Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscars Quest ’26 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. I do so each year knowing no one will give 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.

For my second time ever, I’ve seen all fifty works up for honors this year, comprising 35 features and 15 shorts. Per annual tradition, the following are capsule summaries of the eight nominees I streamed over the past six weeks that I hadn’t previously posted. The services that granted me access to each of them are provided as well, though these might be subject to change without notice.

Diane Warren: Relentless (Kanopy). After sixteen Oscar nominations for Best Original Song and sixteen competitive losses, the celebrated songwriter will be going up against the KPop Demon Hunters juggernaut for Unlucky #17 with “Dear Me” sung by Kesha — featured in, irony of ironies, this revealing documentary about Warren herself. The filmmakers chart the origins of her storied career, from rebellious childhood to stubborn breaking-in years to her first big hit with DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night”, and onward to her very first (and last) chintzy ripoff contract. The funny, profane, neurodivergent songstress has plied her craft for hundreds of artists across the decades, picked up countless other awards (including an Honorary Oscar consolation prize), owns her entire publishing catalog with a nine-digit valuation, and keeps persevering through obstacles and setbacks, such as the time one of her most deeply personal and emotionally searing songs lost the Oscar to a crappy, forgotten James Bond theme. Her songs aren’t always my thing, but the wide appeal of so many of them is undeniable, and now “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” is stuck in my head again. (One last dollop of irony: in this film about artistic respect and acknowledgment, the end credits misspell Art Garfunkel’s name.)

Elio (Disney+). Pixar returns to outer space sans Buzz Lightyear with some of the most breathtaking scenery they’ve ever composed. Too bad it’s the compromised Pixar of today, so their magic comes with a price. Coco co-director Adrian Molina springboards off a Lilo and Stitch fractured-family launchpad into a U.S. military installation that lets officers bring a kid with behavioral issues to work, where said kid accidentally contacts a Space Mensa consortium whose entire interstellar membership are dimwits and cowards, begging questions about their credentials. If you can hold tight through the first hour till it achieves idiot-plot escape velocity at the measurable point when two adult characters grow brains, that’s when all the Nickelodeon kiddie-gack sharpens into focus, the antenna array detects the North Star, and the six credited writers set coordinates toward the faraway nebula that was the quality Pixar of yesteryear…which they might reach if they don’t run out of fuel, and by “fuel” I mean “the viewer’s patience”.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Max) Beleaguered wife, mom, and Best Actress nominee Rose Byrne is already three calamities deep when we meet her mid-descent into a week straight out of the Book of Job Lite, so we have no baseline comparison to know whether the ongoing chain of events eventually drives her mad or the crushing weight of expectations from all sides had already given her a hairline brain fracture before we meet her. Imagine Shrinking except all the therapists are worse than Jimmy at their jobs, and the cameras have no sense of personal space and won’t let her or us breathe because they’re begging us to watch Byrne closely, like really closely. Yes, sure, she can juggle five kinds of damaged calm at once, but it’s like five different indie flicks about Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown crammed into one, to the point where it wore a hole through my empathy larger than the one in her apartment ceiling, and by the end I’m chanting, “CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!”

Little Amelie or the Character of Rain (Fandango rental). My favorite of the two French-language nominees for Best Animated Feature eschews Arco‘s quasi-apocalyptic time-travel gentility for a more grounded drama whose flights of fancy are in one little girl’s imagination. Our titular tyke is the late-developing youngest daughter of a Belgian family living in post-WWII Japan, where she and her young nanny become very close but their much older landlady is understandably grimmer and shall never forget the too-recent, still agonizing past. The generational differences are a fertile ground for Western and Eastern youths to negotiate a warm coexistence, perhaps naively so to the elders in charge, but the sensitive period piece is rendered in vividly poetic visuals, rife with complementary colors that capture the splendor of Japan’s seasons as they carry along, independent of Amelie’s misperceptions and the elders’ distractions and regrets.

The Smashing Machine (Max). It’s Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson like you’ve never seen him before: dramatically solemn and wearing someone else’s drastically different nose. In between moments of stretching the boundaries of his acting chops, he still gets to do a lot of punching and kicking in this otherwise ordinary biopic of champion MMA fighter Mark Kerr, who’s apparently a personable, eloquent wrecking ball when he’s not obsessed with winning at all costs or descending into domestic warfare with his Jungle Cruise pal Emily Blunt as his Concerned Girlfriend, who seems to have walked straight out of one of those reality shows that’s all about greedy women catfighting for screen time. I found myself more invested in the scenes with his manager and pal Mark Coleman (a down-to-Earth turn by real MMA winner Ryan Bader), a fellow fighter whose comeback subplot intersects with his, but doesn’t suffer the same Behind the Music dysfunctional showiness. My wrestling knowledge is scant, mostly picked up from old jokes in Wizard and Toyfare magazines, but director Benny Safdie’s slightly unorthodox verite visuals didn’t quite distract me from the unsatisfying ending whose Moral of the Story is “Winning isn’t everything.”

