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      What to Watch For at the Oscars: ‘Emilia Pérez,’ Cynthia Erivo and More

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      From the most competitive races to the lasting controversies, here’s a guide to becoming an instant expert.The Best Picture Race Looks Wide OpenRalph Fiennes in “Conclave,” which is a top contender for the best picture Oscar. Its biggest competition: “Anora.”Focus FeaturesWhen the Ralph Fiennes-led papal thriller “Conclave” secured the highest honor at the 31st Screen Actors Guild Awards last weekend, it seemed like a strong indicator that it would prevail in the best picture category at the Academy Awards on Sunday night. After all, the last three winners of SAG’s top prize — “Oppenheimer,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “CODA” — all won the best picture statuette at the Oscars.But it isn’t exactly that clear cut.Those past three films had essentially swept their awards season, and aside from the SAG Awards, “Conclave” has won only one other best picture title, at the BAFTAs in February.“Anora,” the comedy-drama about a stripper (played by Mikey Madison) whose modern fairy-tale romance implodes, had several of the other early big wins this season, including two major industry prizes — from the Directors Guild of America and the Producers Guild of America — that almost always signal a best-picture Oscar up ahead.Also, Edward Berger, the director of “Conclave,” was not nominated for a best directing Oscar. Only six films in the history of the Oscars have won best picture without a best directing nomination, most recently “CODA” in 2022.Scandals Plague ‘Emilia Pérez’Karla Sofía Gascón in “Emilia Pèrez.” She is up for a best actress Oscar, but her chances of winning may have been derailed by recent scandals.Shanna Besson/NetflixJust a few weeks ago, “Emilia Pérez” was on top of the world. The Spanish-language musical out of France had earned 13 Oscar nominations, the most of any film this year (and nearly the most ever), and its lead, Karla Sofía Gascón, made history as the first openly transgender actress to be nominated for an Academy Award, in the best actress category no less.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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      A New Age of Iranian Cinema Is on Display at the Oscars

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      “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” an Oscar-nominated movie filmed in secret in Iran, highlights the Iranian film world’s groundbreaking new work, inspired by the women-led protests in 2022.A wife, wearing a nightgown and her hair uncovered, lies down next to her husband in bed. An older man and woman, drunk on red wine, dance wildly and discuss the complexities of sex and nudity at their age. A distressed young woman navigates the sexual advances of a male employer in a job interview.These scenes may seem to be simply ordinary life snippets on the big screen. But their existence — in three Iranian films released over the last few years — is nothing short of extraordinary, representing a new era of filmmaking in Iran’s storied cinema.These movies, and the trend they represent, have gained recognition and accolades internationally. One of them, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” written and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, will compete for best international feature film at the Academy Awards on Sunday.Mr. Rasoulof, 52, is among a number of prominent Iranian directors and artists who are flouting government censorship rules enforced for nearly five decades since the 1979 Islamic revolution. These rules ban depictions of women without a hijab, the consumption of alcohol, and men and women touching and dancing; they also prevent films from tackling taboo subjects like sex.In a collective act of civil disobedience and inspired by the 2022 women-led uprising in Iran and many women’s continued defiance of restrictive social laws, Iranian filmmakers say they have decided to finally make art that imitates real life in their country.Director Mohammad Rasoulof’s movie “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is up for an Oscar in the international movie category on Sunday.Kristy Sparow/EPA, via ShutterstockWe 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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      Best Picture Oscar Nominees: Behind the Scenes of ‘Anora,’ ‘Conclave’ and More

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      In these videos, directors walked us through pivotal scenes from their 2025 Academy Award-nominated films.Sometimes all it takes is one scene. One scene to understand where a movie may take you. One scene to connect with its characters. One scene to give a sense of its style.In this collection of sequences from the 10 movies nominated for best picture at the 2025 Academy Awards (airing Sunday, March 2), you will hear director commentary that illuminates each nominee. A few scenes play out largely in one shot, others build out their world from a song. But each one required an intensive combination of craft and planning to pull off. Watch those narrated scenes below.Sean Baker on ‘Anora’The writer, director and editor Sean Baker narrates a sequence from his comedy featuring Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn.NeonBrady Corbet on ‘The Brutalist’The director Brady Corbet narrates a sequence from his film, starring Adrien Brody. The movie is nominated for 10 Academy Awards.Lol Crawley/A24James Mangold on ‘A Complete Unknown’James Mangold narrates a sequence from his film, starring Timothée Chalamet.Macall Polay/Searchlight PicturesEdward Berger on ‘Conclave’The director Edward Berger narrates a sequence from his film, featuring Ralph Fiennes.Philippe Antonello/Focus FeaturesDenis Villeneuve on ‘Dune: Part Two’The director Denis Villeneuve narrates a battle sequence from his film, featuring Austin Butler.Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros. PicturesJacques Audiard on ‘Emilia Pérez’The director Jacques Audiard narrates a sequence featuring the song “El Mal” from his film, with Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón.Shanna Besson/NetflixWalter Salles on ‘I’m Still Here’The director Walter Salles narrates a scene from his film, which has an Oscar nomination for best picture.Alile Onawale/Sony Pictures ClassicsRaMell Ross on ‘Nickel Boys’The director RaMell Ross narrates a sequence from his film, which has been nominated for best picture.Orion PicturesCoralie Fargeat on ‘The Substance’The writer and director Coralie Fargeat narrates a sequence from her film starring Demi Moore.MubiJon M. Chu on ‘Wicked’The director Jon M. Chu narrates a scene in “Wicked” that features the song “Popular,” with Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo.Universal Pictures More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Disney+, Amazon, Max, Apple TV+ and More in March

