When evil lives among us

  

   Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne give strong performances in The Good Nurse, a reality-based thriller grounded in the hospital environment in which two intensive-care nurses ply their trade.

   It's hardly a spoiler to tell you that Redmayne's Charlie Cullen is a serial killer whose kindly affect and cunning skill with computer systems enables him to obtain drugs that he uses to murder patients. 

   Gradually, we learn that Charlie has a checkered history. Many of his previous employers regarded Charlie with suspicion. 

   Fearing law suits and bad publicity, hospitals preferred to get rid of Charlie rather than call in the law. Demand for nurses being high, Charlie simply moved to the next job.

   Chastain portrays Amy Loughren, a New Jersey nurse with two daughters and severe health issues. Amy needs a heart transplant but can't take medical leave because she hasn't been employed long enough to qualify for it. Besides, her work-related health insurance has yet to take effect.

   Charlie builds a relationship with Amy, helping her to keep her job and offering support with her two daughters. She sees him as a good nurse and friend -- until she no longer can ignore the truth. 

   Director Tobias Lindholm works in a quiet style that keeps the lid on melodrama with Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich playing hard-working detectives who try to stop the string of killings. A hospital administrator (Kim Dickens) offers little help. Her priority: protect the hospital. 

    Lindholm puts complex issues on the table: the inadequacies of the American health care system, the timidity of medical bureaucrats, and the vulnerability of a good person to someone with heinous motives.

   Not all of these issues register equally but Chastain and Redmayne bring credibility to a story that would seem beyond belief if the core of it weren’t based on a real case involving one of the most egregious violations of trust imaginable.

When absurdity becomes very serious

 

     The 1969 Trial of the Chicago 7 was an early piece of real-life political theater, a warped legal proceeding staged against a backdrop of roiling protest against the Vietnam War. 

      In The Trial of the Chicago 7, writer/director Aaron Sorkin mixes the account of an absurd courtroom drama with a slightly dimmed appreciation of the American spirit as embodied in the "radical" defendants and their rebellious lawyer.

     In addition to the seven white defendants, Bobby Seale, a member of the Black Panthers, was attached to the proceedings as a kind of sidecar on the countercultural rollercoaster. 

      And rollercoaster it was: Sorkin zips his way through scene-after-scene as he dramatizes portions of a trial that lasted five months. Flashbacks enable him to abandon the confines of the courtroom. The organizers seek permits for the demonstrations. The police fire tear gas. A female FBI agent tries to cozy up to Jerry Rubin.

     The period was chaotic and so, at times, is the movie, a series of sketches that bump up against one another, sometimes without great finesse. And for all its tumult, the movie offers little by way of game-changing overviews either of the period or of trial.

     Limitations aside, the greatest allure of Sorkin's entertaining effort involves the work of a strong cast, an ensemble of gifted actors who walk us down the movie's countercultural memory lane.

     Standouts include Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman and Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society. Hoffman and Hayden shared common goals but disagreed on how to attain their goals.

     Hoffman, who was very funny, relished theatrics; Hayden approached protest with high-stakes seriousness. Their disagreements and ultimate rapprochement underlies Sorkin's recreation of the trial. 

      The defendants weren't the only stars of the proceedings. A fine Mark Rylance portrays William Kunstler, the radical  attorney who defended the seven. 

     Yahya Abdul-Mateen II makes a formidable Seal, the Black Panther who, along with the others, was charged with conspiracy to cross state lines to incite a riot. But unlike his co-defendants, Seal wasn't involved in planning the event and had been in Chicago for only two days during the 1o68 convention.

    The so-called riot that's at the heart of the case took place in Chicago's Grant Park during the Democratic convention at which Hubert Humphrey was nominated to run against Richard Nixon. 

      In an introduction to the movie, Sorkin uses real footage in which the esteemed Walter Cronkite sets the stage: "The Democratic convention is about to begin in a police state. There just doesn't seem to be any other way to say it." 

     The defendants ran a gamut of personalities, but the size of the cast forces Sorkin into sketching rather than painting detailed portraits. David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch) serves as a conventional guy with deep political convictions and Jeremy Strong portrays Jerry Rubin, who plays a kind of goofy second fiddle to Hoffman.

     And, yes, Cohen gets pretty close to capturing Hoffman's Massachusetts accent and comedic instincts.

    Hoffman and Rubin were Yippies; i.e., members of the Youth International Party, a group that flew a sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll banner over its protests.

    Every trial needs a judge and this one had a particularly incapable one. Frank Langella's Julius Hoffman makes ridiculous decisions without ever really sensing the absurdity that threatens to overwhelm him.

    Perhaps Hoffman's greatest faux pas occurred when he had the disruptive Seal, who eventually asked to defend himself, bound and gagged in the courtroom. The judge made Seal an advertisement for the oppressive nature of the trial. Charges against Seal were dropped before the trial finished.

