Watch scenes from the films nominated for the Oscar for best picture, as well as interviews with the filmmakers below. The 98th Academy Awards will be presented Sunday, March 15. 

“Bugonia”

Inspired by a 2003 Korean movie called “Save the Green Planet!,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia” blends dark comedy, satire, and pointed social commentary about corporate greed, internet and social media propaganda, and how the plight of bees is a sign of the dangers confronting mankind in the face of climate change.

Best actress Oscar nominee Emma Stone plays Michelle Fuller, a Big Pharma corporate executive who is kidnapped by a pair of conspiracy theorists, Teddy and Don (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis), who believe Michelle is key to an alien plot to take over the world.

Written by screenwriter Will Tracy, the film was originally developed for Ari Aster (“Midsommar”), before Lanthimos came on board. A master of the darkly comic, his previous films include “Dogtooth,” “The Lobster,” “The Favourite,” and “Poor Things.”

“I was immediately blown away,” he told The Hollywood Reporter about the script. “I felt it was so funny and entertaining but also extremely impactful and made you really think about things deeply.”

In a conversation at the BFI London Film Festival, Lanthimos talked about the ending of the film, which is both grand and intimate, and about people’s reactions: “Some of them are like, they see it as totally bleak and desperate, and others see it as hopeful. And I think that’s interesting, and that’s where we try to maintain some kind of ambiguity because it tells a lot about you – like, how you experience this and how you see the world. I love that to happen.”

At the Venice Film Festival, Stone said that the themes of “Bugonia” reflect our current reality: “There’s so much that’s happening that’s reflective of this time in our world and it’s told in a way that’s really fascinating and moving, funny and f***** up, and alive.”

In a conversation for the Dolby Creator Talks Podcast, Oscar-nominated composer Jerskin Fendrix described his unusual approach to writing the film’s score, which ranges from grandiose to sorrowful. Without having read the script, or watched any footage, he composed music following months of “esoteric” research he conducted based on just a few words given him by Lanthimos, which included bees, basements, and spaceships. “I was starting to get a bit paranoid,” he said, not being allowed into any discussions during pre-production. He then recorded about an hour of music — some purely orchestral, some for synthesizers, and some a mixture – that Lanthimos placed at specific points in the movie. “I think the reason that a lot of the music actually echoes the psychology — especially of Teddy, this kind of really frantic grandiosity, but paranoia, and so on — is because I was basically in the same position for at least a year, by virtue of Yorgos’ direction,” he said. [Listen to the track “Resurrectionem” from Fendrix’s “Bugonia” score.] 

• “Bugonia” has been nominated for four Academy Awards.

“F1”

Among the year’s top popcorn films was “F1,” starring Brad Pitt as a Formula 1 race driver who is brought out of retirement to help mentor a rising young star on the track. Despite the marquee names of Pitt, Javier Bardem, Kerry Condon, and Damson Idris as the hotshot driver, the main attraction was the visceral racing sequences, with the stars driving modified race cars fitted with fist-sized, remote controlled cameras. 

Editor Stephen Mirrione said he did not know anything about Formula 1 racing before working on “F1,” for which he received his fourth Oscar nomination. (He’d won for the Steven Soderbergh film “Traffic.”) In an interview for Avid, Mirrione said he fought against the viewer feeling “race fatigue.”

Before filming, races were designed with storyboards and based on the contours of individual racetracks. Compiling footage from as many as 30 cameras shooting a single racing sequence, and using maps as a guide, Mirrione would review the footage for specific angles, to see if the storyboards worked or not, and to maintain continuity.

“You want to be sure that the racing sequences were not just about the excitement of watching a race, but that there was always storytelling and narrative information all the way through,” he said.

Director Joseph Kosinski filmed race footage over both the 2023 and 2024 seasons, shooting at the tracks between practice runs and qualifying races. Footage from actual F1 races, including crashes, was incorporated into the story, with drivers like Lewis Hamilton and George Russell factored in.

Production sound mixer Gareth John, of the film’s Oscar-nominated sound team, told Variety that during one sequence, Max Verstappen, driving for Red Bull, crashed into McLaren’s Oscar Piastri. “All the authentic chaos is happening in front of us in real time,” he said. “Many of the things that happen in this film have happened for real, and they’re pilfered from actual F1 events.”

The sound team strategically planted microphones throughout the cars driven by Pitt and Idris, as well as around the tracks, to get the sounds of engines, squealing tires and crowd noises. And while many of the races were mixed to include Hans Zimmer’s score, Silverstone was run without music. “It was trying to keep that energy up just with sound effects,” said re-recording mixer Juan Peralta.

Peralta, a longtime Formula 1 fan, told the Dolby Creator Talks Podcast, “In all my years of watching Formula 1, I’ve only ever watched it either live, which is really loud, or on TV. It’s been a broadcast. So, to put it in a theater with all these speakers and all this dynamic range, it was challenging. You know, I don’t want it to sound different than the actual cars, but I want it to be a cinematic experience. So it was like, you know, doing that little tightrope walk.”

• “F1” is nominated for 4 Academy Awards, including best picture.

“Frankenstein”

Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus,” published in 1818, has been the basis of innumerable horror films, most famously James Whale’s 1931 version, starring Boris Karloff as the Creature imbued with life by a scientist daring to be God. That film, and Shelley’s text, have been lifelong obsessions for Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, whose horror and fantasy films (including the Oscar-winning “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Shape of Water”) have welcomed audiences into wondrous, tactile worlds of awe and danger.

Del Toro talked with “Sunday Morning” about Shelley, who was 19 when she penned the story, and why it had endured: “It was written by a teenager that was full of questions and rage and rebellion. You know, it’s the same questions we have now: What are we? Why am I human? Why am I here?” That questioning is dramatized by his Creature, played by best supporting actor nominee Jacob Elordi. 

For del Toro, there is an appeal to monsters: “Monsters tell you, look, it’s okay to be you. It’s okay to be imperfect. … We are all creatures. I mean, we have a world that tells you you shouldn’t be a creature, but in reality we’re all weird in some way.”

Del Toro’s fascination with “Frankenstein” has fueled his love of cinema and literature since he was a child. “It’s in all of my movies,” he said. “All 13 movies have elements of the film. ‘Pinocchio’ is another prodigal father asking for forgiveness of his child. My first movie, ‘Cronus,’ deals with eternal life. ‘Shape of Water,’ certainly, the idea of the monster being of the same essence as the main female character, and the female character recognizing herself in it. … I mean, my first crush was Mary Shelley. I truly can tell you this, you are born to sing one or two songs in your lifetime. This is my song.”

