Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 is over! I did my best to catch all the Academy Award nominees I could in every single category before the big ceremony Sunday, whether in theaters or on our household’s available streaming services. Last year I managed a 100% completion achievement, but no one gave me a trophy for my amateur hobbyist efforts. My wife Anne was relieved to know our routines could get back to normal, but that’s about it for prizes. Oh, and it was a great excuse to catch some fantastic films I might otherwise have missed…as well as a few pieces of garbage.

This year I earned no real bragging rights. Of the fifty different works up for honors this year, I’ve seen 47 in all as of Saturday morning, with no chance of getting any farther. Per my completionist tradition, the following are capsule summaries of the other ten nominees I watched over the past six weeks that I hadn’t previously written up. The services that granted me access to each of them are provided as well, though at least one has changed since I watched it.

The Apprentice (Xfinity Rewards $1.00 rental). My eye-rolling disdain for Trump dates back to childhood when he first became famous merely by being rich and literally no other worthwhile contribution to humankind. My disdain has never, ever wavered since, neither for his entertainment forays nor his extremely overlong political career. I cringe at the sound of his voice, at the sound of anyone’s impression of it (be they a standup comic or my own wife), and at his name in headlines and posts alike, which is why his name is now in all my social-media Mute filters. I absolutely did not need an entire film dedicated to the secret origin of this rejected Dallas villain’s orangeness, which tromps through so many prequel-style first-appearance pop-up eggs, as if we’re playing Trump Biopic Bingo. That said, Succession‘s Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, one of the all-time evillest lawyers, seems so far removed from normal human behavior, mannerisms, and voices that I can only assume his take is lethally accurate.

Black Box Diaries (Fandango rental; free on Showtime, which we don’t have). The #MeToo movement may have faded into the background here in America, but not everyone has the luxury to forget or to pretend everything’s fine and all males have agreed to knock off all the harassing and raping. Japanese journalist Shiori Itō documents her 2015 assault at the hands of a top media-giant executive with ties to the Prime Minister himself (e.g., the part where he wrote a book about him). Itō charts her own quest over the next several years despite the scant evidence, the uncooperative policemen, the patriarchy’s century-old prosecutorial guidelines, and the public’s pea-brained penchant for victim-shaming rationalizations. Japan: they’re just like us! including — maybe, just maybe — being open to changing an unsympathetic system if enough citizens are tenacious enough to keep pushing back.

A Different Man (Max). Kudos to The Year’s Best Oscar Nominee with Sebastian Stan In It, and not just for its lack of Trump. The Winter Soldier himself is a bitter loner born with the severe deformities of neurofibromatosis who becomes a guinea pig for a magical cure, which turns his features into Stan’s and emboldens him to try things he’s never done before: getting rich! Acting! Dating! Being a colossal jerk! The film pivots from uplifting potential to satirical farce when he meets charming British actor Adam Pearson (Under the Skin), who lives with neurofibromatosis in real life and is playing a better person. Their passive-aggressive battle for the same stage role and the same woman (The Worst Person in the World‘s Renate Reinsve) is the All About Eve of the neurofibromatosis world, ultimately becoming a live-action adaptation of the season-11 Simpsons episode “Pygmoelian”, up to and including the part where a live performance fiasco leads to a wall falling on him. (There’s also a dash of Frank Grimes, if you know that episode.) As it happens, easy cure-alls are nice but have their negative side effects, such as not automatically making you a better person.

Elton John: Never Too Late (Disney+). The legendary musician — of whom I’ve liked quite a few singles but never bought a full album — commemorates his farewell tour with a look back at the first several years of his touring life on the road, with select bio-facts from the early days. The limited scope means it’s far from a comprehensive career summary –- 1976-1990 is written off entirely as a drunken semi-retirement phase, his cleanup is referenced only in that it led to his husband David Furnish (who co-directed this documentary), and it leapfrogs past Ryan White, Princess Diana, and his Oscar for The Lion King altogether. (A Disney-released doc that yadda-yaddas The Lion King? Really?) It isn’t even a fully committed concert film — only partial performance clips, nary a full musical number from beginning to end. (Disney+ has a separate special for that.) A few interesting segments stand out — his dislike of the word “queer” (I’m likewise old enough to recall when it hadn’t been “reclaimed”), how so much pop radio today is “pap”, and excerpts from his podcast where he’d interview up-‘n’-coming musicians he enjoys, such as the rather awesome Linda Lindas. (I felt his aging pain as he muses to himself after they sign off, “I am 64 years older than the drummer in the Linda Lindas.”)

