transgression her budding-filmmaker son Sammy only cottons onto when he puts Mitzi in front of his lens. You sense that Spielberg, too, is using Williams as a vessel to better understand his late mother: The director has rarely seemed so wowed by a leading lady, shooting Williams with the same awe Sammy exhibits when he films his mother in the grips of an artistic reverie.Williams has already picked up nominations from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards for her live-wire performance. “I’ve been working as hard as I know how to make myself ready for a moment when I would meet a role like this,” she said. At the Gotham Awards, where she picked up a tribute award in November, Williams drew a line all the way back to her work on the teen soap “Dawson’s Creek,” which she starred in at age 16 alongside actors James Van Der Beek and Katie Holmes.Michelle Williams at the Long Island Bar in Brooklyn.Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“She seemed so different from the other kids, a creature unto herself even then,” said the actress Mary Beth Peil, who played Williams’s grandmother on the show. “Working with her then, her honesty was almost painful. That’s one of the main things I learned from her, that the camera can see honesty. It’s at the root of every breath she takes.”What motivated her to pursue an acting career at such a young age? “It was like a stand-in for selfhood,” Williams said, “like maybe I could get regard for a woman that I was playing and that would somehow transfer to me, this person that I didn’t really know how to inhabit yet.” As she grew older and won parts in Off Broadway plays or indie films like “The Station Agent,” it felt to her “like I was given a little morsel, and I would tuck it away,” she said. “I collected them and strung them along, and then they started adding up.”With her Oscar-nominated roles in “Brokeback Mountain,” “Blue Valentine” and “Manchester by the Sea,” as well as the naturalistic films she has made with the director Kelly Reichardt (their next collaboration, “Showing Up,” comes out this year), Williams established herself as a top-tier actress capable of unvarnished authenticity. But she is keen to experiment in a more heightened register, as she did in 2011 playing Marilyn Monroe in “My Week With Marilyn” and in 2019 with her Emmy-winning role as the dancer Gwen Verdon in the FX series “Fosse/Verdon.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.In an email, Spielberg, who wrote “The Fabelmans” with Tony Kushner, said, “She has a secret energy that poured from her when she played Gwen Verdon. That went a long way into making her my first choice to play Mitzi.”To hear Williams tell it, that shift to bigger, more stylized performances took a concerted effort; in person, she’s much more contained, with a presence as close-cropped as the pixie haircut she often favors. “It’s good for me to live like that for periods of time because it’s not my natural place,” Williams said, smiling as she recalled how much bigger she had to become to inhabit Mitzi Fabelman. “It’s the most wonderful thing to borrow.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Seth Rogen, Paul Dano and Michelle Williams in a scene from “The Fabelmans.”Universal Pictures and Amblin EntertainmentOften, when you watch these kinds of autobiographical coming-of-age movies, the moms get short shrift. But in “The Fabelmans,” the mother-son dynamic feels like the central story.I couldn’t believe it when I started turning pages in this script. My husband was in the room with me, and I kept saying, “It’s just getting better.” Very often when you have a script, you have a great scene and you think, “Oh, that’s going to be splashy.” And this was just page after page of that, just this undulating, gorgeous aliveness. When I finished, I said to my husband, “It’s a feast. They made her a feast.”It took me a long time to wrap my head around the material because the words and ideas are classic Kushner, through the lens of Steven Spielberg. So it’s filmic and it’s theatrical, which is something that really interests me and I’ve been purposefully concentrating on since I started doing theater again. I prep a lot before a movie, and there was so much to grab hold of. It felt more akin to making a mini-series because the material was so rich.What was the furthest reach for you when it came to playing a big character like Mitzi?In the first part of my career, I was doing sitcoms, TV commercials, soap operas, and I started seeing this other style called naturalism. I wanted that for me, but I had to learn what that was and how to inhabit it, and when I felt like I had arrived at that place that I had yearned to belong in — like with Kelly Reichardt, and every indie movie that I made until I was 30 — the next place that I wanted to go was into something that was more expressionist. That felt like a much further distance to cross.I felt like the journey in my 20s was to finding an authentic way to center myself so that I felt natural inside of my own skin and could offer that to other women that I was playing, but then I wanted to shed that skin completely and be able to find entirely new ways of relating to characters that didn’t always bring me along, that didn’t bind me to just myself for the rest of my working life. That required breaking myself down and then rebuilding myself in somebody else’s image, and making bigger choices.“The journey in my twenties was to finding an authentic way to center myself so that I felt natural inside of my own skin and could offer that to other women that I was playing,” Williams said, “but then I wanted to shed that skin completely and be able to find entirely new ways of relating to characters that didn’t always bring me along.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesWhat do you think drew you toward these more stylized characters?I think one of the things that I realized about naturalism — and it’s still a place that I live, I just made my fourth movie with Kelly Reichardt — is that I also wanted to make work that left a mark and that wasn’t open to projection. I wanted to make work that an audience member had to deal with, where there was less interpretation on their part because the interpretation was really my work. I feel like Mitzi belongs there, and Gwen and Marilyn belong there, and the work that I’ve done in theater belongs there. But it took a lot of learning and a lot of mistakes along the way to be comfortable leaving my own skin.I wonder if that spectrum between naturalism and stylization hasn’t been with you since the beginning. Even with something like “Dawson’s Creek,” you were given pages and pages of very dense, stylized dialogue and you had to find a way to make it sound natural.So much dialogue, oh my God. Twelve pages a day, really verbose. And yeah, the situations and scenarios that you’re working through on “Dawson’s Creek” are a little heightened.But I think people appreciate that you don’t disavow that show, and that you actually made a point of drawing a line back to “Dawson’s Creek” in your Gothams speech.Maybe there’s a connection between firstness and lastness, so I’m constantly reconnecting with my time on “Dawson’s Creek” because every project that I end somehow recalls that to me. But it was an incredible kind of training because you’re also learning these really fundamental things, like how to have a conversation with somebody where you’re looking them in the eye but some part of you is also scanning downward to hit