“Hamnet” 

Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, “Hamnet” is a fictionalized tale about William Shakespeare’s family, imagining that the tragedy surrounding the death of his young son, Hamnet (played by Jacobi Jupe), inspired him to write his timeless work, “Hamlet.” Best actress Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley plays Agnes, William’s wife, and it is her emotional performance that both grounds the story, and elevates it to a universal tale of pain, grief and acceptance.

Buckley (who won the BAFTA, Golden Globe (Drama), Critics Choice and Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance) told “Sunday Morning” that when she started shooting the more difficult scenes, she told her husband she needed to go away for two weeks. So, Buckley went to Hampstead Heath, a vast green space in London, where she’d go swimming each morning. “I just need to be in nature and start my day and wake up that way, and then go to the set and see what came out,” she said.

What came out was a performance radiating fire and tenderness. She says director Chloé Zhao (an Oscar-winner for “Nomadland”) reminded her cinema is not just escapism. “Our jobs as actors and the storytellers are to touch the most heightened expressions that are too hard to hold on our own,” Buckley said. “I get to incubate the bits of us, myself, the shadow bits.”

Asked what are those “shadow bits” that came out for her role, she laughed, “I’m not telling you! You have to watch it and make up your own mind.”

The emotions in Buckley’s powerful performance, Zhao told the American Film Institute, were a collective grief shared by everyone on the set. “We also spoke very personally about loss in their own lives. I’ve said to everyone from the beginning that they should bring their own to set every day. Like, it’s not just preserved for the actors, the space. This is community spaceholding day after day after day. “

In an interview for Vanity Fair’s Notes on a Scene, Buckley, Zhao and Mescal described dramatizing Agnes’ emotions following the death of her son, when William announces he is leaving for London – abandoning her in her grief. He goes to kiss her goodbye; she moves to strike him. The physical violence wasn’t written in the script, but Buckley went for it.

“In moments like this, when the emotions are so charged, the camera will restrain itself from pushing for emotions, because the space is like a bomb about to explode,” said Zhao. “We actually wanna stand back because we want the audience to feel the impact of that shockwave. ‘Cause when you go in there, for some reason, you actually do the opposite. So we stayed wide.”

“But it also feels theatrical,” Mescal said. “It feels like in the world of Shakespeare, like you’re watching, kind of in a meta sense, you’re watching actors in a frame – not that you don’t see wide shots in films, but I feel like some of the more emotionally-charged moments that you would see people jump in on in different films, you don’t [here].”

“And also the unpredictability,” said Zhao, “’cause the camera isn’t there. They have all this space, and the wild animals come out of them!”

“I was so thrilled when that happened!” Mescal said.

“I didn’t even know it was gonna happen,” said Buckley. “And you get a shock when these things come up! Makes me scared watching it now!”

In the film’s climactic scene, when Agnes attends a Globe Theatre production of “Hamlet,” her emotional attachment to the actor playing the dying Hamlet is itself meta: he’s actor Noah Jupe, brother of Jacobi Jupe, who played her dying son. Noah told Time Magazine, “Two months into their shoot, I was shooting something in Greece, and I got a call from my mom and Chloé, and they’re very giddy and smiling. They say to me, ‘How would you feel about playing Hamlet?’ It was obviously something that you just cannot turn down.”

“Marty Supreme”

In director Josh Safdie’s comic-drama “Marty Supreme,” set in 1950s New York, shoe salesman Marty Mauser (best actor Oscar nominee Timothée Chalamet) is convinced he is the world’s greatest ping pong player – and by the looks of it, he is. A striver and a hustler, Marty will stop at nothing to achieve his dream of winning the world championship, even if it means being deceitful, disloyal or larcenous. And he’s not above dognapping.

In a featurette for Fandango, Safdie described the making of the semifinals scene, and how the perspective of Paltrow’s character is key:

“This scene in particular is the intoxication of Marty,” said Safdie. “This is how he infects other people. This is what makes Marty a beautiful person, is that burning desire and that passion inside of him can be infectious. And it’s about the glory of youth, the glory of stardom, the glory of theater, and the adoration that it can bring. And because this story is told through Kay’s point of view and she’s kind of awakening from a malaise – she’s a dormant person, she’s given up on her dream – and coming into this scene and seeing somebody who’s actively pursuing their dream in the most intense way. She’s coming in mid-movie to that dream. You know, it was very important to understand her point of view of this young man.”

Safdie continued: “That was something that I just told to both Géza (Röhrig) and Timmy. This is why you’re doing it. You’re doing it for the adoration. You’re doing it for the fun. You’re letting people know that you’re more than just an athlete. You know, you’re a dancer. You’re inspiring people. You’re making it fun. you’re making it entertaining. … So, there’s a moment in the scene after they do their exhibition point, after they put on this incredible display of talent, Géza lobs up the ball, to allow Marty to just end the game. And the way that you let out, it’s one of my favorite parts of the movie, the way that you let out a little laugh, like your boy is handing it to you and you’re gonna win the semi-finals and you let out a little and then you go in for the slam and then you guys embrace in a way that is so inspiring to me because that is what it’s all about, is moments where you realize you’re not in it alone, and I love that.”

“One Battle After Another”

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” adapted from the Thomas Pynchon novel “Vineland,” is an absurdist comic thriller inspired by the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ’70s, speaking with the immediacy of today’s headlines, wrapped around the story of a father desperately trying to connect with his daughter.

After launching the audience into the violence of a revolutionary group called the French 75 (and the government’s equally violent response to it), the film jumps ahead 16 years to where the former bombmaker, hiding out under the alias Bob (best actor Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio), is trying to raise his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), through a haze of inebriation and paranoia. It’s not for nothing that Willa finds herself parenting her parent.

The story, which involves a maniacal military officer, a martial arts instructor shepherding illegal immigrants, a cabal of White supremacists, hired assassins, and a network of cross-border revolutionaries who gain sanctuary at a convent, is one of the most brazen comedies in recent years. “One Battle After Another” was named best film by the New York and Los Angeles film critics, the National Board of Review, the BAFTAs, and the Critics Choice Awards, and won the Golden Globe for best film (comedy or musical). It also received top prize from the Directors Guild of America and the Producers Guild of America.

In a DGA conversation between Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson, they discussed the film’s tone. Spielberg compared “One Battle” to “Dr. Strangelove” and how Stanley Kubrick handled comedy and a very serious subject, the end of the world. “This brings a kind of absurdist comedy taken very seriously,” said Spielberg, “because it’s so much a reflection of what’s happening today every day throughout this country. But it takes it to a point where you want to laugh because if you don’t laugh you’re going to start screaming, ‘This is too real.’ And so, you’ve got that outlet.”

