The Oscar race has begun and here are some films I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, any of which might find themselves covered in glory (or slathered in humiliation) early next year.

Jay Kelly

Noah Baumbach’s meditation on the nature of stardom should be celebrated simply for giving George Clooney another leading role. It feels like forever since we saw him at the centre of a real movie. I think the last time I saw him on the big screen was in Hail Caesar, nearly ten years ago. There as here, he plays an old-fashioned movie star, but this time he’s in the modern world. There’s an obvious meta-layer here as Clooney is one of the last of the old-school male movie stars (along with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt?). He grins and smarms his way through this fairly slender tale of privileged heartache, but Baumbach (who wrote it with Emily Mortimer) has such a light touch with the material, that it’s easy to enjoy and to empathise with Kelly, even as he descends into self-indulgent misery. There are echoes of Preston Sturges here, as Kelly’s personal mission to connect with his offspring requires the participation of a huge entourage. But in a welcome touch of bitterness, his team gradually peels away as one-by-one they realise that he isn’t worth it. A restrained Adam Sandler is good value as his loyal manager, but it’s worth watching just for the scene on a train where Clooney’s real-life starpower melds with Jay Kelly’s backstory to create real joyful magic.

After the Hunt

I think I don’t quite get Luca Guadanigno. I liked Call Me By Your Name well enough, but I wouldn’t have piled acclaim on it the way that many people did. I was totally unprepared for the bonkers shooting style and soapy excesses of Challengers but I did enjoy it. And I appreciated After the Hunt more than many critics (so again I’m out of step), although I agree that the ending is maddeningly coy, and I have no idea what Michael Stuhlbarg thought he was doing – and he’s one of my favourite actors. If you can get past some of the sloppy plotting, and the lacunae posing as ambiguity, I honestly think there’s much to savour here. Chiefly the performances: Ayo Edebiri as heartfelt as ever, Andrew Garfield as good as I’ve ever seen him, and Julia Roberts (one of the last of the old school female movie stars) just fantastically good as the deeply conflicted philosophy professor. But it’s hard to know what to do with a film which clearly wants to confront issues of power abuse and sexual misconduct, but just not enough to actually depict either.

Wicked For Good

As an enormous fan of The Wizard of Oz, I sat down to watch Wicked the musical on stage with some trepidation. But I needn’t have worried, the show is amazing with soaring ballads, some neat commentary on the nature of propaganda, and wonderful staging. I saw it twice. And John M Chu’s movie version of Act One was even better, taking time to articulate the emotional journeys of Galinda and Elphaba with far more texture and nuance than on stage.

What the hell happened to part two? Well, there are two related issues here. One is that whereas the first half of the story is allowed to unfold naturally and organically, with plot points arising out of character driven choices made by people whose motives we understand, the second half keeps banging its head on the need to tie up Wizard of Oz loose ends. There is very little reason for Elphaba to fake her death, to turn Fiyero into a man of straw, or for Galinda to keep up her various pretences. Time and again, what is supposed to feel like a puzzle piece elegantly slotting into place feels more like a square peg being beaten into a round hole with a pile driver.

And the result of this is the other issue – it becomes impossible to understand who the central characters are and why they’re acting in the ways they do. Quite why the first movie succeeds so well and the second fails so hard, whereas the stage show just seems to cruise through, is something for people with more expertise to answer. I’ll just note that the visuals are as sumptuous as ever, Jonathan Bailey again steals the film, and that Ariana Grande gets almost nothing to do. Oh, and all the best songs are in the first half, but you knew that.

Blue Moon

I remember William Goldman talking about how exciting it was to discover a piece of wonderful story material, such as the tale of Butch and Sundance. I can only imagine how thrilled Richard Linklater must have been to discover that the first show Richard Rodgers wrote after his split with Lorenz Hart was the blockbuster Oklahoma! There’s something so fascinating about the almost parasitical interdependence of a composer and lyricist, neither of whom can have a career without the other. Rodgers swapping Hart for Oscar Hammerstein would have been a hammer blow for better men, but Hart – at least in this version – is a preening, self-doubting, narcissistic, depressive, sexually frustrated, attention-seeking, fame-hungry, self-destructive manbaby. He’s essentially the Michael Scott of 1940s Broadway, which is obviously why tall good-looking Ethan Hawke has shaved his head and been magically shrunk by almost a foot to play the part.

This is one meta-aspect of the movie. Whereas George Clooney and Jay Kelly’s personas overlap so much it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins, here part of the fun is seeing loose, confident, rangy Hawke reinvent himself as diminutive, needy Hart. It’s greatly to everyone’s credit that I did stop thinking about this eventually, but it took a while. And that’s partly because there’s nowhere to hide. Hart is in hell as he waits for the Oklahoma! gang to come over to Sardi’s after their triumphant press night, and the evening plays out in real time.

Another game viewers can play is Easter Egg hunting. A bit like in Saturday Night, of all the famous people Hart encountered, influenced, suggested ideas to or pissed off over the course of his entire life, every single one is now said to have happened in one evening. After the third or fourth such name-drop, my self-congratulatory pleasure in having clocked George Roy Hill or the genesis of Stuart Little, eventually gave way to a slight frustration at the artificiality of it all.

And that’s a shame, but only a minor one, as the psychological portraits here are incredible, with both Hart and Andrew Scott’s smooth Rodgers making a show of generosity, while both seethe with resentment on the inside. And while Margaret Qualley does excellent work, and even though it’s letters from and to her character which inspired Robert Kaplow’s screenplay, the long conversation with her in the coat-check room is the only time that the movie drags.

Bugonia

Lastly, let’s check off the latest Yorgos Lanthimos / Emma Stone / Jesse Plemons joint. A riff on a South Korean film from over twenty years ago, this takes a potent situation and keeps finding new ways to raise the stakes, until eventually it all detonates in an explosion of silliness. I’m not sure why but something tells me that if I’d been watching a film from South Korea, I might have been more willing to embrace the ending, but for much of its running time, I was very happy with the Misery-style situation I was presented with, and I do need to congratulate Will Tracy for his rigour as the rest of the film does not conflict with the rug-pull ending at all, as far as I can see, and that’s not easy. But overall this lacks both the awards-attracting weight of The Favourite and the pleasurable lightness of Poor Things or The Lobster.