your mark. It’s that kind of technical stuff that seems sort of silly and small that still comes in handy for me.And it’s also kind of funny that on that show, Dawson was so obsessed with Spielberg, and now here you are playing Spielberg’s mom.Oh, it’s so weird! I know. It’s so weird.From left, James Van Der Beek, Michelle Williams, Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson in a “Dawson’s Creek” episode that aired in 1999. “I’m constantly reconnecting with my time on ‘Dawson’s Creek,’” Williams said.Columbia TriStar Television, via Everett CollectionHow did you feel the day before you started shooting “The Fabelmans”?It felt like when the race is about to begin and you’re on the starting block and your feet are itching and you’re in this state of readiness. It was that kind of high.What had you so excited about inhabiting Mitzi?First of all, it feels good to be her. She was filled with music, so there was an emotional vibration running through her body at all times. I think about the scale of the piano, and that was her range: That’s how low she can go and that’s how high she can hit, so to contain all of that in you for a period of time is thrilling. And it’s the way that she approached so many things as, “Won’t this be so much fun? Won’t this make such an excellent memory for my family?” There was creativity in every aspect of her life, from how she played with the children to how she dressed herself and cut her hair. She was an artist in every fingertip.Tell me about her hair, because that helmet bob is a striking look.The hair was the first thing that we talked about. She was so acutely aware of what looked smashing on her — she wore those Peter Pan collars her entire life and they suited her so beautifully — and that curving haircut was her signature. When you look at pictures of her, they look like film stills, because she looks like a character. She was her own creation, and her entire life and her children’s lives were works of art. Ultimately, that’s what still gives me the chills as a mother of three. I can’t think of a better thing to aspire to.Do you feel the same? Are you creating lives for your children that are like works of art?It’s my aspiration. We’ll see when they’re all grown up how I did.Spielberg ends the movie shortly after Mitzi leaves her husband for another man, but what did you know about the rest of his mother’s life that helped inform how you thought of Mitzi?Later in life, she and Steven’s father had a reconnection and spent their final years together. It’s overlapping love stories, which is ultimately why the story is heartbreaking, because this love hadn’t disappeared between these two people — it had changed and turned into something else. There was still enough love in their relationship to hold a family, but in your one and only life, it still wasn’t enough to make her stay. The bravery of that decision to me! And so I never encountered her as being selfish, or unhinged. I thought this is a woman who is living so truthfully, so expressively and so bravely, and then giving that gift to each of her children because they saw her do it.Many pundits thought you were a lock to win the supporting-actress Oscar for this role, but instead, you chose to be campaigned as a lead in a very competitive awards race.I think that was a conversation that was happening outside of the core group that made this movie, and I don’t really know why there was a disparity. Although I haven’t seen the movie, the scenes that I read, the scenes that I prepped, the scenes that we shot, the scenes that I’m told are still in the movie, are akin to me with experiences that I have had playing roles considered lead. So for myself, or for anybody involved in the movie, I think we were all in unspoken agreement.“She has a secret energy that poured from her when she played Gwen Verdon,” Steven Spielberg, the director of “The Fabelmans,” said. “That went a long way into making her my first choice to play Mitzi.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesYou still haven’t seen “The Fabelmans”?I’m not able to watch my own work. I think the last thing I saw was “Meek’s Cutoff” in a theater with my daughter, so it’s been about a decade.How come?When I’m working on something, I feel so completely inside of it, and when I switch to an audience member, it alters my experience — and the experience is ultimately what I’m in it for. I can’t seem to go back and forth between the two ways to be involved in storytelling, even though I would like to be strong enough and capable of watching myself, figuring out what I would like to technically adjust and then applying it to the next time. I’ve tried to do that, but I’m getting internal bounce-back. I’m happier and maybe healthier just staying in my personal experience of playing these women.Did that make the end of filming “The Fabelmans” more fraught, because it was the last experience you’d really have with the character?On our last day, I grieved like somebody had actually died. I shocked myself by how grief-stricken I was to say goodbye to the woman that I had inhabited and the relationships that I had with these other characters. I still miss being her and having that spirit coursing through mine, so it’s nice to remember her and the urgency of that period of filming. When you’re making something, you feel like the whole world is available material — everything is tingling and anything is possible — and then, once the filming is over, you go back to breakfast tables. Which I clearly love, because I keep doubling down on kids.You seem to throw yourself into that part of your life with equal relish.It’s kind of a great way to live, to careen between these two realities of this incredibly full-on work experience and then this incredibly domestic life. I enjoy the extremity of both, but something else this experience has given me is the reminder to try and synthesize both sides of my brain.In my real life, I’m very practical, I’m very organized. I’m always making lists and feeling great if I check them off, and my work life is a place where I let all of that go and I allow myself to live unbound from time and order and right and wrong. I want to give myself more of that in my everyday life. It doesn’t have to be so linear, and Mitzi is my best reminder for that: Once she knew what she wanted, she wasted no time taking that for herself. It’s how we should all live, don’t you think? More

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      Jeremy Renner Is in Critical Condition After Snow-Plowing Accident