The bravura chase sequence at the end, involving Willa, a killer (John Hoogenakker), and her dad, was filmed on a stretch of highway in California’s Anza-Borrego Desert State Park that they found by chance. Anderson told the DGA audience, “I have to admit that we went into this movie without that as our ending. We knew that all our participants were headed to the desert, and we knew we were going to have our man save the day in some way. And exactly how it was all going to go down was unclear to us. And in location scouting and driving, we drove on those what we call the ‘river of hills.’ It was just a stretch of road. And that sequence blossomed from the location scouts of driving down there, where you realized it’s very scary to drive those hills because you come up over those, you’re going 65, 70 miles an hour, there’s no one around, but it is blind. You’re blind coming up. … You’re like trusting that nothing’s there. You’re trusting that everybody’s going to keep moving.

“And I was just videoing with my phone and the more you were kind of static, the more you would lose the horizon line. And it became very, very scary. And then I found when I would zoom in on my phone, it was even scarier. Especially if something was there. Then we kind of ended up after these River of Hills at this massive thing that they call the Texas Dip. And it was one of those lucky moments where you’re sitting in a car for four hours going, ‘God, next time maybe I’ll never go on a location scout again.’ But then you come across this and you go, ‘This is why you get in a van and you location scout. because these discoveries are there if you’re patient and the movie gods are on your side.'” Shot in VistaVision by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Michael Bauman, edited by Oscar nominee Andy Jurgensen, and scored by Oscar nominee Jonny Greenwood, the three-car chase sequence is one of the most innovative ever filmed.

• “One Battle After Another” is nominated for 13 Academy Awards, including best picture.

UPDATE: On Sunday, “One Battle After Another” won six Academy Awards, including best picture. Paul Thomas Anderson won three (for best director, best adapted screenplay, and best picture). They were his first Oscars, after having received 11 nominations for “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia,” “There Will Be Blood,” “Inherent Vice,” “Phantom Thread,” and “Licorice Pizza.”

Accepting the screenplay award, Anderson said, “I wrote this movie for my kids to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left in this world we’re handing off to them. But also, with the encouragement that they will be the generation that hopefully brings us some common sense and decency.”

At a backstage press conference, Anderson was asked if he believes the film reflects where we are as a society, or where we are headed. “I think that our film obviously has a certain amount of parallels to what’s happening in the news every day. So, it obviously reflects what’s happening in the world. In terms of where it’s going, I don’t know. But I know that the end of our movie is our hero, Willa, heading off to continue to fight against evil forces, and, I think, like I said in my speech, bring at least common sense and decency back into fashion.”

“The Secret Agent” 

A thriller set in 1970s Brazil during a period of dictatorship (what the film ironically refers to as a time of “great mischief”), “The Secret Agent” follows a stranger, going by the name Marcelo (best actor Oscar nominee Wagner Moura), as he arrives at an apartment building in Recife, which appears to be a haven for political refugees. We learn that just as Marcelo is on a search for information about his past, he is being sought out by hitmen.

For “The Secret Agent,” Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho (whose films include the violent 2019 revenge pic “Bacurau”) blends genres – part political thriller, part family drama, part exploitation film, part ridiculous fantasy – that meld into a narrative that replicates the sinister paranoia of the era. On top of it all is Filho’s nostalgia for ’70s cinema (which he previously catalogued in his documentary “Pictures of Ghosts”), that is captured as much by the style of his film as by clips from period movies. In fact, much of “Secret Agent” takes place in a movie theater, a temple to dreams and escapism – a refuge.

“The Secret Agent” won the best actor and best director awards at the Cannes Film Festival. Moura also won the Golden Globe and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for his performance.

He told Vanity Fair that “The Secret Agent” had aided in his country reflecting back at its period of dictatorship: “We have in Brazil a horrible thing called the law of amnesty, where torturers and killers and everybody just got free from what they did. When Walter Salles makes a film about that (last year’s Oscar-winning “I’m Still Here”), and it’s seen by the amount of people that saw it, and with the amount of young people that went to the movies – and the amount of people that were rooting for Fernanda Torres at the Oscars and looking at her and saying, ‘That artist represents us. There is a Brazilian artist that represents us in Brazil’ – that is great. It says a lot about our country that is in this horrible, polarized moment. … The narrative that film brings matters to us, and beyond that, people are going, ‘Oh my God, so this really happened?'”

Moura likened Filho’s film to a stone creating ripples in the water. “I think it will have a political effect, but also an artistic effect. It’s as Brazilian as you can get. It’s a beautiful film.”

Filho, a former film critic, had met and interviewed Moura at Cannes 20 years ago when the actor was there to promote “Lower City.” At a Q&A at last year’s New York Film Festival, Filho said the two met again at a Brazilian festival after Filho had directed “Neighboring Sounds.” “We established the idea of working together sometime,” he said. “Sometimes you want to work with an actor, an actress, but you really have to find the right material. I mean, you can’t just go and improvise. So, years went by, and I finally decided to sit down and write a script very specifically tailored for Wagner.”

The son of a historian, Filho, who was a child in the mid ’70s, grew up seeing his mother come home with boxes of cassettes and a Panasonic tape recorder. “There is a lot of her work, or the logic of what she did, in the film, because a lot of important information in the film comes from tapes which are analyzed in the future. I mean, I look at you here and us and this is being recorded by many devices I can see, and also by the official camera from the New York Film Festival over there – Hi! – and we are here tonight. This is September 27th, 2025. But maybe if this footage survives in 37 years, or maybe 57 years or 62 years, this will be a document, and people in the future will try to understand what the hell we were talking about, what we were wearing, and I find this fascinating, and I really wanted this to be in the film. I wanted Wagner to play a character we would really empathize with, identify with, and then at some point we would realize that he’s just a life. It’s just a life that was lost many years ago. And that’s how history unfolds, you know? I find that this is something that moves me, and I really wanted to do the film using that idea, the idea of history.”

• “The Secret Agent” is nominated for four Oscars, including best picture and best international feature film.

“Sentimental Value”

Joachim Trier, who shared an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay for his 2021 romantic comic-drama “The Worst Person in the World,” returned with that film’s breakout star, Renate Reinsve, for “Sentimental Value,” about the members of a broken family trying to mend chasms of mistrust. The film, which won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, was nominated for nine Academy Awards; all four of the film’s leads – Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning – were nominated for their performances.