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      “Anora” and “Happy Face” arrive, and “‘Dark Winds,” “The Wheel of Time,” “The Righteous Gemstones” and more return.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to their libraries. Here are our picks for some of March’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘The Wheel of Time’ Season 3Starts streaming: March 13Season 1 of this handsome-looking fantasy series introduced the major characters and concepts from the first book of the novelist Robert Jordan’s hefty “The Wheel of Time” saga. Season 2 adapted parts of the second and third books, moving pieces into place for the grand apocalyptic battle prophesied at the start of the story. In Season 3, adapting “The Shadow Rising,” the heroes are tested by a journey into a desert wasteland. Rosamund Pike returns as the mystic Moiraine, who is helping a group of young people escape the shadowy forces pursuing them, leading them on a journey across a magical realm in danger of falling into ruin — just as it did thousands of years ago. Josha Stradowski plays Rand al’Thor, who could be his land’s last best hope to stand up against The Dark One, or the one to usher in a new age of chaos.Also arriving:March 6“For the Win: NWSL”“Picture This”March 11“Iliza Shlesinger: A Different Animal”March 27“Bosch: Legacy” Season 3“Holland”Zahn McClarnon in “Dark Winds.”Michael Moriatis/AMCNew to AMC+‘Dark Winds’ Season 3Starts streaming: March 9The novelist Tony Hillerman’s “Leaphorn and Chee” series provides the inspiration for this combination neo-western and neo-noir. Zahn McClarnon plays Joe Leaphorn, a lieutenant in the Navajo Tribal Police, who looks after his own people while holding a healthy suspicion of outsiders. Kiowa Gordon plays Jim Chee, Joe’s deputy, who used to work undercover for the F.B.I., gaining intelligence on Indigenous political groups. “Dark Winds” combines complex mystery plots with an insider’s take on Navajo culture. Season 3 finds Joe and Jim investigating a mysterious disappearance in their jurisdiction while their colleague Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten) begins a new job with the Border Patrol. Guest stars include Jenna Elfman and Bruce Greenwood, in a story that will leave Joe questioning his life’s purpose.Also arriving:March 3“Recipes for Love and Murder” Season 2March 7“Starve Acre”March 10“The Gone” Season 2March 18“Wicked City” Seasons 1 and 2We 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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      Geoffrey Rush Lives for the Roar of the Crowd

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      “If you sit at home, you are not sharing your own private experience of what the general pulse of the world is,” said the actor, who stars in the horror film “The Rule of Jenny Pen.”Geoffrey Rush has rarely met a physical task he didn’t want to attempt, be it sword fighting for “Pirates of the Caribbean” or playing the piano for his Oscar-winning role in “Shine.”The new horror movie “The Rule of Jenny Pen,” starring Rush as a supercilious former judge living in a nursing home, required yet another unfamiliar skill set: He had to use a motorized wheelchair.“I got very good at getting up to speed, but in narrow corridors, it was not the same story,” Rush, 73, said of the feature directed by James Ashcroft and also starring John Lithgow as a psychopathic fellow resident. A lot of the final day’s goof reel “was punctuated by me running into staircases or James leaping over furniture because I went, ‘It’s just not responding.’”In a video call from his native Australia, Rush discussed his cultural essentials, many of them — to his surprise — from his childhood and early professional life. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The TreniersThey were the first band to use the words “rock” and “roll” in lyrics, way back in the late ’40s and early ’50s, when they were a blues band hovering between swing and boogie-woogie. Their energy was definitely sexy and audacious. They beat Bill Haley by about a half decade. My mum was a great jiver during my childhood, and she loved Little Richard. She used to dive onto the dance floor.Silent Film ClownsBob Monkhouse, who was an English comedian, had a show that I used to watch every Saturday night called “Mad Movies.” I got introduced to silent film and not necessarily the big guns. He looked at a lot of the minor characters, and I became obsessed by that.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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      These Films See People the Way They See Themselves

