Good evening, and welcome to the 97th Academy Awards. Conan O’Brien couldn’t make it because he’s actually hosting the Oscars, so you get me instead, and it’s good to be back! I’ll tell you up front that I didn’t get anywhere near watching every nominee this year, but I’ve seen all the Best Picture nominees and at least one film in every other category, so I’m not showing up completely unprepared.

Need to catch up quick? Here are your Best Picture contenders:

Anora: Nikolai Gogol’s Inferno. Tangerine but so cisgendered it’s Russian.

The Brutalist: Extended interviews with hideous men. Concrete is king.

A Complete Unknown: Best Timothée Chalamet vehicle this side of Shai Hulud. Inside Bobby Dylan.

Conclave: Mean Girls for cardinals. What the hell is “sequestered” again?

Dune: Part Two: Technical awards must flow. I hate sand.

Emilia Pérez: Cartel Land: The Musical. Disastrous PR shipwreck.

I’m Still Here: The dictatorship experience. But like, on a screen.

Nickel Boys: Reformatory horror. POV PTSD.

The Substance: Genre: Body horror: Subject: Body horror.

Wicked: Winner of the Academy Award for Dumbest Hype Cycle. For folks who loved the hit Broadway musical Wicked.

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And now, the awards. Sort of. I’ll give you my Best Picture pick, but because I didn’t get through everything this year, I’m just going to throw out one thought for each category and it may not even have anything to do with who’s going to win.

BEST PICTURE:

Should win: For my money, there’s nothing better on the whole Oscar ballot than Flow, nominated in International Feature and Animated Feature but not here. Flow is intensely kinetic, dialogue-free but full of big personalities, funny and melancholy and deeply affecting. I think it’s one of the three best films ever nominated in the Animated Feature category, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Dammit snow. You do this every time. Would you please just pick something from the list?: Okay, so I’ve been having a vigorous internal debate whether it’s Anora, Conclave, or The Substance. These are all extraordinary movies at the head of a very strong class, and they’re all going to stick with me for years, but I had to pick one, and it’s…

Will win: Anora. I don’t think I’ve ever seen exactly this kind of crazy onscreen. Many of Anora‘s scenes could be right out of a Coen Brothers movie, except that they don’t feel nearly cartoonish enough. It’s a perfect comedy of errors, heightened by the fact that you can see the screwups coming every time, but it also feels tragic, and invites you to sympathize with people who ought by all rights to be very unsympathetic.

DIRECTOR: Sean Baker (Anora) has such an incredibly keen eye for what makes people tick, and in Anora he’s able to make some truly absurd situations feel real and immediate. That also carries through to his casting decisions—every actor in this movie is pitch-perfect.

LEAD ACTRESS: This is so tough. My head says Demi Moore (The Substance), my heart says Demi Moore, but my heart says Mikey Madison (Anora) too.

LEAD ACTOR: Hard to weigh in on this one with any authority, having missed Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice) and Colman Domingo (Sing Sing). I would say The Brutalist gave Adrian Brody a lot more to do than his remaining competition, but then again this isn’t always an award for Most Acting.

SUPPORTING ACTRESS: I’ll say here that I thought the best performance in A Complete Unknown came from Elle Fanning, but she’s not listed. Zoe Saldaña (Emilia Pérez) is a big betting favorite here.

SUPPORTING ACTOR: Zero suspense here—it’s Kieran Culkin, and deservedly so. A Real Pain is one of the funniest films on the ballot this year, almost entirely thanks to Culkin, who repeatedly goes from hilarious to charming to infuriating and usually back the other way within a single scene.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: The Substance is a work of real genius, dense with metaphor, and pitch-black hilarious. An upset if it wins, but it shouldn’t be.

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: The Conclave is both so good and so writing-forward that it’d be a shock for anything else to win this.

INTERNATIONAL FEATURE: Look out for I’m Still Here, a tense and scary real-life story about a family in the crosshairs of Brazil’s military dictatorship, as a spoiler to a flagging Emilia Pérez. Now, I’m not convinced that I’m Still Here stuck the landing, and there’s an argument it skipped the most interesting part of Eunice Paiva’s fascinating life. It is, however, a better film than Pérez.