Trier’s film deals with memory, both actual and transformed through art into something representing memory, as Gustav (Skarsgård) seeks to make a film inspired by the life of his mother, who was tortured by the Nazis and later committed suicide. That trauma would affect Gustav, and be passed down, the ramifications of which now haunt everyone in his family, even if they are unaware of the cause.

In an interview for the Criterion Collection, Trier talked about time as an element of storytelling: “I didn’t grow up on a farm where seasons come and go and everything is circular. I very much felt that time was an arrow, you know, and I think that movies are great at portraying that, because, like memory, you film your friends on Super 8 or my skate movies on Hi8mm and all these formats, and I look back at them and they are – some of them are dead now, some of them are older, you know, the city changed, they changed. Cinema can deal with that. It’s very specific. So, I think it’s coming back to those existential themes of time and memory that I care about the most in my life really.”

Skarsgård, who won a Golden Globe for his performance, has many moments in the film where the camera simply observes him – saying little with dialogue, but a lot with his expression. “I love that stuff,” he told “Sunday Morning.” “Movies, real movies are not literature. Cinema to me is what happens in the image. Not what is said; what is not said.”

Reinsve told “CBS Saturday Morning” that playing all the different emotional layers of her characters was like a puzzle: “It’s always fun. Even though I’m playing grief or something, I try to find as many layers.”

“Sinners”

Michael B. Jordan first worked with Ryan Coogler in the 2013 drama “Fruitvale Station,” the tragic story of the victim of a police shooting. They reteamed for 2015’s “Creed,” a spin-off of the “Rocky” franchise, and the first two “Black Panther” films. In “Sinners,” Jordan plays twin brothers, Stack and Smoke, who open a backwoods juke joint in the segregated South. When Coogler shared the idea of him playing two different characters, Jordan told “Sunday Morning” his reaction was, “‘I’m a do what?’ I think it was a little bit of anxiety, I think. A little bit nerves. But then, equal amount of excitement.”

But there was more than just dual roles to explore; Coogler’s film is a blend of genres, mixing a drama set in the Jim Crow South with horror, where accomplished musicians belting out Delta blues become targets for vampires (who themselves are mighty talented with banjo picking).

“I describe the film as genre-fluid,” Coogler told “CBS Mornings.” “It’s a lot of genres at different times, and hopefully they sync up.”

Oscar-nominated cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw told “CBS Mornings” she didn’t want audiences to necessarily notice her work: “You don’t want to feel the hand of the creator. You don’t want to feel the technical. You want to make it so good that it feels like a dream.” She is only the fourth woman ever nominated in this category.

Jordan, meanwhile, said that shooting the film’s most intense scenes – this is a bloody vampire film, after all – was surprisingly fun. “We were cracking up laughing, trying to keep a straight face sometimes, because these circumstances are so ridiculous,” he said.

Joran won the Screen Actors Guild’s Actor Award for his performance, as did the film’s ensemble cast. 

“Train Dreams”

Based on a 2011 novella by Denis Johnson, “Train Dreams” is a meditative story of a life lived mostly in isolation, in which Robert, a logger in Idaho in the early 20th century (played by Joel Edgerton), suffers trauma and grief while working on the construction of railroads in the Pacific Northwest. He is an instrument of progress, even though he increasingly feels himself isolated and anachronistic. It is a character study of one whose connections to the Earth, to other people, and to himself are tested and slowly built, erased, and rebuilt.

Director Clint Bentley (who, with co-writer Greg Kwedar, is nominated for best adapted screenplay) has cited such directors as Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky and Francois Truffaut as influences on his work — not just in the impressionistic views of nature and of man’s place within it, but also in the presence of spirits, the haunting memories of the past, and the immutable nature of time. The film is both insular (narration is spoken by actor Will Patton) and expansive (in its rapturous, Oscar-nominated cinematography by Adolpho Veloso).

The images of the film are firmly planted in the beauty of the Northwest, and some sequences (as when Robert and his wife Gladys plot out land for their cabin with stones) depict a hope for the future. But there are also surreal, haunting touches – a pair of boots nailed to a tree; a dead man’s return; a hellish horizon in flames – that show the past’s grip on the imagination. Love and ache reside side-by-side in Robert’s soul.

In a Q&A at the American Film Institute, director Clint Bentley said he’d read Johnson’s novella when it first came out, but never imagined it as a film. And then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. Producers Marissa McMahon, Ashley Schlaifer and Will Janowitz, who held the rights to the book, watched Bentley’s “Jockey” at home (Sundance had transitioned to a virtual festival when the pandemic struck). They called and asked him to consider making “Train Dreams.”

“When I reread it, not only did I fall in love with this story of Robert Grainier and what this guy was going through, but I felt – even though it’s set in the past and it’s in this very specific time at the turn of the century and a logger, it’s about a logger in the Pacific Northwest – I felt like a lot was resonating in my life, and a lot felt very pertinent to today and what we’re going through. And I felt like, well, I’m sure other people will feel that way as well.”

In a world moving at an increasingly fast pace, the lead character’s existential question is, how do I fit in? “Or do you not fit in, and just retreat to your cabin out in the woods?” Bentley said. 

In an interview for Variety’s Awards Circuit Podcast, Bentley said that the loss of both of his parents in quick succession as he began preparing the film affected his understanding of art and memory: “Right after they passed, I would have these dreams that didn’t feel like dreams at times,” he said. “They felt like visitations. I believe I dreamed them, but the things that happened in those dreams — they’ve become as distinct as memories from when my parents were alive.”

That effect is present in his film, as Robert engages with visions or imaginary visitations with those who have crossed his path. “I’d lost quite a few people in my life around that time and was still kind of reeling from it,” Bentley said. “At the same time, my wife and I were welcoming our first child. All these conflicting emotions — grief and joy, birth and death — just collided. The story felt so emotionally relevant to what I was going through.

“Our subconscious holds on to things — dreams, memories, people — long after we think we’ve let them go. ‘Train Dreams’ is my way of honoring that,” he said.

See more: 

Watch scenes from the performances nominated for the Oscar for best actor, as well as interviews with the nominees below. The 98th Academy Awards will be presented Sunday, March 15.    

Timothée Chalamet, “Marty Supreme”

The character of shoe salesman Marty Mauser (loosely based on the life of table tennis player Marty Reisman) is a classic example of a striver willing to subvert norms or personal codes of honor in order to achieve their vision of success. In the world of “Marty Supreme,” that character’s goal is mastery of a sports subculture – and in 1950s New York, there was perhaps no sports subculture more “sub” than table tennis, which makes director Josh Safdie’s period film both pertinent and quaint.