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      RaMell Ross subverts our gaze, breaking the conventional frame in “Nickel Boys” as he did in his documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening.”It’s incredibly rare — in fact, I don’t think it’s ever happened before this year — for a filmmaker to get an Oscar-nomination for a documentary and then land a best picture nomination for their next feature film. (A few have come close, though, and Ava DuVernay pulled it off, but in the opposite order.) Part of the blame lies with the Academy, which has somehow never nominated a documentary for Best Picture. It’s also just difficult, though by no means impossible, to excel in both fiction and nonfiction in a way that captures voter attention.Yet with “Nickel Boys,” nominated this year for both best picture and best adapted screenplay, the photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross has done just that. His previous film, the groundbreaking, lyrical documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” was nominated for best documentary in 2019. “Hale County” may be less well-known than its fictional sibling, but it’s a vital companion piece. In fact, revisiting it now in the light of “Nickel Boys” illuminates Ross’s bigger project, and what makes his work so disruptive and his images so indelible.Much has been written — including here in The New York Times — about “Nickel Boys,” which topped my own list of 2024’s best movies. In reimagining Colson Whitehead’s novel, Ross and Joslyn Barnes shifted the book’s third-person narration to first person perspective, so we spend nearly the entire film looking through the eyes of two teenage boys, Elwood and Turner.That kind of perspective isn’t alien to storytelling. Movies have used it (including Steven Soderbergh’s recent thriller “Presence”), and it’s common in video games. But in “Nickel Boys” it feels fresh and radical. Ross, along with the cinematographer Jomo Fray and the camera operator Sam Ellison, positioned themselves and their equipment incredibly close to the actors so that their perspectives would follow their performances. The effect is remarkable: While Whitehead’s novel is about how we remember history, individually and collectively, Ross’s film is about how we see history.Wilson as Turner, left, and Ethan Herisse as Elwood. We spend nearly the entire film looking through the eyes of two teenage boys. Orion PicturesThat “we” includes the audience — in fact, it might be more accurate to say it implicates the audience. “Nickel Boys” insistently shakes the viewer out of the habits audiences have developed when watching fiction films. The action sometimes cuts away to documentary footage, historical images of Black Americans, without a narratively obvious motivation to do so. The camera acts like a person with their own subjective view in the scene, not the ostensibly impartial eye watching drama unfold that fiction films traditionally employ. Characters look straight into the lens, seemingly directly into our eyes, dragging us into the story.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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      I’m Obsessed With the Italo Disco Song in ‘The Brutalist’

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      Get ready for the Oscars with a deep dive into the duo behind the track, La Bionda, and others.The brothers of La Bionda.Angelo Deligio/Mondadori, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,The Oscars are this Sunday, and my personal pick for best picture is Brady Corbet’s gloriously ambitious, utterly unpredictable epic “The Brutalist.” Corbet and his co-writer, Mona Fastvold, take some wild risks in the movie, and while I don’t think every one of them connects, I’m still awed by the film’s vision and scope. One risk that “The Brutalist” definitely pulls off, though, is the unforgettable, out-of-nowhere song that plays over the closing credits: “One for You, One for Me,” the ecstatic 1978 disco hit by the Italian duo La Bionda.I was certainly not expecting a three-and-a-half-hour drama about an architect who survived the Holocaust to send audiences dancing out of the theater — but the surprising and strangely satisfying La Bionda needle drop is in keeping with the film’s spirit of subverting convention. “It’s quite cheeky,” Fastvold said of the song choice in an interview with USA Today. “I really enjoy leaving the audience with that jolt of energy.”I confess I wasn’t familiar with this song, or La Bionda, before seeing the movie last month, but the first thing I did upon exiting the theater was Google “what is the disco song at the end of ‘The Brutalist’?” The answer led me down a rabbit hole of musical discovery — one that I’m sharing with you on today’s playlist. (I didn’t believe La Bionda could possibly have a song as catchy and transcendently ridiculous as “One for You, One for Me,” and then I heard “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” their retrofuturistic 1980 hit about a sexy alien.)La Bionda were a duo of Sicilian brothers, Carmelo and Michelangelo, who in the late 1970s pioneered a sound that would later come to be called Italo disco: think glistening synths, four-on-the-floor percussion and semi-absurdist lyrics. Italo disco’s production sound and overall sense of theatricality influenced a lot of later new wave artists, and every decade or so a new generation of music fans seems to discover its charms and make it subculturally cool again. But, as Michelangelo clarified in a recent interview with Vulture, he and Carmelo (who died in 2022) weren’t consciously making “Italo disco,” a term he considers an afterthought “to put a label on the shelves.”Regardless of how you classify them, La Bionda are worthy of rediscovery — especially if you like your dance music fun, over-the-top and magnificently gauche. Enjoy this brief introduction to their sound, featuring some of their biggest hits (both as La Bionda and D.D. Sound), alongside music they produced for another Italian pop duo, Righeira.And if you’re looking for something with a bit more grandeur, I highly recommend Daniel Blumberg’s excellent original motion picture soundtrack for “The Brutalist,” which I’ll also be rooting for on Sunday night in the best original score category.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