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      The actor, known for his role as Hawkeye in Marvel’s Avengers movies, was stable, his representative said.The actor Jeremy Renner was in critical but stable condition after being hospitalized with serious injuries from an accident while plowing snow in Nevada, his representative said in a statement.“His family is with him, and he is receiving excellent care,” the representative, Samantha Mast, said in a statement on Monday.The sheriff’s office in Washoe County, Nev., said Mr. Renner had suffered a “traumatic injury” in the Reno area on Sunday morning. He was the only person involved in the accident and was flown to a nearby hospital, the sheriff’s office said. Mr. Renner has a house in the Mount Rose-Ski Tahoe area, according to The Reno-Gazette Journal.Mr. Renner, 51, has played Hawkeye, a member of Marvel’s Avengers superheroes team, in several movies and a television series. He has also twice been nominated for an Oscar, for his roles in “The Hurt Locker” (2008) and “The Town” (2010).Mr. Renner has shared several updates on social media this winter as the area received large amounts of snow.“Nearly done With sledding hill For the kids,” said a caption on an Instagram video clip showing a snow plow last week.“Lake Tahoe snowfall is no joke,” he said in a tweet last month that showed a vehicle covered in snow.Mr. Renner stars in “Mayor of Kingstown,” a thriller whose second season is set to be released on the Paramount+ streaming service on Jan. 15. Another show, “Rennervations,” which follows Mr. Renner as he helps communities to reimagine purpose-built vehicles, is scheduled to air on Disney+ early this year.The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning over the weekend for the areas around Reno, in addition to a warning that was in place for the Lake Tahoe Basin. On Saturday and Sunday, the Tahoe Basin at lake level received between 20 and 24 inches of snow, the Weather Service in Reno said.The Weather Service on Sunday advised those with travel plans through the Sierra Nevada to prepare for winter weather driving conditions and warned of icy roads as additional storms arrive. About 22,000 customers in Nevada were without power early Monday after the storm, according to poweroutage.us, which aggregates data from utilities across the country. More

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      Songs from Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga Make the Oscar Shortlist

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      The academy also released shortlists for documentary, international feature and seven other categories.Will pop superstars like Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga take the stage at the Oscars next year? That possibility became more likely when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released its shortlist for best original song on Wednesday.The Rihanna song “Lift Me Up” (from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) made the cut, as did Swift’s “Carolina” (“Where the Crawdads Sing”) and Lady Gaga’s anthem “Hold My Hand” (“Top Gun: Maverick”).Other songs on the short list include Selena Gomez’s “My Mind & Me” from the documentary about her; the Weeknd tune “Nothing Is Lost (You Give Me Strength)” from the new “Avatar” sequel; and “New Body Rhumba,” the tune that LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy wrote for “White Noise.”Also on the list is the “Spirited” ditty “Good Afternoon” from the songwriting team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. They’re familiar names to Oscar voters: In 2017, they won best original song for “City of Stars” from “La La Land.” A nomination next month would be their fourth in this category.The shortlist for documentary feature included biographical studies like “All the Bloodshed and the Beauty” (about the photographer Nan Goldin) and “Moonage Daydream” (David Bowie), as well as historical examinations like “Descendant” (focused on the Clotilda, the last known ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States) and “The Janes” (named after a collective that provided abortions in the years before Roe v. Wade).Meanwhile. the international feature shortlist is stacked with festival favorites from around the world, including “Decision to Leave,” the South Korean noir from Park Chan-wook; “Bardo” (Mexico), directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu; and Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer” (France), based on a true story. Pakistan’s “Joyland” also made the cut: It features a relationship involving a transgender woman and was temporarily banned in that country.In all, the academy released shortlists for 10 categories — including visual effects, score, sound, and hair and makeup — in advance of the nominations on Jan. 24. Here are the shortlists for song, documentary feature and international feature. For the rest of the categories, go to oscars.org.Original Song“Time” from “Amsterdam”“Nothing Is Lost (You Give Me Strength)” from “Avatar: The Way of Water”“Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”“This Is a Life” from “Everything Everywhere All at Once”“Ciao Papa” from “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”“Til You’re Home” from “A Man Called Otto”“Naatu Naatu” from “RRR”“My Mind & Me” from “Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me”“Good Afternoon” from “Spirited”“Applause” from “Tell It like a Woman”“Stand Up” from “Till”“Hold My Hand” from “Top Gun: Maverick”“Dust & Ash” from “The Voice of Dust and Ash”“Carolina” from “Where the Crawdads Sing”“New Body Rhumba” from “White Noise”Documentary Feature“All That Breathes”“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”“Bad Axe”“Children of the Mist”“Descendant”“Fire of Love”“Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song”“Hidden Letters”“A House Made of Splinters”“The Janes”“Last Flight Home”“Moonage Daydream”“Navalny”“Retrograde”“The Territory”International FeatureArgentina, “Argentina, 1985”Austria, “Corsage”Belgium, “Close”Cambodia, “Return to Seoul”Denmark, “Holy Spider”France, “Saint Omer”Germany, “All Quiet on the Western Front”India, “Last Film Show”Ireland, “The Quiet Girl”Mexico, “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths”Morocco, “The Blue Caftan”Pakistan, “Joyland”Poland, “EO”South Korea, “Decision to Leave”Sweden, “Cairo Conspiracy” More

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      Inside the Oscars’ Best-Actress Battle Royale

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      Forget the men: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Clockwise from top left, Margot Robbie in “Babylon”; Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; Danielle Deadwyler in “Till”; Cate Blanchett in “Tár”; Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans”; and Viola Davis in “The Woman King.”Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures; A24; Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion Pictures; Focus Features; Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures, via Amblin Entertainment; Sony PicturesBy their very nature, awards shows are designed to exclude, barring all but a few from the glory of earning a nomination.Still, this year’s race for the best-actress Oscar is so stacked with contenders that I’m ready to comb the academy bylaws for a workaround. Are five slots really enough to honor a field this formidable? Couldn’t we swipe a few more from the wan best-actor category, at least?The truth is, even 10 slots would barely scratch the surface of what the best-actress race has to offer. Many of the season’s most acclaimed films, like “Tár” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” have given career-best signature roles to their leading ladies, though only one woman can collect the Oscar. Meanwhile, a vast array of up-and-comers, actresses playing against type and underdogs worth a second look will be vying simply to make the final five. Here are the women contending in this season’s most exciting category.The Front-runnersIn the fictional world of “Tár,” the conniving conductor played by Cate Blanchett has been showered with an absurd amount of awards. By the end of this season, Blanchett herself may keep pace with her character.The two-time Oscar winner’s bravura performance — she learned German, orchestra conducting and piano for the role — has netted the most notable prizes so far: In addition to nominations