     Joseph Gordon Levitt plays the prosecutor, a decent enough fellow who, nonetheless, approaches his job seriously. John Mitchell (John Doman) -- Nixon's Attorney General -- personally assigned Gordon-Levitt's character to the trial for reasons that had more to do with what he thought the seven represented than with anything they did.

    Michael Keaton does effective cameo duty as Ramsey Clark, the attorney general under Lyndon Johnson, who became a witness for the defense in the trial.

    It may be difficult for those who weren't alive during the '60s to grasp just how incendiary the times were. The trial may have had a disembodied theatrical quality, but Americans and Vietnamese people were dying in a senseless war that awoke a generation of protest.

     When the chips are down, Sorkin turns earnest and I wondered how another director might have lit  the match that needed to be thrown onto this political gas can of a movie. 

     Still, the performances and byplay (a Sorkin specialty) give the movie plenty of burn. 

Up, up and away -- some of the time

Aeronauts reunites Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones for an adventure that's fine so long as it doesn't touch the ground.

After their joint appearance in The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones reunite for a story about a scientist who enlists the help of a balloonist with a flair for show business.

Based on a real character, Redmayne's James Glaisher hopes to convince Britain's rigid scientific establishment that meteorology should be accepted as a legitimate scientific pursuit. In the 19th Century, predicting the weather evidently was not considered possible.

Director Tom Harper's movie begins when Jones' Amelia Wren arrives late for the balloon launch that's aiming to break the height record for balloon ascendance.

Harper immediately sketches personality details for each member of his adventurous duo. Amelia is the daring one; Redmayne's James takes a more cerebral approach to balloon flight. He's less interested in thrilling the gathered crowd than in collecting atmospheric data.

Amelia understands the importance of grand gestures. To make sure that the onlookers are adequately thrilled, she throws her cute little dog off the rising balloon. The crowd gasps. Not to worry. The dog is attached to a parachute.

Amelia, by the way, is a fictional stand-in for Glashier's real partner, Henry Coxwell. Perhaps to give the movie some feminist charge, Amelia disregards the advice of Antonia (Phoebe Fox), the sister who thinks Amelia should stay home and tend to domestic matters.

Amelia's backstory also involves the guilt she feels about her late husband's demise. Vincent Perez plays Amelia's husband, also a balloonist, in one of the movie's many awkward flashbacks.

None of this provides viewers with much reason to see The Aeronauts. But audiences may wish to seek out this adventure because of its aerial sequences, one of which -- a true stunner -- arrives when Amelia must climb to the top of the balloon to deal with a failure that needs to be righted before the balloon can descend.

At a height of 35,000 feet, both Amelia and James are in danger of freezing to death.

There isn't much else to say about the Aeronauts. One might summarize this way: Balloon footage (good); the rest (meh).

One note: If you haven't seen Harper's Wild Rose, the story of an aspiring country singer from Scotland, you ought to give it a look. It was released earlier this year.

An overstuffed 'Fantastic Beasts' movie

There are pleasures in the second Beasts movie, but it spends too much time running in place.

Back in the Pleistocene days of my youth, vendors at ballparks had a standard cry, "Get your scorecard here. Can't tell the players without a scorecard." We're talking about the days before mammoth scoreboards boasted screens the size of buildings. In my youth, the assumption was that if you arrived at the ballpark, you most likely came to watch the game.

I begin my review of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of the Grindelwald this way because I wish someone had handed me a character roster before I saw the movie. Not only did I have to remember characters from the first movie in the series, but I had to track new additions.

All this by way of saying that this edition of Fantastic Beasts is a bit of a muddle that advances the series' overarching story only by a couple of inches -- and takes 134 minutes to do it. Obviously, a planned five-part series can't deliver its biggest bang in episode two, but a little more end-of-picture satisfaction would have been welcome. At the end of Beasts, I felt as if the story had worked up lots of sweat but mostly had been running in place.

Director David Yates, working from a screenplay by J.K Rowling -- she of the sacred word -- is asked to juggle a variety of plot points that revolve in a dizzying orbit around Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), the series' ostensible main character, a wizard devoted to studying magical zoology. Some of Scamander's creatures live in a magical suitcase that the diffident wizard carries with him at all times.

Grindelwald, you'll learn, is an evil wizard played by a Johnny Depp, whose normal complexion has been augmented with enough white make-up to create the impression that pallor and villainy have become synonymous. Grindelwald seems to be a fairy tale Hitler, a fascist who wants to save the world with wizard pure blood before muggles (humans) screw things up entirely. The movie is set in the 1920s.

The movie opens with Grindelwald escaping from prison and moving to Paris. Among other pursuits, Grindelwald is trying to find Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), a baffled young man who's eager to find out who his parents were. Another returning figure from the first installment, Credence seems morbidly depressed.

