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

Timothée Chalamet has been acting a bit strangely lately. It started last year, when he won the SAG Award for A Complete Unknown and said in his acceptance speech that he wasn’t just aiming to be good, but wanted to be one of the all-time greats. This behavior continued during his press tour for Josh Safdie’s ping pong odyssey, Marty Supreme. “I’m doing top-level shit,” he said during one interview. “It’s been seven, eight years I’ve been handing in top-of-the-line performances.”

There is something off-putting about this level of bravado and ambition especially when it’s applied to an art form which isn’t—or at least shouldn’t be—about scoring wins and besting your competition. On the other hand, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it was kind of refreshing, too. False humility is as bad—hell, it’s worse—than Chalamet’s WWE-style boasting. The actors who pretend to rise above it all, the ones who say, “Oh gosh, I didn’t even realize I got an Oscar nomination; I was in my garden when I got the call from my manager”—truly work my nerves. (Girl, please. You were glued to your TV surrounded by your publicist, your dietician, and your glam squad.)

That said, at some point, I began to wonder if what Chalamet was doing was merely schtick. He’s proven himself to be an incredible self-promoter—remember when he turned up to the Timothée Chalamet Look-a-Like Contest? (He lost.) Could all of this bragging and grandstanding be some sort of meta promotion for the film? Might he be the first actor to take The Method all the way through the press tour?

I think the answer is yes and no—which is possibly what makes Chalamet the perfect actor to depict Josh Safdie’s patented brand of manic New York city hustler.

In a way, Chalamet has always been this nervy, hopped up kid from Manhattan. He’s street smart, like all New York kids (yes, even the privileged ones) and he absorbed a lot of New York hustle culture, which is all about perpetual motion and grandstanding and faking it till you make it.

This is Josh Safdie’s first film made separately from his brother, Benny (who made some waves of his own this year with the more conventional sports biopic, The Smashing Machine) but it feels exactly like the brothers’ early work, Good Time and Uncut Gems.

Those films were about strivers and con artists who were also kind of losers. In my capsule review of Uncut Gems, in which Adam Sandler plays a diamond broker who is addicted to gambling, I said: “It’s honestly a nightmare—a nervous breakdown of a movie that never allows you to catch your breath….The Safdie brothers film [Sandler] like a shark that needs to keep moving to survive.”

I honestly could have cut and pasted that review for Marty Supreme, but there are a couple of key differences. For one, it takes place in post-war Manhattan, beautifully and painstakingly recreated by master production designer Jack Fisk. And Marty Mauser (loosely based on real ping-pong legend, Marty Reisman) actually is talented. He is one of the best ping pong players in the world, if not the very best, as he’ll tell anyone within earshot.

When the film starts, he’s peddling loafers and pumps at his uncle’s shoe store. Of course, he’s a good sales person, too—he knows how to lay on the charm. His uncle just wants to promote Marty to manager and be done with it, but Marty explains that he’s only working there to raise money to compete in the upcoming British Open. Marty’s mother (Fran Drescher) also wants him to stop pursuing this ridiculous table tennis dream and settle down like a normal Jewish son. She keeps faking a debilitating illness over the phone in an attempt to get him to come home from whatever tournament he’s playing in. (You can’t con a conman—he never buys it.)

Marty has a girlfriend, of sorts, named Rachel (Odessa A’zion), who is married to a dullard named Ira (Emory Cohen). In the first scene, she and Marty have a quickie in the supply closet and she gets pregnant—a detail that will animate much of the film.

Marty never has enough money to get where he wants, he’s always scheming and stealing and hustling—but he’s monomaniacal. It’s all about ping pong. Even sex and love are secondary to the game he’s obsessed with. (When Rachel tells him she’s pregnant he makes it clear he wants no part of raising a kid.)

I never thought I’d be writing this phrase, but I wish the film had even more ping-pong scenes. Whether he’s at a tournament or hustling some backroom players in a bowling alley with his buddy Wally (Tyler the Creator)—it’s a joy to watch Marty play. Ping-pong players are marvels of speed, hand-eye coordination, and leaping ability and when Marty’s on his game, it’s electrifying. (After months of rigorous training, Chalamet performed all the table tennis scenes himself, without a body double. Top level shit, you might say.) Marty is obnoxious, of course, when he plays—shouting, cursing, crowing—but he’s gracious when he wins, which is most of the time, wrapping his opponent in a bear hug. However, at the London Open, he finally meets his match, a steely-eyed Japanese player named Koto Endo (Koto Kowaguchi) who surprises Marty with his thickly foamed paddle and lightning fast reflexes. (Unsurprisingly, Marty is also a menace when he loses, cursing at the refs and falsely calling out Endo for cheating.)

While in London, staying at a fancy hotel he can’t afford (he charged it to the International Tennis Table Federation, against their express objections), he lays eyes on aging movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) who’s gearing up for a play (her comeback), and decides to pursue her, just because. He does so with the same dogged determination and unearned confidence with which he does everything else. Somehow it works and they become lovers.

Kay is married to a wealthy businessman named Milton Rockwell, played by Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame. (I confess I spent the entire film trying to figure out what movies I’d seen this excellent actor in before—was he in The Irishman? A season of The White Lotus? It was a bit of a head slapper when I finally googled him.) Rockwell offers to sponsor Marty but he’s the kind of man who likes to lord his wealth and privilege over the little guy—and he’s a sadist, as he proves in one particularly memorable scene.