from the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, Independent Spirit Awards and Gotham Awards, Blanchett won the Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival and a pair of leading trophies from the New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association. The last time Blanchett triumphed with the critics groups on both coasts, she was well on her way to winning her second Oscar, for “Blue Jasmine.”If she wins her third, the 53-year-old would be the youngest woman ever to reach that milestone. (Meryl Streep, Frances McDormand and Ingrid Bergman are the only other actresses to have won three Oscars each for their performances, while Katharine Hepburn holds the record with four.) But those laurels could also count against Blanchett in a race where her strongest competitor has never even been nominated and is angling for a historic win.Michelle Yeoh came close to snagging a supporting-actress nomination for “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), but this time, she’s undeniable: The 60-year-old’s leading role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” as an ordinary woman who becomes the multiverse’s last hope, should earn Yeoh her first Oscar nod.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.The role shows off everything Yeoh is capable of — including her athleticism, precise character work and sense of humor — and she has teared up in interviews while discussing how rarely a movie like that is offered to an Asian actress. In a recent awards round table, Yeoh told the other actresses, “I honestly look at all of you with such envy because you get an opportunity to try all the different roles, but we only get that opportunity maybe once in a long, long time.” Indeed, no Asian woman has ever won best actress, and after 94 ceremonies, the only winner of color in the category remains Halle Berry for “Monster’s Ball.”Can Yeoh pull off a landmark victory? It may help that she has a more sympathetic character arc: While Blanchett’s Lydia Tár compels and confounds in equal measure, Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang learns to drop her guard and let love in. But the competition in this category is fierce, and Blanchett isn’t the only heavyweight she’ll be contending with.For playing a character based on Steven Spielberg’s mother in “The Fabelmans,” Michelle Williams is likely to score her fifth Oscar nomination, which puts her behind Glenn Close and Amy Adams as the three living actresses who’ve been nominated the most times without having won. That gives Williams a potent “she’s due” narrative that could siphon votes from both Blanchett and Yeoh; it helps, too, that she gives her all to the part, playing a vivacious woman whose spirit couldn’t be contained by her marriage.The “Till” star Danielle Deadwyler won the first lead-performance trophy of the season at last month’s Gotham Awards, and she’ll need that momentum to overcome striking snubs from the Independent Spirits and Golden Globes. Still, her emotionally precise performance as the mother of Emmett Till has Oscar-friendly heft, since voters often gravitate toward an actor playing a historical figure.It’s rarer that Oscar voters make room for an action heroine in the best-actress category: Though Sigourney Weaver earned a nomination for “Aliens,” Charlize Theron found no traction for “Mad Max: Fury Road.” But there’s more to what Viola Davis does in “The Woman King” than just wielding a spear. Her fierce warrior is weary and her battle yells pack a cathartic punch. If the movie can make it into the best-picture lineup, Davis should be swept in.Damien Chazelle’s debauched Hollywood dramedy “Babylon” has earned wildly mixed reviews, but the director helmed two Oscar-winning performances — Emma Stone in “La La Land” and J.K. Simmons in “Whiplash” — and that pedigree has pushed Margot Robbie into contention for her role as a fledgling actress convinced of her own star quality. Nominations for “I, Tonya” and “Bombshell” prove that voters like Robbie in ambitious-striver mode, though the movie is stuffed so full of characters that she can’t quite dominate the proceedings like some of her best-actress competition.Oscar voters might consider an ingénue like Ana de Armas for her performance as Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde.” NetflixThe Women Waiting in the WingsCan two Oscar favorites overcome muted streaming launches in a year when theatrical contenders reign supreme? “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” hands Emma Thompson a sexually frank showcase role that had Oscar pundits buzzing at January’s Sundance Film Festival, but the film’s quiet June debut on Hulu drew fewer headlines. And despite a best-picture win this year for “CODA,” Apple TV+ still struggles to get all those “Ted Lasso” and “Severance” viewers to watch exclusive movies like “Causeway,” though the film features a strong, back-to-basics lead performance from Jennifer Lawrence.At least “Blonde” managed a streaming debut that got people talking, though the punishing Netflix drama about Marilyn Monroe had some awfully loud detractors. Can its star, Ana de Armas, rise above those pans? She managed a Golden Globe nomination, at least, and Oscar voters love to single out a rising ingénue, but the film will prove a tough sit in a year with plenty of better-received options.In the first hour of “Empire of Light,” Olivia Colman plays a movie-theater worker who opens herself up to an appealing romance, but in the second, the character goes off her meds and the movie goes off the rails. Even if those two halves don’t quite cohere, Colman definitely gets some big moments to play, and the actress has so quickly become an Oscar mainstay (over the last four years, she has been nominated three times and won once) that she should be considered a perennial option for the final five.Rooney Mara is spirited and sensitive in “Women Talking,” but the studio’s decision to campaign her as a lead actress is tenuous: In this ensemble drama about conflicted Mennonite women, Mara has scarcely more screen time than Claire Foy or Jessie Buckley, who are being positioned as supporting-actress contenders. Then again, Mara is no stranger to category high jinks: Six years ago, she was nominated as a supporting actress for “Carol,” even though she was clearly playing that film’s protagonist.Keke Palmer won a New York Film Critics Circle award for supporting actress for “Nope” even if it really was a lead performance. Universal PicturesThe Dark-Horse ContendersIf social media memes could be counted as accolades, Mia Goth would surely give Blanchett’s haul a run for her money: The young actress’s work in “Pearl,” in which she plays a farm girl who’d kill for stardom, has Twitter awash in Goth GIFs. Ti West’s technicolor horror drama isn’t the sort of thing that Oscar voters usually go for, but Goth is fearsomely committed, knocking out a tour de force, eight-minute monologue that’s topped only by a sustained closing shot of the actress smiling until she cries. At the very least, it’d make for one memorable Oscar clip.I hope that as the membership of the academy grows ever more international, more powerhouse performances will be recognized in languages other than English. In Park Chan-wook’s South Korean noir “Decision to Leave,” Tang Wei is a terrific femme fatale, while Léa Seydoux delivers her finest work as a single mother in the French drama “One Fine Morning.” And Oscar voters who regret snubbing Vicky Krieps for “Phantom Thread” could make it up to her by checking out the royal drama “Corsage,” in which she plays Empress Elisabeth of Austria with beguiling irreverence.Comedic actresses are too often undervalued by Oscar voters, but Aubrey Plaza spent 2022 proving she was capable of much more: Fans of her breakout performance in HBO’s “The White Lotus” should check out her dark, edgy work in the drama “Emily the Criminal,” which earned nominations from the Gothams and Indie Spirits. And “Nope,” which topped our critic A.O. Scott’s list of the best films of the year, boasts a charismatic star turn by Keke Palmer that recently earned a win from the New York Film Critics Circle, even if the group had to pretend she gave a supporting performance to get her out of the way of Blanchett’s leading win. Normally, I’d discourage that kind of category fraud, but in this crowded year, I sympathize with the desire to bend some rules. More