Then there are our old friends Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) and Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudo). She reads minds. He doesn't mind. The couple provides much of the comedy you'll find in The Crimes of Grindelwald, aside from some of the better visual flourishes.

Redmayne, who seems to be wandering through the movie, eventually encounters a middle-aged Dumbledore (Jude Law) who asks him to confront Grindelwald, something Dumbledore himself can't do because he and Grindelmore once were more than brothers and friends -- or some such. Hmm.

Law, by the way, comes closest to calming the movie down to tolerable levels. His Dumbledore seems a welcome pillar of simplicity in a screenful of visual over-abundance.

Other participants in this pre-Potter farrago are Katherine Waterston as Tina, a former Auror; i.e., a wizard chosen to fight crime. Zoe Kravitz turns up as one of Newt's former classmate's at Hogwarts; the fabled school makes a rather brief but welcome appearance in what I'm choosing to call Beasts II, following on the heels of 2016's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Crimes of Grindelwald probably qualifies as one of those critic-proof movies that fans will support, even if they quibble with some of its choices and there are pleasures to be had from Philippe Rousselot's cinematography, from the scale of some of the movie's more elaborate settings and from some of its visual invention.

Somewhere in all this Rowling bric-a-brac, a serious confrontation between good and evil lurks. If I had a magic wand, I'd wave it and order all concerned to please get on with it.

Aardman again achieves its goal — silliness

Generally, I’ve liked the work of Britain's Aardman Animations, the folks who gave us Wallace & Gromit. Aardman’s Early Man follows the studio's Shaun the Sheep movie (2015) with a story built around a shamelessly ridiculous notion. Hapless cavemen from the Stone Age face off in a high-stakes game of soccer with a Bronze Age championship team. You probably didn’t know that soccer — football to the Brits — was invented during the Stone Sage, but fell out of favor with cavemen who never were able to win a big game. Time passed and the sport was taken over by the more advanced Bronziacs. As usual, voice work in an Aardman movie hits the spot. Tom Hiddleston provides the voice for Lord Nooth, a greedy Bronze nobleman who wants to gobble up all the bronze he's able to obtain -- legally or otherwise. Eddie Redmayne gives voice to Dug, the movie’s hero, a cave dweller who tries to whip his unruly cohorts into a bona fide soccer team. Timothy Spall does duty as the voice of Chief Bobnar, the aging head of the caveman clan and director Nick Park goes vocal as Hognob, the cheerful pig companion of the cavemen. As the creator of Wallace & Gromit, Park knows his way around this kind of animation and there are clever bits, many of them arriving as asides. Not as funny as expected or quite as wild as it might have been, Early Man boasts some of the trademarks of Aardman characters, bemused figures with hearts as big as their oversized chompers. Score this one as “amusing.”

J.K. Rowling unleashes 'Beasts'

This prequel to the Harry Potter series isn't as fantastic as one might have hoped.

The box-office numbers for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them probably will be big. If ever there was a time when the country was primed for fantasy, this is it.

Wait. I take that back. When it comes to movies, our escape-hungry country always seems primed for fantasy.

So here comes J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame to hook us into another series of movies designed to transport us into a world of wands and wizards.

Rowling's new series -- yes, two more are in the offing -- takes place in 1926, long before Harry Potter was even born -- much less learning his trade at Hogwarts.

This prequel to the Harry Potter series follows the adventures of Newt Scamander, a wizard who's writing what will become one of Hogwarts standard texts.

Early on, Scamander heads to the US as part of his plan to save and preserve magical creatures of which you will see many.

But here -- as I see it -- is the rub: The movie is only half successful.

Fantastic Beasts, which stars Eddie Redmayne as Scamander, is rich in set design and special effects. The movie's faux but nonetheless impressive atmospherics evoke the sooty streets of Manhattan during the 1920s.

But Beasts is poor, perhaps even impoverished, when it comes to character development and propulsive storytelling.

For some, the movie's visual abundance will be sufficient reward. Strip away a strong dose of Potter affection, though, and what you're left with is a big, muddled movie in which Redmayne shuffles his way toward the next two movies.

Redmayne imbues the main character with a diffidence that makes you wonder whether the actor -- despite tousled hair and just the right look -- was fully able to connect with an ill-defined role.

As one expects, Rowling fills the screenplay with jargon. The American version of Muggles, for example, are called No-Majs (no magics), sadly deficient humans who simply get on with their lives.

Despite the movie's wizardly bias against normal folks, Scamander is open to keeping human company; he even acquires a human sidekick (Dan Folger), a portly, good-natured factory worker and aspiring baker who becomes involved in the story through a baggage mix-up.

