The Oscars: Screening the Good, the Bad, the Ugly: A Brief History of the Hollywood Film Industry during the Pre-Panddemic Era

Greta Gerwig’s living-doll of a Barbie movie handily won the hot-pink vs. dark-brooding competition at the box office, raking in $1.4 billion as the year’s biggest smash while also dominating the year’s memes and becoming the most successful woman-directed film in history.

If the results of the Golden Globes, Critics Choice, BAFTA and Hollywood’s guild ceremonies are to be believed, then Christopher Nolan’s IMAX portrait of the father of the atom bomb will be the one to take home the gold statuette.

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 indicator of audience acceptance is whether or not audiences have seen the nominated films, and this year is no different, with two of the most popular films in the running for best picture available on streaming.

The aim is to increase participation by historically under-represented groups. There is diversity among nominees this year, despite the fact the standards aren’t particularly difficult to meet.

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 is a 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. It can make a race seem less like a contest and more like a coronation when a lot of the groups agree.

If Oppenheimer does not win best picture and best director, that would be a huge shock because there are other prizes to be won. 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.

I am in a competition with no one but myself to view the major- category nominees 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.

A recent column in The Times Opinion section titled How Bad Can it Get for Hollywood?, by Mark Harris, has me optimistic about the future of the film business.