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      ‘The Fabelmans’ Is Judd Hirsch’s Latest Great Story

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      The veteran actor has been singled out for his rousing performance in Steven Spielberg’s drama. It’s the latest chapter in a long career full of anecdotes.“Have we met before?” Judd Hirsch asked enthusiastically as he strode into a French bistro last month. “I’ve met everybody before. Maybe we met when you were a baby and I said, ‘I’ll see you when you’re older.’”When you invite Hirsch, the veteran actor and raconteur, on a lunch date, you’re going to hear stories on top of stories — stories you knew you wanted and stories you didn’t know you were going to get.The instant he took his seat, Hirsch spun a tale about the afternoon’s dining spot, Boucherie West Village, whose building once housed the Off Broadway theater where he co-starred in the original 1979 production of “Talley’s Folly” by Lanford Wilson.As the actor told it, an agent affiliated with the play wanted to replace Hirsch because his role in the hit sitcom “Taxi” was going to conflict with a planned Broadway transfer for “Talley’s Folly.”Instead, Hirsch helped bring the play to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where he performed it that summer and fall during his downtime from “Taxi.” The following winter, Hirsch said proudly, “I came back and did it on Broadway, and it won the Pulitzer Prize.”Riding on similar waves of showbiz know-how and sheer bravado, Hirsch can currently be seen barnstorming his way through a crucial portion of “The Fabelmans,” the director Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama.Hirsch has only a few minutes of screen time, playing Boris, the cantankerous great-uncle of its adolescent protagonist, Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle). But the 87-year-old actor makes every frame count as he delivers a galvanic speech to the young Spielberg stand-in, exhorting him to commit to his artistic aspirations while warning that they will be in perpetual conflict with the needs of his family.Hirsch opposite Gabriel LaBelle in “The Fabelmans.” He’s not on the screen for long but he makes every frame count.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, via Associated PressHirsch’s unexpectedly intense performance in “The Fabelmans” — the latest in a decades-long career spanning stage, screen and a 1972 commercial for JCPenney polyester slacks — would seem to be a testament to his endurance in a singularly fickle industry.But while he is happy for the plum opportunity in a prestigious year-end film, Hirsch could not quite point to any particular reason he should be enjoying another moment in the spotlight right now.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.“I have no idea why I get any part that somebody else can play,” he said. “Or why I don’t get one when I do want to play it. But I’m old enough to know that’s OK.”Approval is always nice, but Hirsch suggested that an actor’s temperament was forged in far more frequent instances of rejection. When you don’t land a role, he explained, “you can say, ‘What the hell did they see in me that made them turn me down?’ Or you can say, ‘They don’t know what the hell they’re missing.’”Though he’s long split his time between Los Angeles and New York, Hirsch was born and raised in New York, and didn’t expect much for himself after studying acting at HB Studio in the early 1960s. “I never thought I’d play anything more than a construction worker, criminal or some schlubby guy,” he said.Instead he went on to play a variety of prominent roles on television (“Taxi,” “Dear John,” “Numbers”), in film (“Ordinary People,” “Independence Day,” “Uncut Gems”) and onstage (“I’m Not Rappaport”).Presently, when Hirsch wasn’t kibitzing playfully with a waiter (“You don’t mind if I don’t speak French?” the actor said, looking over his menu. “I could say some of those words with a French accent”), he was just as fond of sharing anecdotes from an era when he wasn’t well established.There was, for instance, the fateful introduction he received while visiting Universal to audition for a TV movie in the early 1970s.Hirsch has been an awards contender before. He was up for an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony for work he did in 1980, and didn’t win any of the prizes.Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesA woman working there began to show him around to other people in the office: “This is so-and-so,” Hirsch recounted. “And this is so-and-so. This is Mr. Spielberg, and he’s sitting behind a desk, and on his desk is ‘Jaws,’ which I had no idea was anything. And she said” — his voice dropped to a stage whisper — “‘He’s going to be very big.’”“He would not have known of me,” Hirsch said of the fleeting encounter. “Look at all the Spielberg movies since — and I’m not in any of them.”But their trajectories intersected again a half-century later on “The Fabelmans.” The dramatist Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”), who wrote the screenplay with Spielberg, said that the Boris character was based on an actual member of the director’s extended family.The real-life Uncle Boris “had worked in some animal handling in the early days of Hollywood and he had been in the circus,” said Kushner, who has collaborated with Spielberg on “Munich,” “Lincoln” and “West Side Story.” Kushner added that the actual Boris “had lived a wild, itinerant life, and that had made him a fearsome figure to his sister, and to his nieces and nephews.”The scene written for the fictional Boris was intended to impart a lesson about the cost of pursuing an artistic life, Kushner said: “Art has a power that one only imagines one controls. When you access it, if you’re really practicing it, it’s going to take you to the truth. And the truth is sometimes going to be very dangerous.”Hirsch, who was cast after a video conversation with Spielberg, said his preparation was far less weighty.“He said you can play it with an accent or not,” Hirsch recalled. “After I read it, I said, what schmuck would not? He’s going to have to like it this way because I’m not going to do it any other way.”Hirsch said he could channel the frantic passion of the film’s Boris, who feels frustrated that his message is not reaching young Sammy. But the actor said there was only one moment he was “truly scared to do,” when the scene required him to get physical with LaBelle.“I line the kid up against the wall and I say, ‘Look at me — look at me,’” Hirsch said. “After all that, I want him to see what I had to go through.”LaBelle said he encouraged Hirsch to “beat the [expletive] out of me.”