Meanwhile, a supposedly do-gooder group led by Mary Lou Barebone (Samantha Morton) presents opposition to witches; an evil Wizard, Geller Grindelwald, looms; and Manhattan is ravaged by a mysterious, fog-like dark force that reduces buildings to rubble.

The rest of the cast includes Katharine Waterston, as Tina Goldstein, a wizard who's on the outs with the American magic establishments; Alison Sudol as Tina's sister Queenie, a strawberry blond who reads minds; Colin Farrell) as Percival Graves, an American wizard whose motives are obviously suspect.

Have I mentioned Credence (Ezra Miller), a mope of a young man who as been adopted by Mary Lou and who skulks his way through the movie?

Part Dickensian tale about a cruel woman who adopts children for her own purposes, part cartoonish display of creatures too numerous to count and part guide to the way the magical world functions on US shores, Fantastic Beasts struck me as an often charmless addition to the Rowling oeuvre. She wrote the screenplay.

Some of the creatures -- a kleptomaniacal Niffler that looks like a platypus and a reedy Bowtruckle that Scamander keeps in his jacket pocket -- provide fun, perhaps to mitigate the impact the movie's scarier creatures might have on younger children.

James Newton Howard's musical score works to make the movie seem more enchanted than director David Yates can make it.

Absent the built-in affection that helped carry the Harry Potter movies past their rough spots, Fantastic Beasts ultimately must stand on its own.

Sequels will follow. Let's hope that they're more engaging than this over-stuffed first edition. Consuming it, left me with a bad case of fantasy indigestion.

A classy but staid 'Danish Girl'

It looks great, the performances are solid, but early story of a transgender heroine doesn't quite connect.

Einar Wegener was as one of the first people to undergo gender-altering surgery. An artist working in Denmark during the 1920s, Wegener transformed himself into Lili Elbe as he gradually changed his style of dress, added wigs to his wardrobe and ultimately elected to have the surgery that would complete his transition.

According to The Danish Girl, a movie that focuses on Lili's struggle, Elbe died of complications resulting from a succession of difficult surgical procedures, namely the one that was intended to give her a vagina.

As directed by Tom Hooper (The King's Speech), The Danish Girl -- a fictionalized account of Lili's life based on a novel by David Ebershoff -- seems to value classy presentation as much as the emotional dynamics of a story that -- by the end -- becomes an anthem for those who regard their biological genders as mistakes.

Fresh from his Oscar-winning turn as Steven Hawking in The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne portrays Einar who, during the course of the movie, becomes Lili. Alicia Vikander portrays Gerda, a lively and spirited artist who's married to Einar and who remains loyal to Einar/Lili throughout.

The movie makes it seem as if Einar discovers his true gender identity almost by chance. Early on, Gerda's seen working on a large painting of a ballet dancer. When one of her models fails to show up, Gerda asks Einar to put on a pair of stockings and serve as her leg model.

We know from the rapturous, trembling expression on Einar's face that he's begun to acknowledge that he's a woman mistakenly lodged in a man's body.

At first, Einar and Gerda have a good time with Einar's fascinations. Gerda even encourages her husband's interests, suggesting he dress as a woman to attend an annual artists' ball. They'll pass Lili off as a visiting cousin.

At this point, both husband and wife treat Einar and Lili as separate characters, one real, the other, an amusing pose.

Hints of discord arise when Gerda sees Lili kissing a young man (Ben Whishaw) at the artists' ball. Doubts suddenly arise about which part of Einer's dual identity is real and which, a sham.

Redmayne's performance involves a lot of whispered dialogue, and intense observation: He frequently watches women to see how they move, trying to teach himself the externalities of the gender to which he believes he truly was born.

Redmayne's concentrated performance has a dual effect. It makes us wonder how much of what we consider "natural" gender behavior is merely an accumulation of learned gestures.

But this approach also focuses our attention on Redmayne's performance as much as it takes us into the psyche of a character named Lili Elbe.

Vikander gives the movie much of its life, particularly as the couple begins to confront a medical world which either wants to cure Einar of his "perversion" or have him committed to an asylum.

When the couple travels to Paris so that Gerda can exhibit her work, a relationship between Gerda and one of Einar's childhood friends (Matthias Schoenaerts) develops: Schoenaerts' Hans Axgil, a Parisian art dealer, offers emotional support to both Gerda and Lili.

Eventually, Lili and Gerda meet a surgeon (Sebastian Koch) who has been experimenting in gender reassignment surgery. He believes that Lili is precisely what she thinks she is: a woman in a man's body. Lili's willing to brave the risks of surgery to achieve her dream.

Beautifully composed and meticulously upholstered with period detail, The Danish Girl feels like three-quarters of a fine movie: Perhaps Hopper tried so hard to keep things under control that he's locked Lili's pain safely in the past.

Another mediocre night with Oscar

Here are some things I'd hoped never to see:

-- A Birdman parody in which Oscar host Neil Patrick Harris appeared on stage in his tighty/whiteys.