Marty (played by Oscar-nominee Timothée Chalamet) clearly has the chops, but what he needs in order to compete at the table tennis world championships is money, and he is desperate to get it. It becomes the basis of his manipulations of those around him, from hustling drunks, holding a mob figure’s dog for ransom, and bedding the wife of a potential sponsor.

Playing a striver was the attraction for Chalamet. “Knowing the grind as an actor and not being ignorant to it — my dream wasn’t a financial one like Marty Mauser’s, but it was also in pursuit of an ideal,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s this New York connection that I couldn’t even put into words and I’d fail trying to, but that’s just true to my spirit,” he said. “Having gone through a very similar struggle in New York and playing this guy’s struggle in New York, it was deeply resonant for me.”

Having first discussed the project with Safdie seven years ago, Chalamet decided to amp up his table tennis skills, practicing even as he was in production on other films. [Yes, there was a ping pong table on the set of “Dune”] The training was, he said, “somewhere between a marathon and a sprint — it’s really a tremendously athletic sport.”

In a Q&A with Ben Affleck at the American Cinematheque, Chalamet described the challenge of playing an often unlikable character – one who lies, cheats, and abandons friends and lovers, all while struggling for success in a sport few truly respected. One idea instilled by the director was for Chalamet not to be judgmental towards Marty, to take his point of view, as he was not limited by the strictures of playing a flawless hero or a horrible villain: “This guy’s messy and human and real. And I feel like we all know someone like Marty who’s equally at times, you know, inspiring, maybe believes in his dreams, as much as he is a scumbag, somebody who operates purely at self-interest.”

Chalamet is routinely reticent when discussing his work process. In a 2025 interview with “60 Minutes,” he said he wasn’t comfortable revealing the magic of his craft: “It’s nobody’s business how I go about these things. It’s within the law!” he laughed. “Otherwise, it might not be as interesting as people think. Or it could be a lot more interesting than people think. It might be more interesting than what I’m doing.”

At age 30, Chalamet became the youngest male to earn three best actor nominations (after “Call Me By Your Name” and “A Complete Unknown”), a title previously held by Marlon Brando. 

• “Marty Supreme” is nominated for nine Academy Awards, including best picture.  

Leonardo DiCaprio, “One Battle After Another”

Loosely adapted from the 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel “Vineland,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” is an absurdist take on the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ’70s, wrapped around the story of a father desperately trying to connect with his daughter. Add a martial arts sensei who operates an underground railroad for undocumented immigrants, a vengeful military officer, and a secret cabal of White supremacists, and you have one of the most brazen comic thrillers of recent years.

Oscar-nominee Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Bob, who has been hiding from authorities for 16 years under an alias in a mountain community in California. He still lives by the precepts of a revolutionary, but it’s been years, and he’s smoked a lot of weed, so when he tries to contact the central command of his former comrades, the password he needs to remember to get through to his brethren is elusive.

Beyond his role as a lapsed revolutionary, Bob has a more important and immediate function, as a parent to Willa (Chase Infiniti). Inspired by Jeff Bridges’ performance in the Coen Brothers’ “The Big Lebowski,” DiCaprio spends much of the film disheveled, in a bathrobe, and drunk or stoned.

In a conversation at the British Film Institute, DiCaprio said his character developed much further once Infiniti was hired to play Willa, and the screenplay was workshopped. The tensions between father and daughter were accentuated, which only magnified a sense of role reversal between the two, underscoring Willa’s self-reliance and Bob’s lack of control.  

One element was Bob’s paranoid prohibition against Willa having a cellphone. “I think Paul at one point maybe wanted to do some sort of hyper-realistic world where there were no phones, and she arrived, you know, basically saying, ‘Are you out of your mind? I’m going to have a phone. I don’t care if my father’s off the grid or if he’s paranoid, if he’s disconnected from reality, anti-government, I’m going to have that phone.’ And that became this kind of key moment that strung itself along in the movie and created moments of tension. …

“And a lot of those great workshops that we had, that tension arose between us of her almost playing the mother figure and me just desperately trying to connect with my daughter and doing it through anger and self-medicating myself with drugs. Those workshops, I think, were very key. When we landed on set, I think we were on firm footing of what that household dynamic was.”

That dynamic is evident in a scene in which Bob fails completely as a parental role model.

DiCaprio earned his eighth Academy Award nomination for “One Battle After Another.” (He’d previously won best actor for “The Revenant.”) Asked by Rolling Stone about his career, DiCaprio said that in the early years it felt like hitting the lottery: “It was very much like, ‘I can’t believe I’m working in this industry, and I’m getting to make decisions for myself.’ And there’s this frenetic pace that you have. But now, you know, I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve just become even more … I don’t want to say selective, but all these different components have to come into play to make a movie and hope that it not only works but lasts, even if there are no guarantees of either of those things.”

• “One Battle After Another” is nominated for 13 Academy Awards, including best picture.

Ethan Hawke, “Blue Moon”

The composing duo of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart was responsible for many treasured classics in the Great American Songbook, from “My Funny Valentine,” to “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Blue Moon.” But by the early 1940s, the partnership broke apart. Rodgers then teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II, and their first collaboration would prove to be an enduring landmark of musical theater, “Oklahoma!” – a success greater than anything Rodgers and Hart had achieved.

Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon” takes place on that show’s opening night, at a celebration being held in the famed Broadway watering hole Sardi’s, where Hart, a jumble of self-pity, jealousy, and ambition, horns his way in. As played by best actor nominee Ethan Hawke, Hart tries to ingratiate himself upon his former partner (Andrew Scott), but the room already reads Hart as a Tin Pan Alley dinosaur.

Hart tries to lay on the charm with a woman he adores, Elizabeth (played by Margaret Qualley). Never mind that Hart was gay; he is besotted, and moribund to hear of her attraction to a man who mistreats her. What is love, he says, but “madness.”

Hawke has been Oscar-nominated twice before for supporting roles (in “Training Day” and “Boyhood”), as well as sharing screenwriting nominations for Linklater’s “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight.” But the role of the lyricist was something of a stretch: The real Lorenz Hart was less than five feet tall, so Linklater used camera tricks to make the nearly six-foot actor look much shorter. Hawke also wore fake teeth, and shaved the top of his head to affect a real combover.

He also learned a mountain of dialogue, as he becomes an effusive charmer desperate to impress others. “It’s definitely the most text I’ve ever had in a movie,” Hawke told “Sunday Morning.” “I remember calling my wife after the first day – I think I had more lines than I had in the previous five films.”

