A mere two weeks ago, the Oscars for Best Actor and Best Actress were veritable locks.

Jessie Buckley was going to win for her earthy and primal depiction of Agnes Shakespeare in Hamnet and Timothée Chalamet was assured a win for playing a live-wire ping pong hustler in Marty Supreme.

But it seems that being the frontrunner, with its attendant extreme scrutiny, is not the safest place these days.

In the past two weeks, Buckley’s The Bride opened to decidedly mixed reviews, with many critics calling her performance over-the-top and even a bit “cringe.” (I’ll believe it when I see it. She’s never given a bad performance in my estimation.)

Then, to add insult to injury, an interview with her resurfaced where she said that she forced her then boyfriend (now husband) to choose between her and his vindictive cat. (He chose her, smart man.) “I’m going to get canceled,” she said, prophetically. The claws came out, if you will. Hell hath no fury like a pissed off cat lover.

And then there’s Timmy. When Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor at “The Actor” (the annoying new name for the Screen Actors Guild award), a palpable sense of joy, even relief, filled the theater. The talented Jordan is universally beloved, an unproblematic king, as the kids say. Meanwhile, Chalamet has raised hackles by dating a Jenner and campaigning rather brazenly for the Oscar. Still, his work was undeniable in Marty Supreme. And for a while there, it did seem like the Oscar was his for the taking.

Then, in a conversation with Matthew McConaughey for Variety magazine, he said that ballet and opera are art forms “no one cares about” and that he much preferred to work in the medium of film.

Here’s my theory: The disappointment over his dating a Jenner and the disappointment over his remarks about these classical art forms are variations of the same thing. We want to see Chalamet as a sensitive artist, a Byronic poet, a deep thinker. We basically want him to be Elio in Call Me By Your Name.

Dating one of the world’s biggest influencers, a woman with 390 million Instagram followers, doesn’t quite jibe with that persona. The crack about no one caring about opera or ballet has a similar effect. Wait, isn’t Chalamet supposed to be the kind of soulful man who cries at the opera? (Elio would!)

I feel like people feel personally betrayed by Chalamet. But honestly, folks, he’s just a dude—and an undeniable product of the 21st century. He loves sports, hot women, video games, hip-hop and, yeah, he also happens to be a great actor. His off-hand joke about opera should not have set off an international crisis. But that’s what it did.

And the backlash to the remarks has had surprising legs—primarily because dance and opera performers and companies are seizing the moment to promote themselves. (Cleverly, the Seattle Opera offered a 14 percent discount to their production of Carmen with the code TIMOTHEE.)

Is this backlash enough to lose Chalamet and Buckley their Oscars? Well, it’s time to roll out my predictions of select categories.

BEST PICTURE
Who will win: One Battle After Another
Who might win: Sinners
Who should win: One Battle After Another
Anyone else have a shot? Hamnet has a very slim chance
Final thoughts: One Battle After Another and Sinners were my two favorite films of the year, so I’m good either way. Sinners is riding high on momentum after winning the Screen Actors Guild Award—ugh, I mean, “The Actor”—but it’s a genre film and those rarely take home the big prize.

Of course, it’s a sneaky genre film, a film about cultural vampirism masquerading as one about actual vampires, but still. In the end, I think the political urgency of One Battle After Another, coupled with the fact that people really like it (it’s great!), gives it the slight edge.

BEST ACTOR
Who will win: Michael B. Jordan
Who could win: Timothee Chalamet (It’s a very close race!)
Who should win: Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent
Anyone else have a shot? Nah, it’s a two-man race unless Jordan and Chalamet cancel each other out, in which case I suppose Moura could slip in.
Final thoughts: Love me some Chalamet, but he has been VERY overexposed this year. Meanwhile, Jordan has kept his head down, done great work, and looked incredibly dashing while doing so. I think that The Actor win gave voters permission to choose Jordan.

BEST ACTRESS
Who will win: Jessie Buckley
Who could win: Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Who should win: Buckley
Anyone else have a shot? Not really.
Final thoughts: I think Buckley was such a frontrunner her recent stumbles haven’t hurt her. Plus, lots of people secretly hate cats. (I kid, I kid…)

BEST DIRECTOR
Who will win: Paul Thomas Anderson
Who could win: Ryan Coogler
Who should win: PTA
Anyone else have a shot? Nope
Final thoughts: Much of Oscar night will basically come down to Sinners vs. One Battle After Another and Best Director is no different. Both these men are generational talents. It’s just that Paul Thomas Anderson is 55 and has never won an Oscar. Meanwhile, Coogler is 39 and, presumably, has many gold guys in his future.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Who will win: Sean Penn, One Battle After Another
Who could win: Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value
Who should win: The great Skarsgård gave the performance of a lifetime in Sentimental Value.
Anyone else have a shot? Honestly? Literally anyone but Jacob Elordi could win. I particularly think the beloved Delroy Lindo could ride the Sinners momentum all the way to gold. And Benicio del Toro almost stole the show in One Battle After Another with his particular brand of insouciant cool.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Who will win: Amy Madigan, Weapons
Who could win: Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners
Who should win: Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value
Anyone else have a shot? Teyana Taylor from One Battle After Another, for sure. It’s almost a three-woman race.
Final thoughts: I almost can’t believe that Madigan is the frontrunner. Like I said, the Academy hates genre films. But she’s a beloved longtime actress and gave a hilariously iconic performance in Weapons that will be imitated by drag queens for decades to come. And running onto the stage, arms outstretched, a la the zombified children in Weapons, when she won The Actor just might have sealed her the win.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Who will win: Sinners
Who might win: Sentimental Value
Who should win: Sinners
Anyone else have a shot? I doubt it. This is Sinners’ lock of the night.
Final thoughts: In every sense of the phrase, Ryan Coogler can’t miss.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Who will win: One Battle After Another
Who might win: Hamnet
Who should win: One Battle After Another
Anyone else have a shot? I don’t think so!
Final thoughts: Sorry, this is getting boring. But One Battle After Another and Sinners are going to be trading wins all night.