One of the other major plot points involves a gangster’s German Shepherd that Marty has somehow managed to lose—and it’s not clear who will kill Marty first, the dog, the dog’s new gun-toting farmer owner (Penn Jillette, in an amusing cameo), or the gangster himself.

Some have argued that Marty is an asshole and that his quasi-redemption at the end of the film is unearned, but I don’t see it that way. I think Marty is part asshole, part mensch (classic example: He steals a chunk of an Egyptian pyramid…to give to his mother as a gift). His Jewish family, still traumatized by the Holocaust, has lots of love and lots of tsuris—just like Marty himself. Note how Marty always offers a sincere “I love you,” as he rushes out of any room.

In case I wasn’t clear above, Chalamet is fantastic in this role. It may very well be his best work yet, in a career filled with excellent performances. You could make the case that Safdie’s film allowed him to evolve into his purest form—the antsy, quicksilver street hustler who was in there all along.

“I feel like the gift of my life is to focus on this acting thing the way Marty Mauser is locked in on ping pong,” he recently told Vanity Fair.

Mission accomplished, Timothée. Mission accomplished.

I confess that when I heard that Greta Gerwig was doing a new adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, my first reaction was: Why? After all, the Gillian Armstrong adaption with Winona Ryder came out in 1994 which was—la, la, la I can’t hear you—a mere 25 years ago. Okay, so that actually is more than a generation ago, but I loved that adaptation. Winona, at that time the coolest girl in the world, was a sassy and appealing Jo. Claire Danes, the star of my then-favorite show (My So-Called Life), was the beautifully doomed Beth, and the dreamboat du jour Christian Bale (yes, our most method-y of method actors was once a teen idol) was an irresistible Laurie. Heck, I’m even a big enough person to admit that Susan Sarandon made for a warm and wise Marmee.

So I asked myself, is this new adaptation necessary? Turns out, yes. For one thing, it’s clear that Gerwig loves the source material in a bone-deep way. One can practically see the yellowed-with-age, dog-eared, much underlined paperback that Gerwig no doubt carried with her at all times as a young girl. Indeed, she loves it so much, she’s able to mess with its timeline, in a way that feels faithful to the source material and adds new depth and dimension to the plot. Also, the film feels urgent, a word not often associated with the book, without sacrificing any of its lit-by-the-fireplace glow.

It starts, as it always does, with Jo, and I can’t imagine a better Jo than Saoirse Ronan, one of our best actors. Her Jo is smart, loving, quick-tempered, stubborn, and most importantly frustrated—in a visceral sort of way—with the status of women in society. The character of Jo is usually depicted as plucky—and she’s certainly that here—but she’s almost mournful, too, so profoundly aware of life’s inequality that it feels like an ache. As Marmee, Laura Dern portrays motherhood itself as a healing and loving force of nature but she also allows a little of her character’s frustration to bubble to the surface. “I’m angry all the time,” she admits to Jo (who, if not Marmee’s favorite daughter, is certainly the one she understands and empathizes with the most)—and it’s a bit of shock. But, of course, a woman as intelligent and capable as Marmee is would be a little angry. She simply learned to channel that anger into something decent and true.

Rising star Florence Pugh makes for an excellent Amy—funny, bratty, and, as always, smarter than she looks—but I confess I found her a bit ungainly as a 12 year old. I preferred Armstrong’s strategy of casting two actresses as Amy; who can forget a young Kirsten Dunst moaning over her life-ruining lack of limes? Still, Pugh is so amusing as the younger incarnation of Amy it’s hard to really get bent out of shape over this. And Timothée Chalamet is the perfect Laurie. Gerwig had the good sense to expand his role: We see him as a lovesick boy nearly swooning with longing for Jo. (Chalamet, as he proved in Call Me By Your Name, gives good swoon.) And later, he’s convincing as a louche and dissolute young man, heartbroken and in need of saving. The cast is rounded out by an excellent Chris Cooper as the sad Mr. Laurence, whose spirit is rekindled by the joie de vivre emanating from family next door. And, of course, there’s Meryl Streep, who makes for a deliciously unsentimental and prickly Aunt March.

Now about that timeline: Gerwig starts with Jo in New York, pursuing a writing career and having already met the mysterious Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel, too good-looking for the part IMO), then toggles back and forth between her childhood and adulthood. This mostly works famously, especially when she adds a meta device where Jo interacts with an amused and skeptical publisher (the ever welcome Tracy Letts) who will eventually publish her novel. But sometimes the dual timeline can be a bit confusing (pro tip: Pay close attention to Jo’s haircut).

A few more quibbles: As Meg, the bird-like Emma Watson is miscast as Jo’s older sister. And the film indulges in a few too many anachronisms (“You’re on fire,” Bhaer says to Jo, when the edge of her skirt grazes the fireplace. “Thank you,” she replies.) Along those lines, New York-era Jo dresses a bit more like Diane Keaton in Annie Hall than a character in a 19^th century novel.

But mostly, it feels magical, like a Christmas gift. What Gerwig proves is that you don’t need to be slavishly faithful to a text. If you love a book deeply enough, if you’ve truly internalized its spirit and meaning, you can riff on it in such a way that makes it feel fresh without betraying its essence. As Gerwig makes clear, Little Women is almost as relevant today as it was when it was published 150 years ago. What a meaningful tribute to a beloved work of art.