Mike Schulz, Dave Levora, and Darren Pitra yearn for the return of the sun before Levora commends Schulz on the number of Oscar picks he got right. Schulz demurs, saying he beat last year’s record by one, and that averages out to about an eighty-percentile grade. They then discuss the particulars of the Oscar nominations, which you can hear at the following podcast.

Concerning the films that he managed to see this past week:

• ISS, directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite and starring Ariana DeBose, Chris Messina, John Gallagher Jr, Masha Mashkova, Costa Ronin, and Pilou Asbæk, about Russian and American astronauts who are ordered by their respective ground-controls to take over the International Space Station, as Earth is now engaged in World War III. A brisk thriller that reminds Levora of 2010: The Year We Make Contact, albeit minus monoliths.
  
• All of Us Strangers, directed by Andrew Haigh and starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, and Claire Foy, is a “fantastic heartbreaker” about correcting one’s present torments by coming to terms with one’s past.
  

As for previews, there is Origin, directed by Ava DuVernay and starring Jon Bernthal, Vera Farmiga, Audra McDonald, Niecy Nash-Betts, Nick Offerman, and Blair Underwood. Origin is about Isabel Wilkerson, who wrote a study in 2020 called Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which describes racism in the United States as an aspect of a caste system,.and Wilkerson’s efforts to get past a huge personal tragedy and adapt Caste as a film. It sounds an awful lot like Adaptation., doesn’t it? That was Spike Jonze’s portrayal of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s efforts to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, a book that defies obvious ways of translating its subject matter to film. As far as Schulz can see, Kaufman needn’t worry that DuVernay, who also wrote Origin’s screenplay, is trying to steal of patch of his peculiar turf. Aside from that, Toho International is re-releasing Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, albeit without color — Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color, they’re calling it. If you loved the color version, and you’re not ambivalent about modern-day black-and-white films, then you’ll probably get into it all over again, one assumes. . .

“ISS” and “All of Us Strangers”

The 2024 Academy Awards Nominations