“The moment where he pinches my face, I was like, ‘No, no, hurt me. Come on, let’s do it,’” LaBelle recalled.He added, “It’s not like I’m hanging on the side of a plane. I’m just getting my face pinched.”Whether his “Fabelmans” performance garners any attention for a year-end film award, Hirsch noted that he had been down this road before.Hirsch said the only “Fabelmans” scene that gave him pause was one requiring him to get physical with LaBelle. But the younger actor wasn’t fazed. “I was like, ‘No, no, hurt me,’” LaBelle said.Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesHe pointed out that for work he did in 1980 alone, he was nominated for an Oscar (for “Ordinary People”), an Emmy (“Taxi”) and a Tony (“Talley’s Folly”) — and won none of them. Though Hirsch didn’t mention this, he did go on to win Emmys for “Taxi” in 1981 and 1983.Hirsch said he was actually relieved he didn’t win for “Ordinary People,” in which he played a psychiatrist treating a traumatized teenager (Timothy Hutton). Both men were nominated as supporting actors, and Hirsch suggested that Hutton — who ultimately won — was more deserving of the honor.“I said, what’s the worst thing that could happen to me?” Hirsch explained. “I win this damn thing and then have to look at him and make excuse, excuse, excuse — ‘They made a terrible mistake, it should have been you.’”After a server asked him if he would like some black coffee (“That’s the usual color, isn’t it?” Hirsch replied without missing a beat), the actor resumed delving into his trove of stories from projects that did not earn him any trophies or recognition.He spoke of his performance in the 1978 drama “King of the Gypsies,” in which his character is shot by Eric Roberts and falls out an apartment window to his death.“So I said who’s going to do that?” Hirsch recalled. “They said, ‘You.’ I said, ‘OK.’ I arrive at the set and there’s one of those enormous air mattresses in the street.”Hirsch said he filmed three takes of his fatal fall, but while the finished sequence in the movie shows him taking gunfire and toppling out the window, the part where his character lands on a car was performed by a stuntman.“Luckily I didn’t have to hit a car,” he said. “Otherwise, you and I would not be talking here.” More

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      Highbrow Films Aimed at Winning Oscars Are Losing Audiences

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      The kind of critically praised dramas that often dominate the awards season are falling flat at the box office, failing to justify the money it takes to make them.A year ago, Hollywood watched in despair as Oscar-oriented films like “Licorice Pizza” and “Nightmare Alley” flatlined at the box office. The day seemed to have finally arrived when prestige films were no longer viable in theaters and streaming had forever altered cinema.But studios held out hope, deciding that November 2022 would give a more accurate reading of the marketplace. By then, the coronavirus would not be such a complicating factor. This fall would be a “last stand,” as some put it, a chance to show that more than superheroes and sequels could succeed.It has been carnage.One after another, films for grown-ups have failed to find an audience big enough to justify their cost. “Armageddon Time” cost roughly $30 million to make and market and collected $1.9 million at the North American box office. “Tár” cost at least $35 million, including marketing; ticket sales total $5.3 million. Universal spent around $55 million to make and market “She Said,” which also took in $5.3 million. “Devotion” cost well over $100 million and has generated $14 million in ticket sales.Even a charmer from the box office king, Steven Spielberg, has gotten off to a humdrum start. “The Fabelmans,” based on Mr. Spielberg’s adolescence, has collected $5.7 million in four weeks of limited play. Its budget was $40 million, not including marketing.What is going on?The problem is not quality: Reviews have been exceptional. Rather, “people have grown comfortable watching these movies at home,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers.“The Fabelmans,” directed by Steven Spielberg, has gotten off to a slow start at the box office.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin EntertainmentEver since Oscar-oriented films began showing up on streaming services in the late 2010s, Hollywood has worried that such movies would someday vanish from multiplexes. The diminishing importance of big screens was accentuated in March, when, for the first time, a streaming film, “CODA” from Apple TV+, won the Academy Award for best picture. ‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.The Song of the Fall?: A 120-year-old symphony by the composer Gustav Mahler is finding new life with unlikely listeners after a star turn in the film.This is about more than money: Hollywood sees the shift as an affront to its identity. Film power players have long clung to the fantasy that the cultural world revolves around them, as if it were 1940. But that delusion is hard to sustain when their lone measuring stick — bodies in seats — reveals that the masses can’t be bothered to come watch the films that they prize most. Hollywood equates this with cultural irrelevancy.Sure, a core crowd of cinephiles is still turning out. “Till,” focused on Mamie Till-Mobley, whose son, Emmett Till, was murdered in Mississippi in 1955, has collected $8.9 million in the United States and Canada. That’s not nothing for an emotionally challenging film. “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a dark comedy with heavily accented dialogue, has also brought in $8 million, with overseas ticket buyers contributing an additional $20 million.“While it is clear the theatrical specialty market hasn’t fully rebounded, we’ve seen ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ continue to perform strongly and drive conversation among moviegoers,” Searchlight Pictures said in a statement. “We firmly believe there’s a place in theaters for films that can offer audiences a broad range of cinematic experiences.”Still, crossover attention is almost always the goal, as underlined by how much film companies are spending on some of these productions. “Till,” for instance, cost at least $33 million to make and market.And remember: Theaters keep roughly half of any ticket revenue.The hope is for results more in line with “The Woman King.” Starring Viola Davis as the leader of an all-female group of African warriors, “The Woman King” collected nearly $70 million at domestic theaters ($92 million worldwide). It cost $50 million to produce and tens of millions more to market.