-- An Oscar show in which Boyhood won only one award, Patricia Arquette 's statue for best supporting actress.

-- A purported celebration of movies in which the high points belonged to three singers: Lady Gaga, John Legend and Common. Lady Gaga nailed a medley of songs in a tribute to The Sound of Music, and Legend and Common brought the audience to its feet with Glory, the song from Selma that went on to win an Oscar.

With their win, Legend and Common found a platform to give one of the night's best acceptance speeches, even managing to mention the appalling rate at which young black men are being incarcerated.

So what kind of night was it?

You don't need me to tell you that it seemed endless, that an affable Neil Patrick Harris got off to a great start with a rousing musical number and then sank under the weight of a ton of lamely written material.

I'm not an ardent Birdman supporter, so Oscar's finale didn't buoy my spirits, either.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu won best director. Birdman won best original screenplay, and, of course, took home best-picture honors.

I felt sad for Boyhood and Richard Linklater, an indie-oriented director who may not get another shot at an Oscar. I'd have felt better if the Academy had split its votes, giving Birdman best picture and Linklater, best director.

Despite complaints about this year's lack of women and people of color, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences does seem to be changing.

Time was movies such as The Theory of Everything (British and a bit middlebrow) and Selma (socially powerful) would have been frontrunners for best-picture honors. Neither was.

And Oscar seems as removed from popular tastes as ever. Julianne Moore's victory as best actress was well-deserved, but I wonder how many people saw Still Alice, a heartbreaking movie about a brilliant college professor forced to deal with early onset Alzheimer's.

Was I upset that Eddie Redmayne, who played physicist Steven Hawking in The Theory of Everything, beat Michael Keaton (Birdman) in the best-actor category? Not really.

I've always liked Keaton, but thought Redmayne had the more difficult role. Despite Hawking's debilitating ALS, Redmayne never failed to show us the man's brilliance, arrogance and wit.

What else but random thoughts are possible during a telecast that tended to stagger under the weight of its own mediocrity?

-- Notable acceptance speeches came from Graham Moore (who won the best-adapted-screenplay Oscar for The Imitation Game) and from Patricia Arquette, who used the stage as a platform to call for wage equality for women.

Moore, who mentioned that he attempted suicide at age 16, encouraged those young people who feel different or alienated to hang in. Their day, he said, will come.

-- I was happy for Alexandre Desplat, who won best original score for The Grand Budapest Hotel, his first Oscar win after eight nominations. Desplat is a great composer of movie music.

-- I wondered if Clint Eastwood applauded when Laura Poitras won the best documentary Oscar for Citizen Four, her movie about Edward Snowden.

-- I was surprised that Whiplash won the Oscar for best editing, but upon reflection remembered that the movie's editor, Tom Cross, made a story about a jazz-obsessed drummer (Miles Teller) feel like an action movie.
Cross did a fine job, but Boyhood, which was shot over 12 years, must have been the more difficult movie to edit.

-- The In Memoriam section put a lump in my throat.

-- It struck me that the best visual effects category consisted of movies that a majority of viewers might actually have seen: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Guardians of the Galaxy, Interstellar and X-Men: Days of Future Past. Interstellar won.

-- Wouldn't the telecast have been better if Harry Belafonte, Maureen O'Hara, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere and animator Hayao Miyazaki had been honored at the big show rather than at a separate Governor's Awards program.

I'd rather have seen them than the chaotic Everything is Awesome production number. The tune -- from The Lego Movie -- was nominated for best song.

-- And who thought it was a good idea that director Pawel Pawilkowski, whose Ida won best foreign-language film, had to compete with the band to finish his acceptance speech?

-- The set? It was arcade gaudy. Maybe that's why Harris occasionally wandered into the audience, a move that mostly fell flat. So did a running gag about Harris's Oscar predictions, which supposedly were being kept under lock and key.

Still, maybe some good came out of the evening. Best supporting actor winner J.K. Simmons (of Whiplash) told people to call their parents.

With Simmons on the case, who needs Jewish mothers?

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead. Put Oscar behind you, and call home.

For a complete list of Oscar winners, click here.

It's almost over -- Oscar season, that is

Birdman and Boyhood in tight race for best picture.