Flow (Max). If you loved the breathtaking naturalist art design of The Wild Robot, here’s its best partner for a great double feature. Gints Zilbalodis and his crew composed it entirely using Blender — a luscious, suspenseful adventure from Latvia about a cat caught in a massive miles-wide flood and the other hardy animals it meets and does the found-family thing along the way, it’s nominated for Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature, a rare twofer but not unprecedented (see also 2021’s Flee). It’s captivating, scary, funny, and optimistic in its depiction of the old adage “Life will find a way”. Also refreshing: none of the animals talk or sing. Who does that in an animated film?

Memoir of a Snail (Fandango rental). The most NSFW of all the Animated Feature contestants is low-key Australian stop-motion from Academy Award Winner Adam Elliot (2004’s Harvie Krumpet) about a shut-in girl (Succession‘s Sarah Snook) and snail aficionado who recounts the traumas of her life. The promo art looks cute, but inattentive parents who overlook the R rating may end up fielding kids’ questions about suicide, masturbation, fetishes, and teenage coming-out stories, though the framing device — with one character in the throes of Alzheimer’s — ties some of it together by the end. But without the quizzical snails and the strong voice cast (Kodi Smit-McPhee! Eric Bana! Nick Cave! Dominique Pinon from Alien Resurrection!), this could’ve just been an overlooked live-action mumblecore indie.

The Six Triple Eight (Netflix). Scandal‘s Kerry Washington rules in the true story of Captain Charity Adams, who led the Black/POC women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion throughout 1945 in performing the overlooked duty of sorting over 17 million undelivered pieces of mail to and from the American soldiers on the European front. Washington summons every ounce of willpower and fortitude to lift us above her head and carry us through to the best part of the movie, which is a mini-doc at the very end that salutes the real-life soldiers who served in that unit but weren’t recognized for decades. Standing between us and those touching moments is…okay, full disclosure, this was my very first time watching a Tyler Perry film. I’ve no idea if his standards include cliched dialogue straight out of 1950s social-studies filmstrips, an earnest stock-character ensemble, special effects that might look passable on smaller TVs (there’s one practical explosion that’s impressive), and over-the-top cameos from famous white folks (Susan Sarandon in a frightening Eleanor Roosevelt dental prosthesis, Sam Waterston proving why he normally plays Lincoln rather than FDR, Breaking Bad‘s Dean Norris as a southern-fried racist general). Points to Oprah Winfrey for bringing dignity in one scene as Mary McLeod Bethune. I might’ve missed her and this film if it hadn’t slid into the Oscar lineup through the Best Original Song backdoor exploit courtesy of “The Journey” by Academy Award Winner H.E.R. (Judas and the Black Messiah) and pro songwriter Diane Warren, who matches Perry schmaltz for schmaltz.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Kanopy). If you can only see one 2024 Oscar nominee about military dictatorships that the U.S. covertly supported on other continents despite the human rights violations and countless murders committed for our benefit, and if I’m Still Here hasn’t come to your local cinemas, then make it this in-depth exposé of American and Belgian complicity in the 1961 assassination of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s justly elected premier Patrice Lumumba — puppet-mastering for the sake of profiteering in the billion-dollar uranium industry. As director Johan Grimonprez and his researchers tell it, the project, begun with President Eisenhower’s approval, had two secret weapons: overseas mercenaries, and the unwitting assistance of jazz legends led by Jazz Ambassador Louis Armstrong, who embarked on a goodwill tour of central Africa with several fellow musicians in tow, none of whom knew their entire gig was a spy front. The filmmakers are so meticulous, they cite all their sources at every step during the film with each and every new revelation, which might make it all the more jaw-dropping for some viewers when the “good guys” revealed in this brouhaha include Malcolm X and Nikita Khruschev. It’s yet another argument that the U.S. hasn’t been a faithful “leader of the free world” since looong before the current administration, but hey, the songs have a snappy beat and you can dance to ’em.