ANIMATED FEATURE: The Golden Globe went to Flow (correct), and the BAFTA went to Wallace and Grommit: Vengeance & Fowl (British), so naturally the popular pick here is The Wild Robot, a rousing power-of-love-and-friendship story that I wouldn’t be upset to see win.

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE: I only saw Porcelain War. I don’t believe it’ll win, though it might have if voting had closed after that White House blow-up with Zelensky. But I’m getting sidetracked, because what’s important here is that it features the best animal performance I saw this year, from the featured couple’s adorable puppy Frodo. Not only did Frodo survive the events of the film, he showed up at the live panel discussion following the online screening I watched. Good dog.

ORIGINAL SCORE: I’ve seen more than one person describe Conclave as “camp” and that feels at least a little right to me. The soundtrack mirrors the movie’s plot and performance, mostly understated but punctuated with some very dramatic moments. I’m a fan.

ORIGINAL SONG: Is Diane Warren’s (“The Journey” from The Six Triple Eight) nightmare over at last? Probably not! Yeah, she got an honorary Oscar in 2022, but it’s just not the same, is it? This year she probably loses out to Emilia Pérez‘s “El Mal”, the closest thing Pérez has to a banger, and in certain unlikely but plausible scenarios, potentially its only win tonight. Anyway, my vote would’ve been for “Like a Bird” (Sing Sing).

CINEMATOGRAPHY: There are two I haven’t seen yet in this category, Maria and Nosferatu. Of the rest, The Brutalist feels like the smart choice. Everything—the framing, the lighting, the movement—is impeccable. Also, the DP’s name is Lol Crawley. Lol.

COSTUME DESIGN: So I’ve been playing a lot of Avowed lately, and one of the great things about Avowed is its use of really vibrant color. It’s head and shoulders above comparable games in that department and that really elevates the environments. I bring this up because I feel similarly about Wicked, which I expect to take both this award and Production Design going away.

EDITING: “You can’t give this one to the longest movie in the field, snow. They’ll kill you.” They can try. Not only has The Brutalist got some neat formal tricks, but it flows so seamlessly that the movie never once felt overlong to me.

MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING: Whatever happens later in the program, The Substance won’t go home empty-handed tonight. I haven’t seen Nosferatu, but I can tell you none of the other competitors are in the same league or even playing the same game.

PRODUCTION DESIGN: You know what? I have never loved the set design in the Dune films. Or, I’ve loved everything but most of the indoor sets, which for sure evoke an appropriate mood, but at the cost of not seeming like places where anyone actually lives or works. I never read the books, so of course it’s possible that I’m missing something something either thematically or lore-wise here.

SOUND: Dune‘s sound design is top-notch though.

VISUAL EFFECTS: Anyone else underwhelmed by Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes? Not the effects, which were of the usual extremely high quality. For me, the emotional core that made this the most underrated franchise in science fiction just wasn’t as present.

ANIMATED SHORT: I only saw Wander to Wonder, but what a film to see. If you’ve played Control, you’ll probably find this to be vibe-adjacent to that game’s fictional Threshold Kids series. It’s unhinged, disturbing, highly not-for-kids, and impossible to look away from.

LIVE-ACTION SHORT: People keep saying A Lien has it. I get that. It’s utterly nerve-wracking, and blisteringly topical, which on its own is probably enough to carry it to the prize. It felt a little shallow to me, though?  If you want a dark horse, consider Anuja, a great little film on a topic of comparable social importance (if not necessarily immediacy, for American audiences). All that Netflix lobbying money has to produce a winner eventually, right?

DOCUMENTARY SHORT: I’m a sucker for interesting formal choices in these. Incident delivered with a stripped-down approach that’s almost all surveillance camera and police body camera footage, often with multiple synchronized views in splitscreen. There’s no voiceover, no interviews, only some sparse narrative text and camera audio—and even that, only when it’s available, which it’s often not. Taking that approach in a police shooting doc, you won’t be surprised to hear, makes this maybe the toughest half-hour on the entire ballot. The only other film I watched in this category, The Only Girl in the Orchestra, probably does not have the kind of heft it would need to win.

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That’s your preview, folks. Pour yourselves some drinks, sit back, and let’s see who gets slugged in the face this year. Once I’ve got my final predictions, I’ll post them in the comments.