The mainstream no longer exists, and this year’s nominations show that the Academy now knows it. The classic age of studio filmmaking, when great movies reliably did big box-office business and also won Oscars, was also the time when movies were made almost exclusively by white men and were mainly about white men and women. That’s why the notion of the mainstream is essentially one of subtraction—it was always whoever was left in the seats amid the filter of exclusions that the industry imposed on human experience, both behind the scenes and on the screen. In recent decades, the industry has—too gradually and too grudgingly, but nonetheless demonstrably—done a little better. It has acknowledged its exclusionary past and attempted to improve. At the same time, Hollywood has a new trick up its sleeve: its most popular movies, the ones that tend to garner the largest audiences—superhero movies, franchise films—are ones that, regardless of the diversity of their casts, show not a multiplicity of experiences but no experiences at all. They are denatured films, emptied of experience not just by the fantasy premises and properties on which they’re based but by their formatted production; they’re synthetics, even if a few reflect personal commitment and others display an appealing sense of design. Superhero fans and producers of franchise movies don’t like to think so, but the people who affirm the difference even more tellingly than critics—and to clearer practical effect than even Martin Scorsese has done in interviews and in print—are the members of the Academy, whose nominations this year embody a bracing candor. Call it truth-in-nominations: the voting members have made clear that what makes the money is one thing, but what motivates them to make movies is another.

The business and the art of movies have always meshed uneasily, but now the commercial side is essentially a money-laundering operation: actors, filmmakers, and technicians work on blockbusters that enable them to make the lower-budget projects that their hearts are truly in—and that earn Oscar nominations. After the 2009 Oscars, the Academy, reacting to the absence of “The Dark Knight” from the list of five Best Picture candidates, expanded the category to include as many as ten films (and later fixed the number at ten), in the hope of creating space for tentpoles. The voting members were expected to put their mouths where their money is. Instead, the Academy has filled several slots with artistically ambitious movies of the sort that would likely never have seen the inside of the Dolby Theatre in previous years. That’s because the Academy, responding to the brilliant and necessary #OscarsSoWhite campaign, has been strengthened by an infusion of new members from a wide range of backgrounds.

The expansion of the Academy in recent years has fostered a more representative membership, a younger membership, and a more international membership. This evolution has corresponded with an unprecedented contraction in studio filmmaking, along with a shift, likely enduring, of viewers’ interest and money toward streaming. If the streaming services decide to produce more of the sorts of movies that get Oscar nods, it’s doubtful that the Academy will turn up its nose up at them in defense of the so-called theatrical experience, which is already on life support as a commercial outlet for new films of artistic ambition.

It’s cause for celebration that two instant classics, “Licorice Pizza” and “Drive My Car,” are among the ten Best Picture candidates at the 2022 Oscars. What’s more, their directors, Paul Thomas Anderson and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, are nominees for Best Director; both movies’ screenplays have been nominated, too, and “Drive My Car” is one of the five Best International Feature finalists. Three major critics’ groups—the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics (I’m a member of both), along with the Los Angeles Film Critics Association—voted “Drive My Car” Best Picture. I doubt whether that would have mattered to an earlier generation of Academy members, but I believe that the current membership, or a significant portion of it, took notice of the critics. The awards didn’t, of course, make them like the film, but merely prompted them to see it, and their enthusiasm followed.

I don’t think that either “Drive My Car” or “Licorice Pizza” will win in any of these categories, and this spotlights another peculiarity about Hollywood: the industry is plagued by inferiority complexes. Just as franchise producers aren’t satisfied with their billions and crave artistic respect from critics and the Academy, many of the serious creative people in the business appear to fret that their work may be mere entertainment and does not contribute to the public good. That’s why two kinds of movies tend to dominate the Oscars: social-issue films and bio-pics. They deliver clear messages and celebrate real-world heroes. Of course, such films aren’t intrinsically worse than any other kind; it’s neither politics nor real lives that are the problem but, rather, the rote approach to them. (It’s also a long-standing problem, exacerbated by critics, that movies overtly about political themes are taken as political—and that the political implications of other kinds of movies either pass under the radar or get a free pass.)

There is one key part of the Oscars that the Academy’s voters don’t control—the ceremony itself—and it’s bad news for the Oscars that, well before the broadcast, the ceremony is news. In response to a sharp decline in viewership since 2014 (and a dramatic drop by more than half in 2021), the Academy removed eight categories from the broadcast, shunting those awards to a preliminary hour. (The banished crafts are hair and makeup, editing, sound, production design, and original score; the three short-film categories also got bumped.) Reportedly, the Academy was responding to warnings from ABC, the network airing the show, that it would cancel its broadcast if categories weren’t cut. The insult to the people who make movies is obvious—and kudos to Jessica Chastain, who says that she’s ready to skip the red carpet in order to be in the hall for the awards in that preliminary hour. But this change is only the latest step toward alienating viewers who are passionate about movies, while doing nothing to attract others—as if an hour’s difference were all that kept the Oscars from getting Super Bowl ratings.

Ratings-driven panic pushed the Oscars broadcast down the slippery slope to irrelevance when, in 2009, the winners of honorary Oscars were booted off of the broadcast altogether and into a rump banquet. Was it just a matter of saving ten or fifteen minutes? Or of eliminating elders from a show that wanted to tickle the fancy of young viewers? In any case, the winners of Honorary Awards this year, who are kept off the stage and out of sight, are Danny Glover, Samuel L. Jackson, Elaine May, and Liv Ullmann; the fact that they’re not considered worthy of the main stage is yet more evidence that there is no mainstream—and that the Oscars don’t belong on network television anyway.

