Despite Donald Trump, the American mass entertainment event known as the Oscars is likely to draw millions of viewers throughout the world on March 16. This is especially so since several truly excellent non-Hollywood films and performers are in competition in the Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress categories. And as in previous years, I am offering my unsolicited views on several of the nominated films and performers—both those that impressed me and those that didn’t.

Any fearless forecasts? None, but I would put the odds on Sinners being picked as Best Film, Ryan Coogler as Best Director for Sinners, Renate Reinsve as Best Actress, and Stellan Skarsgård as Best Supporting Actor, respectively, in Sentimental Value, and It Was Just an Accident as Best International Feature Film.

The secret agent

Set in Recife, Brazil, in 1977, the plot of The Secret Agent has a very contemporary ring. A Brazilian big business honcho demands the revocation of a patent for an electric vehicle that runs on lithium batteries filed by a university-based scientist. The scientist, Armando, refuses, and in an altercation, punches the son of the sleazy corporate titan.

To escape the clutches of the vengeful businessman, Armando (aka Marselas) flees to Recife and holes up in a “house of refuge” run by an eccentric ex-anarchist/communist lady, where he finds warmth, solidarity, and a fleeting romance, in the company of other individuals facing threats to their lives. But contract killers trace him to the city. The Brazilian equivalent of a witness protection program has prepared passports for him and his son, but will they be able to deliver the documents before the killers get to them?

Presented to the viewer in the grainy pre-digital color celluloid film of the movies of that era, Recife comes alive, bathed in tropical sunlight and filled with the Beetles that were that period’s vehicle of choice, owing to the establishment of a Volkswagen assembly plant in Brazil. It’s carnival season, and at night, the city throbs with excitement, sexual abandon, and surreal sightings of severed legs of murdered people coming alive and assaulting frolicking couples.

The air is also thick with corruption and violence, and the streets are patrolled by local police who thrive on bribes and whose last concern is protecting a scientist determined to flee the country rather than give in to a corporate gangster.

It is gripping drama, and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s superb direction elicits a first-rate performance from Wagner Moura, who plays Armando, and the rest of the cast. Indeed, The Secret Agent showcases the glittering talents of contemporary Brazilian cinema. The movie definitely deserves the nominations for Best Film, Best International Feature, and Best Actor, but will it buck the momentum for Sinners?

Marty supreme

Before there was ping pong diplomacy between China and the US, there was (according to the film) the ping pong rivalry with Japan, which was one of the few sports where the Japanese were allowed to compete internationally during the post-war occupation of Japan.

That’s the big picture against which the standard formula for Hollywood sports flicks unfolds in Marty Supreme: Hero is ambitious and can’t wait for glory. Hero runs into difficulties, some of which are of his own making, that almost run him down. Hero pulls himself together to represent and win for the US of A on the world stage.

That there are some parallels with the classic film on pool, “The Hustler,” is probably not coincidental. Timothee Chalamet as Marty Mauser does a good job playing the hustler, though he can’t quite match the electric performance of Paul Newman as the pool shark in the earlier film.

I’m not exactly sure what Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays a has-been Hollywood star, adds to the pot except the sounds of sex finally fulfilled. But the film does convey how, in terms of its challenge to the player’s reflexes, table tennis is much more demanding than lawn tennis (or so says an utterly mediocre ping pong player).

Marty Supreme has been nominated for the Best Film and Best Actor categories, but it’s up against some tough hombres.

Sentimental value

Joachim Trier shows he is a worthy successor to the great Ingmar Bergman in depicting the high drama in the ordinary lives of ordinary people. In Sentimental Value, the return of long-absent father Gustave Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, upends the ordered lives of two sisters, Nora and Agnes, played respectively by Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who had only themselves to fall back on in his absence and their mother’s demise.

Yet there seems to be more to his return than a desire for reunification. A storied movie director, he appears to be obsessed with his own mother’s suicide, and has come up with a script for which he asks Nora, an accomplished stage actress, to play the role of a woman who hangs herself. When she refuses to even read the script, he turns to an up-and-coming Hollywood actress, Rachel Kemp, played by Elle Fanning, to play the part, complicating the family drama and introducing a rift between the two sisters.

Trier keeps you guessing as to where this film is headed, even as he mounts the pressure for a resolution. The audience, by this time, seems prepared for the outcome they have already guessed at, only to be surprised by the ending they have been primed subconsciously to root for.

The casting is perfect, with Skarsgård, Reinsve, Lilleaas, and even Fanning acting in perfect synergy. The film has been nominated for best film, best director, best actress, best supporting actor, and best supporting actress in the upcoming Oscars. Much like Justine Triet’s 2023-24 film “Anatomy of a Fall,” Trier’s film shows that, with a compelling story and superb cast, a small-scale production that can actually be mounted on stage can compete at the box office with the expensive historical epics or special visual effects thrillers that dominate today's filmmaking.