The Substance (Fandango rental). The most disgusting Oscar nominee in history features The Greatest Demi Moore Performance in History. Possibly feeding on a steady diet of David Cronenberg and Stuart Gordon, writer/director Coralie Fargeat sledgehammers viewers with an uncompromisingly vicious SF/body-horror parable about ageism, society’s superficial obsession with reinforcing unreasonable beauty standards, and potentially lethal products sold without FDA approval. Moore is unforgettably nightmarish as a former Oscar winner turned TV aerobics instructor who, after being suddenly fired for oldness by her loathsome boss (Dennis Quaid at his unprecedented skeeviest), tries to salvage a career by taking a bizarre regimen of gizmos and goop that temporarily clone her into a perfect, younger version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley (The Leftovers, Poor Things). As is often the case here in the Twilight Zone, there are numerous rules and limitations: for one, the clone has a completely separate consciousness and soon forms its own agenda at odds with her wants. Severance meets All About Eve by way of 1985’s Perfect in what’s really the sort of beyond-R-rated film so extreme that I shouldn’t be watching…and yet it’s one of the most committed, scathing, savagely unfettered satires I’ve ever witnessed, up to and including the Grand Guignol grotesquerie at the end. For you three readers who’ve made it this far, don’t tell anyone this is secretly my pick for Best Picture.

Sugarcane (Hulu). Reservation Dogs‘ bleakest episode, season 3’s origin-horror story “Deer Lady”, was based in part on the real-life tragedies of hundreds of Native kids who were shipped off to white-led North American “residential schools” (many of them overseen by the Catholic Church) only to die there and often have their deaths covered up. In that exact vein, this documentary involves one that preyed upon the Secwepemc Nation in a wee British Columbia community called Sugarcane. This spiritual cousin of Nickel Boys and Spotlight examines that dark past, the survivors who escaped as well as their descendants (including the filmmakers), the quest for more revelations and the struggle to carry on. A cameo by Justin Trudeau at a press conference doesn’t quite solve everything, and it’s glacially paced at times — call it the speed of mourning — but the turbulent emotions are real, demand a reckoning and seek a path forward.

…

MCC readers have already been privy to my thoughts on 23 other feature-length nominees in the following entries:

• Alien: Romulus
• Anora
• The Brutalist
• A Complete Unknown
• Conclave
• Dune: Part Two
• Emilia Perez
• The Girl with the Needle
• Gladiator II
• I’m Still Here
• Inside Out 2
• Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
• Maria
• Nickel Boys
• No Other Land
• Nosferatu
• A Real Pain
• The Seed of the Sacred Fig
• September 5
• Sing Sing
• Wicked
• Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
• The Wild Robot

We also posted a single entry covering 14 of the fifteen contenders for Animated Short Film, Live-Action Short Film, and Documentary Short Subject:

• Beautiful Men
• In the Shadow of the Cypress
• Magic Candies
• Wander to Wonder
• Yuck!
• A Lien
• Anuja
• I’m Not a Robot
• The Last Ranger
• The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent
• I Am Ready, Warden
• Incident
• Instruments of a Beating Heart
• The Only Girl in the Orchestra

That leaves the final three — the only celebrated works that successfully evaded me all season long and apparently didn’t really want too many people to watch them anyway. These will go on my long-term to-do list, where they’ll probably be gotten around to someday, though they’ll have to compete for my free time with other works of varying quality, such as those last two Fast and Furious sequels I haven’t seen.

• Better Man: The first Best Visual Effects nominee I haven’t seen since 2019, about a British singer who has fans and yet I cannot name a single song by him. It was in theaters for a short time, but I procrastinated it in favor of concurrent films in the more important categories. It was gone by the time I had time for it, soon came to streaming, but as of tonight its handlers are still charging twenty bucks for rental. I don’t rent movies I love for that price, let alone something I’m self-obligated to watch for the sake of this whole daffy game.
• Death by Numbers: The lone holdout for Documentary Short Subject was available exclusively as part of that category’s theatrical program, which ran some 165 minutes and included four shorts already available online for free.
• Porcelain War: To my surprise, this year’s mandatory Ukraine documentary played here in Indy for a short time before its nomination was clinched. After it was announced, *poof*! It vanished without a trace — no re-release and no streaming plans announced. I trust it’ll eventually show up on Kanopy, where most documentaries go to die.

…thus endeth the quest. All that’s left are the formalities, by which I mean ABC being ABC, Conan O’Brien as our first-time host, winners being named and me staying up late for our wrap-up. To be concluded!