The bomb, bombshell, and possible comeback are what to expect at the Oscars

The Oscars are in the Park: Looking Up at the Shortest Featured Movies of the Year (or How I’m Going Through It)

The most successful woman-directed film of the year, with a total box office of over one billion dollars, is Greta Gerwig’s living-doll of a Barbie movie.

There are signs that Christopher Nolan’s IMAX film, the portrait of the father of the atom bomb, will garner gold statuettes at the upcoming awards ceremonies.

Host Jimmy Kimmel will start the evening’s festivities at the Dolby Theater an hour earlier than usual, one of several strategies the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is employing to lure TV viewers back to something approaching pre-pandemic (30 million+) levels. (The last three years have averaged less than half that.)

The biggest predictor of how many viewers watch the show is whether audiences have seen the nominees, and this year is no exception with two of the most popular films in the running for best picture already available on streaming.

This year’s best picture nominees have to fulfill at least two of four previously optional diversity and inclusion standards by the Motion Picture Academy in order to be considered.

This could also be due to the Academy’s enlarged and broadened voting membership — almost 11,000 people (up from 6,261 in 2012) from 93 countries — with substantial increases in the percentage of women and persons of color over previous years.

There’s also the horse race. The Oscars come at the tail end of a wave of awards ceremonies, some from groups with memberships that overlap with the Academy’s. A lot of those groups agree can make the race feel less like a contest than a coronation.

It would be startling if Oppenheimer doesn’t win the two big prizes at the Oscars, as well as best editing, best score, best cinematography and possibly best supporting actor (Robert Downey Jr.). Da’Vine. Joy Randolph has won every best supporting actress award on the circuit so far for her grieving cafeteria manager in the prep-school dramedy The Holdovers.

With no one else but myself to compare the nominees for major categories, I decided to look them up before the ceremony tomorrow night. I’m doing well this year, probably because the slate is fairly small: Most of the films with acting and screenplay nominations are also contenders for best picture. If I can get over my aversion to biopics that I wish were documentaries instead, I have a good chance of going into the ceremony with the confidence of a dorky student who’s done all the reading for the final exam.

Barbenheimer notwithstanding, 2023 was a bad year for Hollywood. Harris cites lingering effects of pandemic shutdowns, the writers’ and actors’ strikes, the decline of the streaming business model and the looming menace of A.I. “If ‘Hollywood’ were a big summer movie,” he writes, “we’d be right at the end of Act II, at the always-darkest-before-the-dawn moment in the story, when all seems lost.”