The Ugly Stepsister (Hulu). Fans of grimdark revisionist takes on classic fairy tales should love this Norwegian funhouse-mirror version of Cinderella. Emilie Blichfeldt’s feature directorial debut takes up the viewpoint and cause of stepsister Elvira (Lea Myren), who isn’t as snobby, hateful, or one-dimensional as your standard versions. While Cinderella herself (Thea Sofie Loch Næss, from Zack Snyder’s Twilight of the Gods) mostly gallivants around the periphery and gets an explicit sex scene, Elvira’s cheerleader-mom drags her through a medieval Extreme Makeover hell in hopes of grooming her into the perfect feminine specimen that might capture the prince’s heart and fortune, not necessarily in that order. Same as last year’s The Substance, it’s a grotesque body-horror black comedy serving as a cautionary satire of trying too desperately to succeed in the patriarchy’s cruel world, in which one woman’s attempted reinvention eventually warps her mind as much as her body. In particular, the climactic slipper-fitting scenes are not for the faint of heart.

Viva Verdi! (Jolt.film). A documentary about opera, that largely Italian-language art form, might not be ideal viewing for anyone who’s ever spent their free time yelling, “NON-ENGLISH MUSIC IS EVIL!” at the FCC through their rotary phones the morning after the Super Bowl. Another of the oddities that squeaked in through the unsupervised Best Original Song backdoor, this Indiegogo-funded gem takes us inside Casa Verdi, a storied retirement home for musicians established by the composer himself for talents of a certain age. The average resident’s age is 85 and they might not be able to live on their own, but their gifts are no less diminished and a select number of fortunate young students earn short-term stays to learn from them while they still can. It makes a light, enlightening companion to the previous year’s Maria Callas biopic.

The Voice of Hind Rajab (Fandango rental). Like The Perfect Neighbor, it incorporates actual recordings of its victim before she died. Like Armed with a Camera, it incorporates footage from the scene of their murder and a shot of their covered body, and arguably treads the precarious line between exploitation of a tragedy and outraged journalism. Unlike those two documentaries, this is otherwise a dramatization of a horrifying true story — the final hours in the life of a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was trapped in a car with the bodies of her family and surrounded by vengeful Israeli forces. The narrative perspective comes through the emergency call-center reps who responded to her pleas for help from fifty miles away over the course of several hours, virtually helpless unless they can untangle the knotted web of bureaucratic protocols through diplomatic channels at tar-pit speeds just to see if they can get first responders into the area safely without the IDF blowing them up as well. The director Kaouther Ben Hania was previously nominated for the art-commerce satire The Man Who Sold His Skin and the experimental meta-doc Four Daughters, both worth seeking out for their compassionate examination of innocents taken advantage of by others. Here, she conducts a requiem of helplessness and anguish that does not end happily and will scrape like nails across your exposed nerves, even if you’re already aware of what happened and try to brace yourself for the outcome.

…

MCC readers have already been privy to my thoughts on 19 other feature-length narrative nominees in the following individual entries…

• Arco
• Avatar: Fire and Ash
• Blue Moon
• Bugonia
• F1: The Movie
• Frankenstein
• Hamnet
• It Was Just an Accident
• Jurassic World Rebirth
• Kokuho
• Marty Supreme
• One Battle After Another
• The Secret Agent
• Sentimental Value
• Sinners
• Sirat
• Song Sung Blue
• Weapons
• Zootopia 2

…and three more that were encapsulated in my annual home-video streaming rundown:

• KPop Demon Hunters
• The Lost Bus
• Train Dreams

The nominees for Best Documentary Feature received their own rundown…

• The Alabama Solution
• Come See Me in the Good Light
• Cutting Through Rocks
• Mr. Nobody Against Putin
• The Perfect Neighbor

…as did the respective contenders for Animated Short Film, Live-Action Short Film, and Documentary Short Subject:

• Butterfly
• Forevergreen
• The Girl Who Cried Pearls
• Retirement Plan
• The Three Sisters
• Butcher’s Stain
• A Friend of Dorothy
• Jane Austen’s Period Drama
• The Singers
• Two People Exchanging Saliva
• All the Empty Rooms
• Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud
• Children No More: “Were and Are Gone”
• The Devil Is Busy
• Perfectly a Strangeness

…and with that, we are done. Self-high-five and imaginary trophy for me!

Special thanks are owed to the following:

• Anne, my cute tiny Oscar Widow, for her immeasurable patience while I kept running around town doing this.
• The Kan-Kan Cinema, Keystone Art Cinema, and the south-side AMC 17 — Indy’s finest locations when it comes to screening indie projects, international films, and the occasional documentary, especially when they’re Oscar nominees.
• The good folks at the Oscars Death Race subreddit, where I was ecstatic beyond words to discover there are, in fact, other folks out there who commit to this very same game, some of whom have been doing it longer than I have. They’re welcoming to quiet strangers like me and extraordinarily savvy at sharing whenever they’ve found rare, limited-time streaming opportunities from the oddest places, and not necessarily pirated (which is Not My Thing).
• The good folks at Jorleagle Designs, the Etsy seller who makes this souvenir T-shirt to commemorate the experience.
• Anne again, for buying me the shirt so I could get a trophy after all.

All that’s left now are the final formalities, by which I mean ABC being ABC, Conan O’Brien hosting once again, winners being named and me staying up late for our wrap-up. To be concluded!