A modest proposal: let the ceremony be itself, a spectacle at which movie people get honored and make speeches for the occasion, with all the spontaneity and personality that this implies. Do away with the so-called entertainment, and with everything else except the in-memoriam montage, and let this hangout of a Hollywood party go where the people the Academy wants to reach also hang out, whether it’s Instagram Live or YouTube or any site where the fundamental aspects of the event will be not merely tolerated but welcomed.

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BEST PICTURE

“Belfast”

“CODA”

“Don’t Look Up”

“Drive My Car”

“Dune”

“King Richard”

“Licorice Pizza”

“Nightmare Alley”

“The Power of the Dog”

“West Side Story”

“The Power of the Dog” is, I think, a lock on Best Picture. Even if it weren’t a good movie, it would be a front-runner for its confrontation with toxic hypermasculinity, misogyny, and the multidimensional cruelty of homophobia, as well as its critique of the mythology of Westerns. But Jane Campion’s movie has a rare dramatic intensity, at least in its handful of best scenes; it has a sense of atmosphere, well-calibrated performances, and a spare and fierce visual sensibility. What it doesn’t have are loose ends, anything to spark imagination. It’s a film of intentions that says what it means, and it means nothing more. Still, it’s the third-best film on this list of nominees. What’s most interesting about it is a twist that connects it to another of the year’s most distinctive films, Paul Schrader’s “The Card Counter” (which got no nominations)—call it a twist of political violence. Both films reflect despair with the social order and a lack of confidence in the legal system to thwart and punish grave crimes against victims who rank low in the civic hierarchy. The film that’s likeliest to challenge “The Power of the Dog” is “CODA,” which won the Best Picture award, this Saturday, from the Producers Guild and which may be a beneficiary of the Oscars’ system of voting: if no film gets fifty per cent (or more) of first-place votes, the Academy counts second-place votes, and so on until the fifty-per-cent threshold is reached. “CODA” is a sentimental film with the practical virtue of putting deaf characters and actors, and the practice of A.S.L., in the foreground. There’s little aesthetic ground for a fan of “The Power of the Dog” to consider “CODA” the next-best picture, but the decision may not be, for some, an aesthetic one.

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BEST DIRECTOR

Paul Thomas Anderson (“Licorice Pizza”)

Kenneth Branagh (“Belfast”)

Jane Campion (“The Power of the Dog”)

Steven Spielberg (“West Side Story”)

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (“Drive My Car”)

Jane Campion’s direction of “The Power of the Dog” will win for its dramatic and physical intensity. I do think that there’s significant enthusiasm for Steven Spielberg’s work on “West Side Story”—technically showy and overbusy, like “1917,” and even more narrowly stuck in intentions. But the daring intimacy of Campion’s direction is far superior. This year, the art will be recognized.

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BEST ACTRESS

Jessica Chastain (“The Eyes of Tammy Faye”)

Olivia Colman (“The Lost Daughter”)

Penélope Cruz (“Parallel Mothers”)

Nicole Kidman (“Being the Ricardos”)

Kristen Stewart (“Spencer”)

This is a tough one to predict. Nicole Kidman’s turn as Lucille Ball, in “Being the Ricardos,” is the best of the bunch. But the keenly analytic focus that Kidman brings to the role of the comedic genius is the reason why she won’t win—the role is conceived to show how Ball created comedy, not how she performed it, and the casting of a non-comedian in the role has wrongly proven controversial. Kristen Stewart’s eerie performance as Princess Diana leaves impersonation behind for something like incarnation; its difficulty level is high, but the film itself is cramped and confines the actress. Cruz’s starring role in Pedro Almodóvar’s film “Parallel Mothers” is wonderful, but more for her presence and her realization of a magnificently written role than for anything that she does, or needs to do, in it. Colman’s performance in the adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel is literal, virtually declaring one emotion at a time; this absence of ambiguity, a function of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s direction, may indeed be the quality that the Academy is honoring, and if she hadn’t won the 2019 Oscar for Best Actress, for “The Favourite,” she’d win here. But I think that Jessica Chastain, in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” will win for the extremeness of her transformations in the role (which extends over four decades), even though the film is minor and not especially acclaimed. Chastain has never won, and this will be her year.

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BEST ACTOR

Javier Bardem (“Being the Ricardos”)

Benedict Cumberbatch (“The Power of the Dog”)

Andrew Garfield (“Tick, Tick . . . Boom!”)

Will Smith (“King Richard”)

Denzel Washington (“The Tragedy of Macbeth”)

Three bio-pics: Bardem’s performance as Desi Arnaz, in “Being the Ricardos,” has flair and energy, but the role isn’t written with the complexity that makes Kidman’s performance as Lucille Ball so strong. As Jonathan Larson, Garfield bounces off the walls with appealing vigor, but, instead of the authority of musical genius, he adds an element of cuteness that works against the role. Smith, as Richard Williams, in “King Richard,” will win; he invests the role with a sense of high purpose, passionate authority, and a distinctive repertory of gestures. Washington’s performance in “Macbeth” is largely a function of the power and the dramatic authority of his presence, because Joel Coen’s directorial concept of Shakespearean acting is both narrow and vague. Cumberbatch delivers a conceptually interesting performance as, in effect, a performer—someone living his life in a state of self-concealing deceit—and he delivers it ferociously. I think he won’t win but that, if the numbers were released, he’d be close.

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BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Jessie Buckley (“The Lost Daughter”)