My not-so-fearless forecast after surveying the competition: Reinsve as Best Actress and Skarsgård as Best Supporting Actor.

One battle after another

The director, Paul Thomas Anderson, probably started with what he thought was a great idea: lampooning the left and far right, so as to appeal to the box office middle while placating the warring "extremes" with humor. The problem is, the depiction of the left as made up of the cartoon character radicals in the film is likely to be taken as reality and not in the spirit of comedy by the far right, which saw the peaceful protests around George Floyd as masterminded by "dangerous leftists" such as those depicted in the movie. Also, the right is not likely to see as funny but to agree, in fact, with the views of the racial purity gang and Colonel Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn, while the left will see the antics of these people as the new normal.

Talk about being out of synch with the times: we are not in the non-ideological 1990's, when the book, Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon, on which the film is based, was published. Amazingly, the film producers did not get this.

Can one really make a comedy of opposing ideological views at a time of deepening polarization, when even the middle's sense of humor has given way to great worry and fright? As the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel by the television network ABC owing to sarcastic remarks he made after the assassination of far right activist Charlie Kirk has underlined, we live at a time when the space for political humor is fast disappearing, where being taken off the air is probably the least threatening outcome that those comic artists who are willing to push the envelope can hope for.

Still, I was hoping that there would at least be a few good old laughs, given some of the reviews I read. But when the director's idea of fun is Leonardo DiCaprio's being unable to stay long enough in one place to charge his cell phone, or his frustration at his inability to remember a password, I realized that probably not even Nora Ephron, were she still alive, could save Tinseltown from its state of advanced stultification, something that the industry's Greek Chorus of reviewers is increasingly finding hard to conceal.

In the end, the director, aware of the furies closing in, tries to escape the movie's fate by resorting to the great Hollywood escape, the car chase with lots of fireworks, but this merely prolongs the death throes of another multi-million dollar disaster.

This is, however, a minority opinion, since the film has been nominated by the Hollywood establishment for several categories, including Best Film, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress.

Sirat

In most films filmed in the desert, the terrain functions mainly as a passive backdrop for the travails and foibles of human beings. In Oliver Laxe’s Sirat, which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2025, it is an actor, an agent, at once volatile, beautiful, and deadly.

A father, Luis, played by Sergi López, searches for his missing daughter, along with his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), in the Moroccan desert. At a rave, an event where endless dancing takes place to a pulsating electronic beat, they come across a group of social misfits who appear to move from rave to rave. When troops arrive to break up the rave owing to a political crisis and tell the foreign revelers to go home, the group escapes from the slow-moving caravan of trailers and SUVs, and Luis and Esteban, at the spur of the moment, decide to tag along.

The band speeds through the desert and negotiates winding mountain roads, with Laxe treating viewers to spectacular landscapes. Indifferent at first to Luis and Esteban, the group gradually initiates them into their communal, nomadic lifestyle. But just when a sense of an expanded community takes hold, tragedy strikes, and the film careens into a headlong flight to nowhere.

Stalked by bad luck, the group halts to seek relief from their condition with drugs and dancing to the mesmerizing beat of rave music, only to find out they have landed in the middle of a minefield. The gripping last half hour of the film is devoted to how the survivors negotiate their way out of the trap, where each step could very well be one’s last.

Laxe’s vision of tragedy being the mother of solidarity suffuses the film, where Sergi Lopez provides a memorable portrait of a late middle-aged father moving from grief to recklessness to resignation. Sirat has been nominated for Best International Feature in the Oscars, where its bracing arid atmosphere might not fare well against the more complex, intriguing narratives of It Was Just an Accident, The Secret Agent, and Sentimental Value.

Sinners

Badass identical twins return to the badlands of Mississippi, where lynchings are public spectacles, from Prohibition-era Chicago with a rep as tough enforcers for Al Capone. Flush with cash, they buy property, intending to provide hot music and lots of booze to entertainment-deprived black farmers, and make it clear to the local whites they’re not going to take any shit from the Klan.

The audience gets primed for a showdown between the brothers and the Klan, but is treated instead to a battle royale between invading white vampires that do not discriminate by skin color as to whom they will bite and bring with them to the realm of the undead (though the obligatory shootout with the Klan is not forgotten).

Ryan Coogler's Sinners is a flip in the imagination that delivers a riotous cinematic experience, but about which one can't write anything more without being a spoiler--and reviewers who are spoilers deserve to have stakes driven through their hearts. But it does no harm to reveal that one message the film delivers is that only in the realm of the undead is there real equality between blacks and whites. Another is that, yes, believe it or not, some vampires can be trusted to keep their word.

Michael B. Jordan's performance as the twins is masterful, catching both similarities and differences in personality in a nuanced fashion. Wagner Moura’s acting in The Secret Agent is impressive, but Jordan has the more challenging role, making him the frontrunner in the race for best actor. The film is likely to notch more wins in the other categories where it has been nominated.