Current wisdom has it that 2015 has given us one of the tightest Oscar races in years. Clear frontrunners have yet to emerge in several important categories, namely best picture, best director and best actor.
That may be true, but I have to confess that even several tightly contested races haven't gotten me psyched for Sunday's Oscars. In truth, the moment I'm most eagerly anticipating is the end of what feels like another interminable awards season.
Having said that, I suppose it's incumbent on me to make a few Oscar predictions, so here goes:

Best Picture
Birdman will win.
The competition has narrowed to a battle between Boyhood and Birdman. It's entirely possible that Boyhood will prove victorious, but Birdman seems to have received a boost of inevitably from victories at the Producers and Directors Guild awards, where it won best picture and best director honors respectively.
Besides, I know moviegoers whose judgment I respect who believe Boyhood doesn't quite live up to its reputation. A little underwhelming, they argue.
I'm going against my gut by picking Birdman, but my gut often finds itself out of alignment with Hollywood thinking.
I hope I'm wrong. I hope Boyhood takes best picture, but I'm prepared for Birdman to fly.
Best possible upset: Selma surprises everyone and wins best picture.

Best director
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
It's not unreasonable to expect a split vote for best picture and best director with Birdman winning best picture and Richard Linklater (Boyhood) winning best director.
A favorable outcome for Linklater might depend on whether the Academy decides that this well-regarded indie director -- who spent 12 years making his movie -- can't go home without some recognition.
But ...
It may be difficult to stop Inarritu since he's already won the Directors Guild award and because his movie bowed much later in the year than Boyhood, which had its premiere more than a year ago last month at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.
Of course, there's yet another possibility: Inarritu wins best director, but Boyhood snags best-picture honors.

Best Actor
Eddie Redmayne will win for The Theory of Everything.
Lots of folks think Birdman's Michael Keaton will take home Oscar gold for his portrayal of a desperate Hollywood actor trying to make a comeback on Broadway.
Keaton, who hasn't starred in a movie in a while, certainly makes for a better Hollywood story than Redmayne: Veteran actor re-emerges to wow voters or something like that.
But the Screen Actors Guild award went to Redmayne, and actors make up the Academy's biggest voting bloc. Ergo, my pick.
Besides, Redmayne was terrific as physicist Steven Hawking; he deserves credit for keeping Theory of Everything from falling into disease-of-the week sentimentality. He portrayed Hawking's ALS-related disabilities with alarming accuracy, but never lost sight of Hawking's wit, brilliance and humanity.
If there's a dark horse here, it's Bradley Cooper. How could a Cooper victory happen? If Redmayne and Keaton wind up splitting voters, Cooper has a chance.
Besides, even people who don't admire American Sniper concede that Cooper gave one hell of a performance as Navy SEAL Chris Kyle.

Best Actress
We're now crossing into safer terrain for predictions.
Julianne Moore wins the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of a college professor battling a rapidly advancing case of Alzheimer's. This is a strong category, but Moore deserves to win -- not only for her performance in Still Alice, but for a career geared toward excellence -- with a few digressions, of course. Let's not talk about her first movie of 2015: The misbegotten Seventh Son.

Best Supporting Actor
The Oscar goes to J.K. Simmons. Why go against the wave of support Simmons already has received with Golden Globe and SAG awards?
If you think Simmons was scary and intimidating as a sadistic music teacher in Whiplash, you've forgotten his portrayal of a white supremacist in 56 episodes of HBO's Oz.

Best Supporting Actress
Patricia Arquette will win.
Arquette may not have quite as much support as Simmons, but she'll have enough to win an Oscar for her work as an often-frustrated single mother in Boyhood.

Now for some quicker hits:
Look for The Imitation Game to emerge victorious in the best adapted screenplay category. I'm betting that The Grand Budapest Hotel will win best original screenplay for Wes Anderson , although -- for my money -- the movie is more a brilliant display of visual wit than anything else.
I'm going to skip most of the so-called technical categories, except to note that Birdman will win a cinematography Oscar for Emmanuel Lubezki, who also won in that category last year for his work on Gravity. Talk about being on a roll.
As for documentaries: It doesn't look as if anything can stop Citizen Four from taking home an Oscar, although I can't help but wonder whether Academy voters have at least some mixed feelings about Edward Snowden, the film's subject.
I'm thinking the Polish film Ida will win best foreign-language film, although this category can (and has) produced upsets. If I had a vote, it would have gone to Leviathan.
I'll be watching and Tweeting Sunday evening, contributing to the great snarkfest that now accompanies every awards show.
I believe the annual gathering at which Hollywood celebrates itself is fair game for snark.
Let's face it, the lengthy telecast seldom proves entertaining, and the results don't necessarily reveal anything essential about the cultural moment in which we're living.
We watch because ... well ... because we do.
Let's face it, being movie lovers often necessitates putting ourselves in the position of rejected lovers who refuse to take a hint. No matter how many times the Oscar show bores or disappoints us, we always seem to return for more.

'Jupiter' ascends, Wachowskis sink

A muddled fantasy that pours on the visual stimulation.

Get ready for a list of strange ingredients:

-- Inter-species gene-splicing.
-- Something called "recurrence," a mysterious process that resembles reincarnation.
-- Aliens who want to conquer Earth to boil down the human population in refineries designed to produce a life-extending substance for those greedy aliens.
-- A young woman who cleans toilets in Chicago, and doesn't know that she's actually a queen.