Working off a screenplay by the nominated Robert Kaplow, the film’s production process took about a decade, during which Linklater and Hawke workshopped the script. According to the director, that also allowed the actor to age into the role. And with that aging came a weariness to reflect Hart’s sense of increased obsolescence as he witnesses Rodgers’ success. [Hart would die of pneumonia later that year.]

After the acclaim of “Training Day,” Hawke starred in more films, TV and on Broadway, but he says there was a time he passed on more parts than he took – and the offers started drying up. “When you’re young,” he told “Sunday Morning,” “You don’t realize that this is a young person’s game, and those kinds of job offers, there’s a shelf life on that.”

And when did that “shelf life” notion hit him? “Around the same time gray starts appearing in your beard,” he replied.

• “Blue Moon” is nominated for two Academy Awards, including best original screenplay.

Michael B. Jordan, “Sinners”

There have been several instances of actors being nominated for playing multiple characters in a film, from Charlie Chaplin in “The Great Dictator” and Peter Sellers in “Dr. Strangelove,” to Meryl Streep in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and Nicolas Cage in “Adaptation.” Lee Marvin actually won best actor for playing brothers in “Cat Ballou.”

For “Sinners,” Michael B. Jordan plays twins, Stack and Smoke, who open a backwoods juke joint in the segregated South. It appears at first to be a story about two ambitious men trying to make names for themselves under the cruel limitations of Jim Crow. But then the supernatural enters the picture, as vampires become an ever greater threat than the racist violence around them.

Jordan won the best actor award from the Screen Actors Guild. 

He had first worked with director Ryan Coogler on 2013’s “Fruitvale Station,” and they teamed up again for “Creed,” “Black Panther,” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” When Coogler shared the idea of playing two different characters, Jordan told “Sunday Morning” his reaction was, “‘I’m a do what?’ I think it was a little bit of anxiety, I think. A little bit nerves. But then, equal amount of excitement.”

In an extended conversation with “Sunday Morning,” Jordan described his research into the roles:

“It started to run through my head: Okay, how are we going to do this? And I think that’s something that Ryan also knew was going to be good for me, which is a challenge and to kind of push me out of my comfort zone. This was the hardest thing that I’ve ever done to date. And it allowed me to imagine the best version of it, but then also the excitement of figuring out, okay, how do we problem solve? How are we going to get this done? What’s the technicality? How are we going to get into it? I had all these questions. I had all these ideas, and we just kind of took a pause, took a moment and really got back into the foundation of like, who are these brothers, you know? What are the dynamics of an identical twin?

“That’s such a unique specific relationship that only exists between identical twins,” he said. “I had an opportunity to talk to a lot of identical twins, and it was very informative and they’re kind of like celebrities in their own right, you know? Like, no matter what town you go to or wherever the twins are from, they’re known as the twins. … So, there’s a little bit of that celebrity, I guess, that comes along with being identical twins that we wanted to tap into in this movie as well.”

In this video from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, VFX supervisor Michael Ralla explains the techniques used to create multiple Michael B. Jordans – from split-screens that merge two filmed performances into a single shot, to using multiple cameras built into a halo rig to capture Jordan’s performance and then place his head onto the body of a stunt double. [Ralla’s effects team, as well as cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, were among the film’s record 16 Oscar nominations.]

• “Sinners” is nominated for a record 16 Academy Awards.

UPDATE: On Sunday, Michael B. Jordan won the Academy Award for best actor for “Sinners.” It was his first Oscar. Accepting the award, he said, “Thank you, everybody in this room and everybody at home, for supporting me over my career. I feel it. I know you guys want me to do well. And I want to do that because you guys bet on me. So, thank you for keep betting on me. And I’m going to keep stepping up.”

At a press conference backstage, Jordan was asked about what went into creating two distinct characters. “Smoke is a bit more, he’s quiet, he’s a protector. And Stack is a little bit more light and buoyant, and a little bit of a slick talker and a troublemaker. So I try to just establish different perspectives. They have an outstanding relationship for their entire lives. So just imagine you being in a partnership for, like, 30-something years. How many times they would argue, how many times they would keep score on who’s right and who’s wrong. All these things I kind of just started to build up and
so they can have a history between each other. And those are the things that hopefully came to light in-between the lines, those nuances between the two. That’s a little bit of the work.”

Wagner Moura, “The Secret Agent”

Wagner Moura won best actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s political thriller “The Secret Agent.” Set in Brazil in the late 1970s, a period of dictatorship (what the film ironically refers to as a time of “great mischief”), the story opens with a stranger, Marcelo (Moura), arriving at an apartment complex in Recife, which appears to be a haven for political refugees. 

Like the other residents who are vague about their pasts, Marcelo easily slips into the fabric of life there, as easily as he slips into his job as a functionary at the government office responsible for issuing ID cards. We discover that, just as he is on a search for information, there are also men being paid handsomely to try to find him.

During an interview, Marcelo goes off the record about his capacity for violence towards the man he blames for his plight.

Moura, who played drug lord Pablo Escobar in “Narcos,” had not starred in a Brazilian film in a decade. (He directed 2018’s “Marighella,” about a guerrilla fighter.)

He told Vanity Fair that “The Secret Agent,” which takes place around the time of his birth, is like a memory piece: “A lot of [the film] connects you to something where, even if you didn’t live it, you feel it,” he said. “My mind worked in that sense: I thought about the photos of my father. I have this video of my parents’ wedding, and it’s in that part of the country.”

“I love the Ibsen play called ‘An Enemy of the People,’ and I always think about that play when I think about ‘The Secret Agent’: Someone is punished for doing the right thing. It feels a little naïve, but it’s what happens when values are upside-down. … This film is a lot about how the values of a government can shape the minds of people in general – but the ones that are not in conformity with that idea really pay a price. I think here, Kleber is talking about himself and that specific time when we all lived in Brazil under Bolsonaro. We all paid a big price by not obeying or not agreeing with what was going on.”

At a Cannes Film Festival press conference last May, Moura, who had shot “Marighella” when Bolsonaro ruled, described the attitude of the filmmakers making “The Secret Agent”: “In a dystopia, you have to try to hold on to something, uphold the values of dignity, remain an upstanding person. A dictatorship is very difficult indeed because you’re under threat of death basically, and the threat concerns your values as well. You’re being threatened by the powers that be. And if you group together, I think that’s what’s most wonderful in times like that. Not only when there’s a dystopia but even in happy good times. It’s lucky we can set up groups of people in this manner when there is a dystopian period of time in a very authoritarian regime. …

“The film focuses a lot on values. Values that come from the powers that be are twisted, and most people seem to align with these values. It’s hard to remain who you are. It’s hard to remain loyal and faithful to the person you actually are. There are societies and countries where similar situations have occurred. In Brazil, to be gay, Black or a native Brazilian, life may become very complicated. So politically speaking, these are real issues we wanted to talk about.”

