Cramming for the Oscars

I’m in competition with no one but myself in trying to view all the major-category nominees for the Oscars 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.

The problem with cramming for the Oscars, as I do every year to varying degrees of success, is that it renders one cinematically wearied. A putatively enjoyable activity becomes homework. If I fail to squeeze in a nominated film before the ceremony, I’ll probably never see that film at all. It becomes associated with the grind. I love the Oscars, with all their pageantry and pomposity. I love big-scale spectatorship, the rare moments in modern life when many of us are looking at a screen showing the same thing at the same time. But I also love when they’re over and I can get back to less goal-oriented culture consumption.

And so it is that a recent piece by Mark Harris in The Times’s Opinion section with the dreary headline “How Bad Can It Get for Hollywood?” has me paradoxically hopeful for post-Oscars 2024, and for the inevitable changes to come to the moviemaking business.

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.”

But Harris sees a silver lining: The strikes prevented big franchise movies from being completed, and audiences’ appetites for superhero movies that require deep knowledge of complex lore (more homework!) seem to be, if not eliminated, then at least diminished. These pressures, he suggests, might lead to some necessary creativity, to projects with smaller budgets and less complicated postproduction, to “self-contained films that don’t demand moviegoers have a Ph.D. in previous installments or extended universes.” The same happened in the summer of 1989, Harris notes, when moviemaking was at an impasse and films like “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” “Do the Right Thing” and “The Little Mermaid” showed there were audiences to be cultivated and money to be made from unexpected genres.

I’m excited for tomorrow night’s ceremony (The Times’s live coverage starts at 4 p.m. Eastern; the ceremony’s at 7 p.m. Eastern on ABC) and I’m excited for what comes after. I’ve already set my sights on some of the more exciting fare coming soon-ish: “Hundreds of Beavers,” a low-budget black-and-white movie with no stars but, yes, hundreds of beavers, played by humans. “Sasquatch Sunset,” starring Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough in heavy prosthetics, featuring a script with no words and lots of grunts. And it’s not slated to come out until Christmas, but Robert Eggers’s take on “Nosferatu” stars Willem Dafoe (who made “The Lighthouse” and “The Northman” with Eggers), Lily-Rose Depp and, evidently, 2,000 live rats.

Your guide to the Oscars

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

Music

• Britain and the E.U. will join the U.S. in delivering aid to Gaza via ship. An airdrop of aid accidentally killed several Palestinians yesterday, the Gaza authorities said.

• President Biden plans to sign a bill today to fund dozens of federal programs, averting a partial government shutdown.

• Donald Trump posted a nearly $92 million bond in a defamation case he lost to the writer E. Jean Carroll, which allows him to appeal the verdict without having to pay her.

• The Republican National Committee elected Trump’s handpicked candidates, including his daughter-in-law, as its top leaders.

• No Labels, a bipartisan group, said it would launch a third-party presidential ticket. It does not have a candidate yet, but Democrats worry the effort could pull votes from Biden.

• A Pentagon report found no evidence that the government has covered up knowledge of extraterrestrial technology, or that any U.F.O. sightings represented aliens visiting Earth.

• The U.S. economy continues to show strength. It added 275,000 jobs last month, while the unemployment rate rose slightly but remained below 4 percent.

• A U.S. federal jury found the former president of Honduras guilty of conspiring to import cocaine into the U.S. and working with El Chapo and other drug traffickers.

CULTURE CALENDAR

🎸 “Deeper Well” (Friday): The country artist Kacey Musgraves, a perceptive and incisive writer, is expert at capturing transition. Much of “Golden Hour,” her third album, beautifully captured what it feels like to fall in love (listen to “Butterflies”), and her most recent, “Star-Crossed,” distilled the sadness and bargaining of falling out of it (as in “Good Wife”).

The lead single for her upcoming album of the same name, “Deeper Well,” is a folksy meditation on self-love, her desire for growth and her acceptance of change. She talks about quitting weed and excising unhelpful habits and people from her life. “I’ve gotten older now I know / How to take care of myself / I found a deeper well,” she sings. The album itself promises more low-key-ness and introspection. Musgraves wrote it, she told The Cut, while “craving a return back to the center.”

Roast Chicken With Couscous, Dates and Almonds

Ramadan begins soon, and sweet dates take a prominent place at the iftar table, either served by themselves or cooked into an array of fragrant dishes. Yvonne Maffei’s golden roast chicken with couscous, dates and buttered almonds would be a heady, aromatic way to break the fast, and a festive meal for any other occasion. In this North African dish, the spice-coated chicken cooks in a pot of couscous, which absorbs the savory drippings, while toasted almonds add a buttery crunch. Be sure to seek out the freshest dates you can find. Those with a lighter color and soft texture will have the best flavor.

REAL ESTATE

What you get for $950,000: A cottage in Southwest Harbor, Maine; a two-bedroom condo in Miami Beach; or a four-bedroom bungalow in Seattle.

The hunt: A Brooklyn couple were looking for a distressed property they could restore and rent to a low-income tenant. Which one did they choose? Play our game.

Games: A night with New York’s lesbian and bisexual backgammon league.

Rebranding: Kylie Jenner has a more mature image — and new products to go with it. Read her interview with The Times.

Holy scrolls: Hallow, a prayer app partially owned by Mark Wahlberg, has turned to TikTok to find its flock. Its ads are reaching nonreligious users.

Bread in Britain: London bakeries are selling big, doughy New York-style bagels. Some traditionalists are standing by the London “beigel.”

ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER

Stop mindlessly scrolling

If you often get sucked into the infinite “doom scroll” of social media (or are looking to help a loved one who can’t shake TikTok), Wirecutter’s experts have some solutions. One tip: Set up designated spaces in your home, like your bedroom, where your phone is banned entirely. Having it out of sight can go a long way toward keeping it out of mind. I regularly joke about wanting to throw my phone into the ocean, but going cold turkey and cutting off all communication is not rational. Our advice can help you make sure your phone fits into your life, and not the other way around. — Annemarie Conte

GAME OF THE WEEK

Women’s college basketball: It’s conference championship weekend, your last chance to see many of the top teams before the N.C.A.A. tournament begins. The three conferences below all hold their finals on Sunday, airing on ESPN from 1 to 7 p.m.

• In the SEC, undefeated South Carolina has been cruising all season, but last year’s national champion, L.S.U., could give them a challenge.

• And in the Pac 12, Stanford, one of the sport’s powerhouses, is seeking a fourth straight No. 1 seed in the tournament.

If you’re just getting up to speed on this season, The Athletic has five story lines that you should know.

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