Ok, take a breath. The idea here is to let you know that these and many additional incongruities populate Jupiter Rising, the latest muddle of a movie from the Wachowski siblings (Andy and Lana).

As visually dense as it is dramatically unsophisticated, Jupiter Ascending doesn't so much flop as splatter, sending fragments of story flying toward incoherence.

Any initial excitement about the movie probably stems from the Wachowskis success with the Matrix trilogy, movies that created their fan base. It remains to be seen whether that fan base has sufficient strength to help Jupiter Ascending get off the ground.

A short summary of the plot probably is unavoidable. Mila Kunis plays Jupiter Jones, the daughter of a Russian immigrant family living in Chicago. Various aliens are tracking Jupiter, who happens to have been born with the exact DNA of the late queen of an alien civilization.

Jupiter's royal genetic heritage threatens the offspring of the late queen, a group of ambitious siblings want the Earth for themselves. If Jupiter's genetic heritage allows her to be recognized as a royal, she inherits the Earth.

Take another breath. There's more.

How about a dutiful alien protector? Channing Tatum portrays Caine Wise, a stoic alien warrior with a few wolf genes, a goatee and shoes that allow him to lift off the ground and fly. Think super Air Jordan's. Caine rushes to Jupiter's aid when villainous aliens try to kill her.

Once on the run, Caine introduces Jupiter to Stinger (Sean Bean), an alien with bee genes mixed into his make-up. I can't remember whether it matters, but bees never sting royals, the caste to which an unknowing Jupiter belongs.

Now, about the late queen's competitive offspring, foul creatures that they are:

Balem (Eddie Redmayne) wants the Earth badly. So good in The Theory of Everything, Redmayne here lends his talents to a movie so addled it might have been dubbed The Theory of Absolutely Nothing. Redmayne tries his best to be menacing, interrupting his barely audible whispering with occasional bursts of anger.

Then, there are Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), the sister in the group, and Titus (Douglas Booth), the obsequious brother who tries to advance his cause by staging a ceremonial marriage to Jupiter in some intergalactic cathedral.

Meanwhile -- and there are a lot of meanwhiles in Jupiter Ascending -- Jupiter falls for Caine. He resists her because he knows that no lowly gene-spliced guy can hope to aspire to romance with a royal.

Perhaps trying to emulate the episodic leaps of a Star Wars movie, the Wachowskis shift the action from Jupiter to other locations without establishing much sense of where the hell they're dragging us, and the action set pieces extend beyond any reasonably supportable length.

At one point, Jupiter must establish her legitimacy by obtaining some sort of official validation, a process that enables the Wachowskis to assemble a mini-satire on bureaucracy that boasts a cameo from Terry Gilliam. Gilliam's no stranger to visually bloated movies himself -- although, he's better at it than the Wachowskis. Remember Brazil?

As Jupiter, Kunis brings little to the role. Tatum, who knows how to give a real performance (see Foxcatcher), isn't asked to do much beyond striking a heroic pose. He battles strange looking creatures and pretends as if he's flying through he air in an ice-skater's crouch.

Now, if Jupiter Ascending were a flat-out comedy, its visuals might be more interesting. But as a bit of sic-fi that aspires to Dune-like complexity, it lacks enough consistency to be taken seriously.

Ornate spaceships, for example, pass in review like floating art objects. They seem unrelated to any plausible technology.

To be fair, I did spend some time wondering how the Wachowskis achieved some of the movie's more impressive effects, but I spent even more time wondering why they had bothered to create them in the first place.

It would be wrong to suggest that the Wachowskis suffer from some horrible talent deficit: It's more apt to say that as writer/directors, they make fabulous production designers.

A marriage full of challenges

Redmayne and Jones are terrific in this mature look at the marriage between Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde.

The Theory of Everything -- a look at the 26-year marriage between physicist Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde -- is based on Wilde's book, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen.

I begin there because those expecting a movie along the lines of Errol Morris' A Brief History of Time or a visual companion piece to any of Hawking's many bestsellers, probably will be disappointed.

Although the movie has taken the title of one of Hawking's books, it has less to do with theoretical physics than with a very untheoretical marriage that lasted quite a long time. Wilde knew that Hawking had contracted ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) before she insisted on tying the knot.

When Wilde married Hawking in the 1960s, he had been given only a few years to live. He's now 72.

Director James Marsh (Man on Wire) makes a choice that opens his movie to a wider audience than those obsessed with cosmology.

Perhaps Marsh assumed, quite justifiably, that those who are deeply interested in questions such as whether time had a beginning would know where to look for more information. Hawking, by the way, changed his mind about that question during the course of his work.