Spoiler alert: Like Michael B. Jordan, Moura plays two characters in the film. (But we won’t tell you who the other one is.)  

• “The Secret Agent” is nominated for four Academy Awards, including best picture.

See more: 

Watch scenes from the performances nominated for the Oscar for best supporting actor, as well as interviews with the nominees below. The 98th Academy Awards will be presented Sunday, March 15. 

Benicio Del Toro, “One Battle After Another”

Benicio Del Toro, who won an Academy Award for best supporting actor for “Traffic” (2000), and was nominated for “21 Grams” (2003), earned his third Oscar nomination for “One Battle After Another.” 

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s darkly comic thriller, Del Toro plays Sergio St. Carlos, a martial arts sensei and overseer of an underground railroad for undocumented immigrants. His association with revolutionaries requires him to bring his strategic and focused attention to whatever situation washes up at his door, including Bob (best actor nominee Leonardo DiCaprio), a lapsed revolutionary figure who is on the run after military forces have attacked his cabin. Sergio tries to give the kind of help the desperate Bob doesn’t know he needs.

In a conversation recorded for the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, Del Toro said that when Anderson approached him about the role, he first sent a picture of a poster depicting a tiger dressed in a judo kimono. “I said, ‘Okay, send me the script when you can.’ And he sent me this picture. And I was like, Huh? And then I read the script and I kind of, like, understood. There’s like a strength in there. I thought it was cool. There’s a strength, and the kimono gives him some kind of, like, sense of honor.”

There were many changes to the script done on the fly, to suit the characters, or to take advantage of found locations. Del Toro, who had a short window in joining “One Battle” following filming of “The Phoenician Scheme,” said it was originally intended that Bob and Sergio would kill police officers, but it soon devolved into a discussion of where. Thinking ahead, Del Toro said doing so would mean having to clean up the mess.

“The drafts did change,” Del Toro said. “In the draft that we were about to shoot, there was, I believe, Bob killed one of the officers and then I killed the other one. It was pretty intense. I just said, ‘Well, if we’re gonna kill him in my dojo, we’re gonna have to clean it up. And then after that, Leo is on his own.’ All these conversations happened between Leo, Paul and myself, and little by little we started getting to what you see now. I can’t take the credit of that. Leo had great ideas in there, too, and so did Paul. But I think I was the one who instigated the thing about, Wow, we’re going to kill him in my place. And then, you know, there was talk about we’ll burn the place down. And then I go, ‘We got to get some good insurance here. I ain’t going to burn all those trophies, you know?’ But that’s how the dialogue came, and Paul was just very light on his feet to change.

“Every movie has ‘movie moments.’ And I think you can have a movie and have three movie moments, but if you have a movie that deals with killing and you have too many movie moments, we’re going to check out. It’s just logic, and working with people that are seeing the same story, the same idea of logic. We showed up, we were ready to kill people. You know, I was just practicing the choke and all that stuff on the floor and rolling around, and [Paul] showed up and said, ‘We’re not killing anyone.’ ‘Okay. Well, what do we do then?’ There’s a seriousness and a motivation and an understanding of the story. I was very clear of what the purpose of my character was: I’m to take Leo from point A to point B. That’s it. And so, I knew that. And then how do we do? How do we do it in the most convincing and realistic way? And it went in the direction that it did.”

• “One Battle After Another” is nominated for 13 Academy Awards, including best picture.

Jacob Elordi, “Frankenstein”

Guillermo del Toro’s lifelong fascination with Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” has afforded moviegoers with a gift they didn’t know they needed: a new interpretation of the often-filmed gothic novel about a crazed scientist who creates life from the remains of the dead. Not only is del Toro’s “Frankenstein” one of the most opulent renditions ever made; it is also one of the most emotional, in its telling of the respective stories of scientist Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), and the Creature he births (Oscar-nominee Jacob Elordi).

As the Creature befriends a blind man (David Bradley), who has shared his love of books, Elordi’s character explores his sense of self, and his sense of purpose, and seeks answers – in literature, and in his own fragmented memories. 

Some of the most indelible performances of Frankenstein’s Creature, such as Boris Karloff’s, were pantomimic – a man struggling to communicate, whose physicality could be brutal but also childlike. Del Toro’s creature is capable of speech, empathy, and a desire to connect, but much of the time he struggles as he takes in the world around him.

Asked why he chose Elordi for the role, del Toro told “Sunday Morning,” “Eyes. I cast the eyes.”

In an extended conversation with “Sunday Morning,” Elordi (who had previously played Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” and starred in “Saltburn” and the HBO series “Euphoria”) talked about the process of becoming the Creature, and his communication with the director:

“I remember, there became a point in filming where I would just stare at him, ’cause I was pretty non-verbal the whole time we were filming, and Guillermo and I, we would stay on set the whole time. So, if there was a lunch break or something, the pair of us would be on set, and I would just stare at him. And he looked back at me one time and he’s like, ‘I’ll let you know when you can break.’ And it actually, it was like a pat on the back. I knew that I was submitting myself to him and I could trust him, and he did. And it was when the film was over, you know, but it was a great thing to hear.”

Was he in the Creature’s mindset that whole time? “Well, for me, when I’m shooting a movie, this whole sort of idea of Method and the conversation around it, I think, is so skewed and butchered, because if you’re making a film, for me, the way that I create, your 24 hours of your day is about the film. Everything you do is about the film. You eat for the film, you sleep for the film, you talk about the film, you dream about the film, you take in media that has to do with the film or music or art. For me, filmmaking and acting is an all-consuming process. You know, you can’t, like, moonlight in the movie. You don’t turn it off, and nor would I want to, because you have six months to play with one of the greatest artists of the last century. Six months to play Frankenstein’s Creature. Six months to be around castles and fire and monsters and beauty and pain and all these things. I mean, that’s the world that I want to live in.”

His performance was enhanced by the Oscar-nominated makeup and prosthetics he wore. Asked how long it took to apply, Elordi said, “It would depend; when he was freshly minted and newborn, you know, head-to-toe sort of sculpture, it was 10 or 11 hours depending on how much we were moving or whatnot. And then when he’s in his coat and you can sort of just see this section of his body, it’s about 5 to 6 hours. Which was a treat. That was like, ‘Okay, thank God it’s a short day!'”

• “Frankenstein,” a Netflix release, is nominated for nine Academy Awards, including best picture.