“The Woman King,” starring Viola Davis, is one of the few Oscar-oriented films this year that has struck a box office chord, bringing in about $70 million.Ilze Kitshoff/Sony PicturesOscar-oriented dramas rarely become blockbusters. Even so, these movies used to do quite well at the box office. The World War I film “1917” generated $159 million in North America in 2019 and $385 million worldwide. In 2010, “Black Swan,” starring Natalie Portman as a demented ballerina, collected $107 million ($329 million worldwide).Most studios either declined to comment for this article or provided anodyne statements about being proud of the prestige dramas they have recently released, regardless of ticket sales.The unwillingness to engage publicly on the matter may reflect the annual awards race. Having a contender labeled a box office misfire is not great for vote gathering. (Oscar nominations will be announced on Jan. 24.) Or it may be because, behind the scenes, studios still seem to be grasping for answers.Ask 10 different specialty film executives to explain the box office and you will get 10 different answers. There have been too many dramas in theaters lately, resulting in cannibalization; there have been too few, leaving audiences to look for options on streaming services. Everyone has been busy watching the World Cup on television. No, it’s television dramas like “The Crown” that have undercut these films.Some are still blaming the coronavirus. But that doesn’t hold water. While initially reluctant to return to theaters, older audiences, for the most part, have come to see theaters as a virus-safe activity, according to box office analysts, citing surveys. Nearly 60 percent of “Woman King” ticket buyers were over the age of 35, according to Sony Pictures Entertainment.Hollywood considers anyone over 35 to be “old,” and this is who typically comes to see dramas.Maybe it is more nuanced? Older audiences are back, one longtime studio executive suggested, but sophisticated older audiences are not — in part because some of their favorite art house theaters have closed and they don’t want to mix with the multiplex masses. (He was serious. “Too many people, too likely to encounter a sticky floor.”)Grim dramas have struggled, but sparkly ones have succeeded. “Elvis,” starring Austin Butler, took in $151 million in North America.Warner Bros.Others see a problem with the content. Most of the movies that are struggling at the box office are downbeat, coming at a time when audiences want escape. Consider the successful spring release of the rollicking “Everything, Everywhere All at Once,” which collected $70 million in North America. Baz Luhrmann’s bedazzled “Elvis” delivered $151 million in domestic ticket sales. .“People like to call it ‘escape,’ but that’s not actually what it is,” Jeanine Basinger, the film scholar, said. “It’s entertainment. It can be a serious topic, by the way. But when films are too introspective, as many of these Oscar ones now are, the audience gets forgotten about.“Give us a laugh or two in there! When I think about going out to see misery and degradation and racism and all the other things that are wrong with our lives, I’m too depressed to put on my coat,” continued Ms. Basinger, whose latest book, “Hollywood: The Oral History,” co-written with Sam Wasson, arrived last month.Some studio executives insist that box office totals are an outdated way of assessing whether a film will generate a financial return. Focus Features, for instance, has evolved its business model in the last two years. The company’s films, which include “Tár” and “Armageddon Time,” are now made available for video-on-demand rental — for a premium price — after as little as three weeks in theaters. (Before, theaters got an exclusive window of about 90 days.) The money generated by premium in-home rentals is substantial, Focus has said, although it has declined to provide financial information to support that assertion.Some films, like “Armageddon Time,” now become available for digital rental after they spend just three weeks in theaters.Anne Joyce/Focus FeaturesThe worry in Hollywood is that such efforts will still fall short — that the conglomerates that own specialty film studios will decide there is not enough return on prestige films in theaters to continue releasing them that way. Disney owns Searchlight. Comcast owns Focus. Amazon owns United Artists. The chief executives of these companies like being invited to the Oscars. But they like profit even more.“The good news is we’ve now got a very large streaming business that we can go ahead and redirect that content toward those channels,” Bob Chapek, Disney’s former chief executive, said at a public event on Nov. 8, referring to prestige films. (Robert A. Iger, who has since returned to run Disney, may feel differently.)Others continue to advocate patience. Mr. Gross pointed out that “The Fabelmans” will roll into more theaters over the next month, hoping to capitalize on awards buzz — it is a front-runner for the 2023 best picture Oscar — and the end-of-year holidays. Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon,” a drug-and-sex induced fever dream about early Hollywood, is scheduled for wide release on Dec. 23.“I think movies are going to come back,” Mr. Spielberg recently told The New York Times. “I really do.”Steven Spielberg, on the set of his production “The Fabelmans.” Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment More

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      Julia Reichert, Documentarian of the Working Class, Dies at 76

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      She took home, to Ohio, a 2019 Oscar for “American Factory,” and in a long career teaching and making films, she paid special attention to working women.Julia Reichert, a filmmaker and educator who made a pioneering feminist documentary, “Growing Up Female,” as an undergraduate student and almost a half-century later won an Academy Award for “American Factory,” a documentary feature about the Chinese takeover of a shuttered automobile plant in Dayton, Ohio, died on Thursday at her home in nearby Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was 76.Steven Bognar, her husband and filmmaking partner, confirmed the death. The cause, diagnosed in 2018, was urothelial cancer, which affects the urethra, bladder and other organs. She learned she had non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2006.Ms. Reichert, a longtime professor of motion pictures at Wright State University in Dayton, was in the forefront of a new generation of social documentarians who came out of the New Left and feminist movements of the early 1970s with a belief in film as an organizing tool with a social mission. Her films were close to oral history: Eschewing voice-over narration, they were predicated on interviews in which her mainly working-class subjects spoke for themselves.“Growing Up Female” (1971), which she made with her future husband, James Klein, a classmate at Antioch College in Ohio, was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry in 2011.Her documentaries “Union Maids” (1976), made with Mr. Klein and Miles Mogelescu, and “Seeing Red” (1983), also made with Mr. Klein, were both nominated for Academy Awards.Both movies mix archival footage with interviews. “Union Maids” profiles three women active in the Chicago labor movement during the Great Depression. “Seeing Red” portrays rank-and-file members of the Communist Party during the 1930s and ’40s.Ms. Reichert was again nominated, in 2010, for the short documentary “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” which she directed with Mr. Bognar, her second husband.