Admittedly, The Theory of Everything might have been more interesting if Marsh had given us a bit more insight into Hawking's work, but the movie earns its stripes as an intriguing look at a difficult marriage, and it makes no attempt to canonize either Hawking or Wilde.

They remain human beings dealing with adversity, and if you bypass The Theory of Everything, you'll miss two of the year's finest performances: from Eddie Redmayne as Hawking and Felicity Jones as his wife.

We meet Hawking at Cambridge in 1963. He's the kind of annoyingly bright graduate student who easily impresses his professor (David Thewlis) by breezing through problems that drive other students crazy.

Redmayne gives a physically demanding performance that must have become more taxing the more he was called upon to mimic the disease that deformed Hawking's body, put him in a wheel chair and eventually took his voice.

Hawking speaks with a computer-generated voice that, by now, has become familiar to those who've seen him -- and who hasn't?

Redmayne not only captures Hawking's physical disabilities, he infuses his performance with intelligence and wit. A half-smile that may result from disease also serves as a kind of metaphor for a situation in which Hawking seems to realize that biology has dealt him an absurd hand.

Jones' performance is every bit as good. When we meet her, she's a young woman studying medieval Spanish literature. Unlike Hawking, she believes in God. It's almost as if she intends to will her marriage to succeed.

As the story unfolds, Jane's decency never wavers, but she also begins to feel the inevitable resentments of a woman whose sacrifices have been doubled: She's a caretaker both for Hawking and for the couple's three children.

Unlike most of us who are prone to complaint, Jane has earned her frustration.

When Jane joins a church choir, she meets choir master Jonathan (Charlie Cox), an incredibly understanding fellow who becomes part of the Hawking family. Increasingly, he provides Jane with much needed emotional support and, ultimately, with love.

Marsh takes a non-judgmental approach to both Hawking and Jane, allowing them to be themselves without the intervention of an authorial voice to tell us where they're doing well and where they may have gone wrong.

So, yes, I'd have preferred a little more science and a good deal more stylistic daring to match the boldness of Hawking's thought, but The Theory of Everything deserves credit for taking a mature look at the evolution of a most unusual marriage between two most unusual people.

And the mysteries of marriage, as even the dimmest of us must know, remain resistant to scientific analysis.

Maybe a week with Marilyn wasn't enough

Michelle Williams does nice work in My Week With Marilyn, but the movie comes up short.

The main reason you might want to see My Week With Marilyn -- which is a bit of an anecdote passing as a feature-length movie -- centers on the work of Michelle Williams. Williams offers a mixture of fully realized performance and unrestrained glamor as Marilyn Monroe, capturing the Hollywood sex goddess during days in England when she was filming The Prince and the Showgirl under the direction of the esteemed Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh).

Here's how we know what went on: An avid film enthusiast named Colin Clark (a real person) worked as a third assistant director (read lackey) on the production. Clark evidently developed a week-long relationship with Monroe in which she both relied on him and toyed with his affections. Clark, who went on to become a documentary filmmaker, wrote a couple of books about his experiences tagging after Monroe.

If Williams makes a convincing Monroe, the same can't be said for Branagh, who suggests Olivier (the cast of the mouth, the delivery of lines), but obviously can't manage to look like him. And, yes, it bothered me because the movie's make-up people went to great lengths to turn Williams into a Monroe look-alike.

Director Simon Curtis, working from a script by Adrian Hodges, brings too little interpretive savvy to the proceedings, and Eddie Redmayne (through no fault of his own) can't make a memorable character out of a star-struck young man who's in love with the movies. On screen, Clark comes off as a bit of a cliche, a wide-eyed kid who has run away to join the show-business circus.

Some of the supporting performances are good. The always impressive Judi Dench gives a nicely shaded performance as the kindly Dame Sybil Thorndike, and it's nice to see Emma Watson (of Harry Potter fame) given a chance to do something other than react to special effects. She has a small role as a young woman working in wardrobe. Watson's Lucy clearly would make a more suitable companion for Clark than Monroe, who at the time was married to playwright Arthur Miller, played here by Dougray Scott.

And I particularly enjoyed Zoe Wanamaker as Paula Strasberg, Monroe's Method-oriented acting coach who contributed mightily to Olivier's massive frustration. Olivier didn't want to Monroe to plumb the depths of her character; he simply wanted her to get on with it.

A film about Monroe -- a complicated and often troubled woman who may have been both oppressed and nourished by her status as a sex symbol -- would have been most welcome, and the gifted Williams clearly was up to the task.

But My Week With Marilyn sums up what's interesting about itself in one very incisive line of dialogue: Monroe was a star who wanted to be taken seriously as an actor; and Olivier (who also starred in Prince and the Showgirl) was a revered actor who wanted to be a star. They couldn't help but clash.

That's a revealing observation, but insufficient to sustain an entire movie. My Week With Marilyn simply isn't big enough to accommodate a star of Monroe's magnitude