It was just an accident

Where does politics end and recognition of the other as a fellow human being begin, is one of the two questions posed by It was just an accident. The other is, are there circumstances where it’s not smart to entertain the other’s humanity?

A mechanic suspects the squeaking sound made by the artificial leg of a visitor at his shop indicates the man was the one who tortured him in prison. He kidnaps the man but hesitates to execute him, impelled by a sense that due process demands that he must be sure about the identity of the suspect. We follow him as he rounds up individuals who were subjected to torture by the same man.

But all were blindfolded, so no one could provide absolute certainty regarding the suspect’s identity. In the process, the victims experience mood swings as they argue over age-old questions regarding revenge, the moral code of the resistance, and compassion, even for one’s enemies.

You hope that the film does not end where you suspect it’s heading, but the director, Jafar Panahi, masterfully transports you to it with an excellent cast and script. A powerful work on the ethics of resistance to an unjust state, this film won the Palme d’Or in this year’s Cannes Film Festival and is a finalist for best international feature film at the Oscars. The timing of the Oscars with the current upheaval against the theocratic regime in Iran might work to its advantage.

Bugonia

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia cements his reputation as the master of the quirky. It pits a believer in an alien invasion, Teddy, played by Jesse Plemons, against corporate executive Michelle (Emma Stone), whom he kidnaps in the belief she is a spy from the galaxy Andromeda bent on destroying the human species. The film proceeds as a battle of wits between Teddy and Michelle, as they try to impose their versions of reality on each other, with Don, Teddy’s misfit cousin, played by Aidan Delbis, whom Teddy has recruited to kidnap Michelle, not quite sure who to believe.

The film is classic Lanthimos, a combustible mix of slapstick, the bizarre, the poignant, and the unexpected. There’s never a dull moment as the film teases its way, with several bodies strewn by the wayside, to a conclusion that pulls the rug from under the audience.

Emma Stone does not disappoint, but she’s likely to be edged out by Renate Reinsve, with the latter’s wonderfully controlled performance in Sentimental Value. Lanthimos has a shot at being named “Best Director,” but faces formidable competition in Joachim Trier (Sentimental Value) and Ryan Coogler, who matches Lanthimos’s propensity for the bizarre in Sinners.

Train dreams

Set in the late 19th and early 20th century, Train Dreams, which has been nominated for Best Movie in the Oscars, is a simple but moving tale about an itinerant worker’s effort to find the meaning of life as economic forces relentlessly destroy the woodlands of the US northwest, keeping him and a multinational labor force on the move, along with others, in search of work and frustrating his dream of finally settling down on a small plot of land with his wife and daughter until it is too late.

The film captures nature’s pristine beauty even as loggers do violence to it and trains of the Central Pacific Railroad slice through it. Indeed, there is poetry even in the felling of trees that are centuries old, and the murder of a Chinese coolie is not translated into anger but transfigured into a haunting memory.

The campfire is an occasion for camaraderie through the swapping of stories rather than comradeship forged by a common sense of exploitation. Herein lies a contradiction: the message of the ruin people bring to nature, and themselves, is undermined by the poetry of its telling, so that in the end what one is left with is nostalgia for a bygone era and identification with the hero’s attitude of resignation to forces he cannot understand, much less control.

But Joel Edgerton does an excellent job capturing the mix of questioning and acceptance of the main character, Robert Grainier, and I am surprised he was not nominated for Best Actor.

Hamnet

Imagining Shakespeare, the man has provided Hollywood with many moneymakers in the past, like Shakespeare in Love. The latest effort to explore the sources of the enigmatic playwright’s genius, with likely success at the box office, traces the inspiration of his greatest play, Hamlet, to the grief he and his wife Agnes (or Anne) felt at the death of their son, Hamnet. Most of the movie is speculative, but who cares? The proposition is intriguing.

Hamnet, directed by Chloe Zhao and based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, unfolds rather slowly and, to be honest, flatly as a conventional story of love tested by tragedy and is really saved by the last 15 minutes, when the play is staged at London’s Globe Theater. In fact, that scene, where Hamlet’s dying on stage triggers Anne’s transcendence of her sorrow, would have been cathartic even if it were detached from the rest of the film.

Jessie Buckley’s acting as Agnes is, however, impressive—though, IMHO, it is a notch below that of Renate Reinsve’s in Sentimental Value. As for Paul Mescal, well, he tries, but he doesn’t come across as Shakespeare but as Paul Mescal playing Shakespeare.

Hamlet, by the way, was the high point of my acting career in high school, where I played one of the grave diggers who gave Hamlet the skull on which he pronounced his immortal words, “Alas, poor Yorick…”. Alas, poor me, it was the last time I was on stage.