“The Last Truck” documented the closing of a an automobile assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, some of it clandestinely filmed by workers inside the plant. The movie served as a prologue to “American Factory,” which Netflix released in conjunction with Barack and Michelle Obama’s fledgling company Higher Ground Productions, and which won the 2019 documentary-feature Oscar.Reviewing the film in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called it “complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped, spanning continents as it surveys the past, present and possible future of American labor.”The movie is suffused in ambivalence. Having purchased the same plant documented in “The Last Truck,” a Chinese billionaire converts it into an automobile-glass factory and restores lost jobs while confounding American workers with a new set of attitudes.In 2020, Ms. Reichert and Mr. Bognar were invited by the comedian Dave Chappelle to document one of the outdoor stand-up shows he hosted during the Covid pandemic from a cornfield near his home in Yellow Springs. The two-hour feature “Dave Chappelle: Live in Real Life” had its premiere at Radio City Music Hall as part of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.Although Ms. Reichert addressed a variety of social issues in the documentaries she directed and produced, her enduring interests were labor history and the lives of working women. Her last film, “9to5: The Story of a Movement,” directed with Mr. Bognar, brought those two concerns together, focusing on the organizing of female office workers beginning in the 1970s.Ms. Reichert with Mr. Bognar and Chad Cannon, who composed the score for “American Factory,” at a screening of the film in Los Angeles in 2019.Araya Diaz/Getty ImagesJulia Bell Reichert was born on June 16, 1946, in Bordentown, N.J., a city on the Delaware River about eight miles southeast of Trenton. She was the second of four children of Louis and Dorothy (Bell) Reichert. Her father was a butcher in a neighborhood supermarket, her mother a homemaker who became a nurse.One of the few students from her high school to go to college, Ms. Reichert was attracted to Antioch because of its cooperative work-study program. Her parents were conservative Republicans, but once she was at Antioch Ms. Reichert’s political orientation shifted left. She canvased for the Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, during the 1964 election and hosted a feminist program, “The Single Girl,” on the campus radio station. She later credited her radio experience with honing her documentary skills.“I came out of radio,” she said in an interview with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scientists before winning the 2019 Oscar. “So without having to spend any money, I learned a lot about interviewing and editing and mixing music and how to talk — how to tell a story in a time frame.”Ms. Reichert also took a film course at Antioch with the avant-garde filmmaker David Brooks and organized a documentary workshop with Mr. Klein. After making “Growing Up Female,” which was originally intended for consciousness-raising groups, she and Mr. Klein founded a distribution cooperative, New Day Films, which focused on bringing new documentary films to schools, unions and community groups.The couple also collaborated on the documentary “Methadone: An American Way of Dealing,” in addition to “Union Maids” and “Seeing Reds.”Vincent Canby of The Times, who discovered “Union Maids” in early 1977 on a double bill in a limited run at a downtown Manhattan theater, called it “one of the more moving, more cheering theatrical experiences available in New York this weekend.”He was similarly supportive of “Seeing Red,” which was first shown at the 1983 New York Film Festival, and which is arguably the most sympathetic portrayal of American Communists ever put onscreen. Mr. Canby considered it “a fine, tough companion piece to ‘Union Maids.’” Rather than dogma, he wrote, the subject was “American idealism.”Ms. Reichert started a filmmaking program at Wright State University with Mr. Klein. She also directed a quasi-autobiographical feature film, “Emma and Elvis” (1992), written with Mr. Bognar, about a married documentary filmmaker who becomes involved with a young video artist. Although the film received only limited distribution, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum praised it in The Chicago Reader for “making a filmmaker’s creative/midlife crisis meaningful, engaging and interesting.”Mr. Reichert and Mr. Bognar during the filming of “American Factory.”NetflixMs. Reichert’s most personal film — the first she directed with Mr. Bognar — was “A Lion in the House,” a documentary about children with cancer completed in 2006 after having been in production for close to a decade. It was inspired in part by her adolescent daughter’s struggle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her daughter recovered, but after the film was completed Ms. Reichert was herself diagnosed with cancer.“A Lion in the House” won multiple awards, including a Primetime Emmy, the 2006 Sundance Film Festival grand jury documentary award and the 2008 Independent Spirit Award for best documentary.Ms. Reichert’s marriage to Mr. Klein ended in divorce in 1986. She married Mr. Bognar, who survives her, in 1987. She is also survived by her daughter, Lela Klein; three brothers, Louis, Craig and Joseph Reichert; and two grandchildren.Ms. Reichert was very much a regional filmmaker. After graduating from Antioch, she remained in the Dayton area and became a source of inspiration for other Midwestern documentarians, including Michael Moore and Steve James. She also produced a number of films.In an appreciation written for a 2019 retrospective of her work at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich recalled that Ms. Reichert had “defied every stereotype I’d had of independent filmmakers.”“She wasn’t rich, and she wasn’t arrogant or egotistical,” wrote Ms. Ehrenreich, the author, of “Nickel and Dimed” (2001), about the working poor in America. (She died in September.) “The daughter of a butcher and a house cleaner turned registered nurse, she dressed and spoke plainly, usually beaming with enthusiasm, and never abandoned her Midwestern roots.”She might have added that virtually all of Ms. Reichert’s films were explicitly collective enterprises.A scene from “American Factory,” depicting workers at an auto-glass factory in Ohio.Netflix, via Everett CollectionIn an email, Mr. Klein wrote that he and Ms. Reichert “came of age with a sense that it was only through community that the type of work we wanted to see being made could happen.”“And Julia really lived her beliefs,” he added.Despite her politics, Ms. Reichert was by her account less interested in ideology than she was in people. In an interview with Cineaste magazine, she called the subjects of “Seeing Red” “some of the most wonderful people you’ll ever want to meet.”“They made a very positive life choice, despite everything they went through,” she said.“American Factory,” which deals with the mutual culture shock experienced by Chinese and American workers and their reconciliation, was Ms. Reichert’s most ethnically and racially diverse film. The movie, she told an interviewer, “tries to be very fair by listening to everyone’s point of view — that of the chairman” — Cao Dewang, the billionaire Chinese entrepreneur who purchased and reopened the factory — “union people, anti-union people, and workers.”Indeed, Mr. Cao, a product of Communist China who teaches American workers the hard realities of global capitalism, is in many respects the film’s protagonist.Although a fully committed artist, Ms. Reichert wore her politics so lightly that almost no one seemed to notice when she concluded her Oscar acceptance speech for “American Factory” by cheerfully citing the best-known phrase from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s “Communist Manifesto.”“We believe that things will get better,” she said, “when the workers of the world unite.”Lyna Bentahar contributed reporting. More