A FEW MORE PREDICTIONS:
Best Cinematography: Sinners
Best Casting (new category!): Sinners
Best Editing: One Battle After Another
Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Frankenstein (huzzah, not Sinners or One Battle After Another)
Best Production Design: Frankenstein
Best Score: Sinners
Best Song: “Golden,” KPop Demon Hunters
Best Animated Feature: KPop Demon Hunters
Best Documentary Feature: The Perfect Neighbor
Best International Film: Sentimental Value

Sometimes the best way to call attention to an historical injustice is through bold entertainment. That’s certainly what the great American auteur Spike Lee has in mind with Da 5 Bloods. On its most essential level, it’s an adventure film, about four Vietnam vet buddies returning to Ho Chi Minh City to look for buried treasure (gold bricks issued by the American government to thank the South Vietnamese for assisting them in the war), as well as the remains of their best friend and squad leader, Stormin’ Norman Holloway, who died in battle. But it’s also about the racist legacy of that terrible war—Black soldiers were disproportionately placed on the front lines to die, even as they were being discriminated against on American soil—and the way trauma never really leaves you. As far as our four heroes are concerned, the American government owes them that gold.

The film starts off on a light-hearted note, as the four grizzled friends (Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, and Isiah Whitlock Jr.) meet up at the hotel, marveling at how old they look, giving each other good-natured grief, and recreating their famous handshake. But already we can see that there’s something edgy and coiled about one of the men, Paul (Lindo). He’s in no mood to make light when his buddies mock him for supporting Donald Trump. Eventually, Paul’s handsome school-teacher son, David (Jonathan Majors), joins the expedition, ostensibly because he wants his cut of the gold bricks, but mostly because he’s worried about his old man.

Lee flashes back to the so-called “Bloods” in the war—and makes a curious choice: The aging actors play themselves as young men—and without the benefit of the kind of de-aging technique that Martin Scorsese employed in The Irishman. It’s hard to know exactly why Lee made this choice—on Twitter, my friend Bill Ryan suggested it was meant to show that they were still mentally in the war, even in their 60s. Someone else posited that Lee simply didn’t have the money for the complicated CGI—I strongly doubt that was the reason. After all, there are multiple ways to negotiate flashbacks—he could’ve simply used a set of younger actors. Whatever the case, after the initial cognitive dissonance wears off, it works—adding a layer of poignancy to the battleground scenes. Of course, in those flashbacks, the troop leader, “Stormin” Norman, is played by a young man, Chadwick Boseman (fun fact: Boseman is actually 42, but he easily looks ten years younger), because he didn’t make it out of ’Nam alive. The effortlessly charismatic Boseman is a perfect bit of casting here—as more than one casting director has noticed, he comes across as a natural leader of men.

There’s another poignant subplot involving Clarke Peters’ Otis, easily the most stable and responsible of the four friends, as he visits Tiên (Lê Y Lan), a prostitute he had a relationship with during the war. She’s financially comfortable now, and living with her adult daughter. She has connections to a shady French merchant (Jean Reno), whom she claims can help the Bloods smuggle the money back to the U.S. But can Otis trust her?

As we’ve come to expect from Lee’s work, Da 5 Bloods pulls out all the stops: shifting visual perspectives and aspect ratios, historical footage, fanciful digressions, references to old films including Apocalypse Now and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The lush soundtrack features the work of the great longtime Lee collaborator Terrance Blanchard as well as era-appropriate music including Marvin Gaye’s mournful acapella version of “What’s Going On.”

Da 5 Bloods is quite literally action packed, but it has two set pieces that stuck out to me. One involves the canoe-ride the Bloods take to the jungle. As they glide down the river, they are solicited by merchants, also on boats. They buy a six pack of beer, say no to the guy peddling flowers. One man, selling live chickens, gets a little pushy—and doesn’t quite realize how agitated Paul is getting. A scuffle breaks out. “You killed my parents!” the merchant ends up screaming at the veterans.

Another scene involves the disarming of a landmine (the Vietnamese jungles are still filled with dangerous landmines that could kill you just for stepping wrong). To tell you more would be to ruin the heart-pounding effectiveness of the scene. (I will say that the introduction of a trio of do-gooder landmine disablers—one is a quasi love interest for David—is another one of the film’s many loosey-goosey digressions that somehow manages to work.)

Both those scenes highlight the brilliance of Delroy Lindo as Paul. The journeyman actor taps into something deep and dark in this character. At 67, Lindo still looks strong and fit, like a guy who could whip someone’s ass in a bar fight. He embodies Paul’s male repression and rage, while never losing sight of his humanity.

Indeed, all the acting is great—this could be the film that makes Jonathan Major, so memorably good in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a movie star—but it’s Lindo’s movie.

It’s remarkable how many genres of movies Lee is able to cram into this film—war film, buddy film, heist film, not to mention father-son reconciliation pic and even a bit of romance—while also addressing topics as weighty as systemic racism and PTSD. I want to emphasize that, while it has serious things on its mind, Da 5 Bloods is tons of fun. It’s over-stuffed, hyper violent, uproariously funny, heartbreakingly sad, filled with messy contradictions—and I wouldn’t change a minute of it.

Da 5 Bloods is now streaming on Netflix.