Delroy Lindo, “Sinners”

With more than 75 film and TV credits to his name, including “Malcolm X,” “Crooklyn,” “Get Shorty,” “Heist,” “The Last Castle,” and “Da 5 Bloods,” and a Tony Award nomination for “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” Delroy Lindo has been a steady presence for more than five decades. He brings that gravitas to Ryan Coogler’s conflagration of genres, “Sinners,” in which a music-filled story of Black entrepreneurs in the Jim Crow South becomes swarmed with vampires.

Lindo plays Delta Slim, a blues musician recruited by twin brothers Smoke and Stack (best actor nominee Michael B. Jordan) to play in their new juke joint. Stack finds the musician to be a hard fish to reel in.

“Sinners” represents Lindo’s first Oscar nomination.

He told “CBS Mornings” that development of the character of Delta Slim started with Coogler sending him two books: “Deep Blues” by Robert Palmer, and “Blues People” by LeRoi Jones (a.k.a. Amiri Baraka). “I read those two books, I then exposed myself to a lot of music specific to the Delta – Delta Blues musicians Howland Wolf, Sunhouse, Muddy Waters, Ike Turner,” he said. “I looked at a lot of documentary film that centered on people living in the region. So, I was just soaking up as much data, information as I could, and then filtering it through my own process to come up with Delta Slim.” He also got lessons to play the piano and harmonica. 

The backstories of blues artists fueled Lindo’s delivery when Slim tells of the experience he and a fellow player had when they showed up in the wrong Southern town one day. In an early cut of “Sinners,” Coogler had deleted the chain-gang scene containing Slim’s three-page monologue; Lindo fought to reinsert it, and the director relented. “Not in its entirety, but enough was there that it kind of restored the overall spirit of what he had written originally,” Lindo said.

Lindo said that receiving his first Oscar nomination was a big deal. “Part of the reason that it’s a big deal is because of how people are responding in my behalf. It’s a big deal to a lot of people, therefore it enhances how I’m thinking about the whole experience,” he said.

• “Sinners,” is nominated for 16 Academy Awards, including best picture.

Sean Penn, “One Battle After Another”

A two-time best actor Oscar winner (for “Mystic River” and “Milk”), Sean Penn gave one of his most intense performances in “One Battle After Another,” playing a maniacal military officer, with a piercing gaze and a ridiculous haircut.

As the white supremacist Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, Penn is in pursuit of a Black revolutionary, Perfidia (best supporting actress Oscar nominee Teyana Taylor), but his pursuit of her becomes carnal, and ultimately vengeful when – years later – he searches for the young woman he believes may be his daughter.  

Lockjaw detains Willa (Chase Infiniti) and administers a DNA test. It is to find out whether she is the product of Lockjaw’s assignation with her mother 16 years earlier – and her life rides on the result.

Penn had first met Paul Thomas Anderson when Anderson was directing his debut feature, “Hard Eight.” (Sean’s brother, Michael, composed music for that film.] In a Variety conversation with Julia Roberts, Penn remembered a piece of advice he’s given the young director – “A go-to quote I had at the time, which was, ‘Always consider the possibility that everyone else is wrong.’ And he’s stuck to it.”

Penn later crossed paths with Anderson during post-production of their respective films (“Into the Wild” and “There Will Be Blood”) at Skywalker Ranch. Penn finally acted in an Anderson film, in “Licorice Pizza.” And then came “One Battle After Another.”

“There are great, great directors, of course, who aren’t writers,” said Penn. “But when a great director is also a great writer, then the first thing he did is when he gave you the script, and you’re having that experience. With him it’s always gonna be so fresh. I had no idea what he was taking on.”

W Magazine asked Penn about any special preparation he may have done for the role of Col. Lockjaw. “Because of other aspects of my life, I’ve spent a lot of time around that culture,” he replied. “As for any preparation, this one felt like, ‘Shut up, Sean. Stay out of their way.'”

• “One Battle After Another” is nominated for 13 Academy Awards, including best picture.

UPDATE: On Sunday, Sean Penn won the Academy Award for best supporting actor for “One Battle After Another.” It was his third acting Oscar, tying him with Jack Nicholson, Daniel Day-Lewis and Walter Brennan among male actors. He was not present to accept the award. 

Stellan Skarsgård, “Sentimental Value”

Beginning as a teenager on Swedish television, Stellan Skarsgård has accrued more than 150 film and TV credits, from European dramas (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” “Breaking the Waves”), to Hollywood hits (“The Hunt for Red October,” “Good Will Hunting,” “Mamma Mia!,” the “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Dune” franchises), and even a galaxy far, far away (“Andor”). In “Sentimental Value,” for which he received his first Academy Award nomination, he plays Gustav, a once-successful filmmaker who tries to enlist his estranged daughter, Nora (best actress nominee Renate Reinsve), to take on the lead role in his latest film.

But she refuses to even read the script, and it becomes evident that there is a lot of unspoken, buried tension between her and the father who abandoned his family when she was a child. It turns out that the script Gustav has written – based on the life of his own mother (Nora’s grandmother), who was tortured by the Nazis during World War II – reveals as much as it obscures when it comes to the fractured family history. Gustav is confronted by Nora about the example he set as a parent. What is unearthed is not just the tension between father and daughter, but also between Nora and her sister, Agnes (best supporting actress nominee Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). 

Though dialogue in “Sentimental Value” is in both Norwegian and English, there are also many moments in the film when Skarsgård holds the screen without talking, saying a lot with his expressions. “I love that stuff,” he told “Sunday Morning.” “Movies, real movies are not literature. Cinema to me is what happens in the image. Not what is said; what is not said.”

Skarsgård suffered a stroke in 2022, and since then he has worn an earpiece while filming to help with lines. “It’s actually more complicated than learning the lines, because the prompter has to say their line while the other actor is talking,” he said.

In discussing “Sentimental Value,” a film about the pull between career and family, Skarsgård reflected on having eight children, many of whom are actors (including Alexander Skarsgård), which he credits with inspiring him. “I stole things from them. Like, expressions and the sort of naive attitude towards everything,” he said. “Just watching them is fantastic.”

Skarsgård won the Golden Globe for his performance. 

See more: 

Watch scenes from the performances nominated for the Oscar for best supporting actress, as well as interviews with the nominees below. The 98th Academy Awards will be presented Sunday, March 15. 

Elle Fanning, “Sentimental Value”

Elle Fanning began her professional career as a toddler in the Sean Penn film “I Am Sam,” playing a younger version of the character played by her sister, actress Dakota Fanning. Growing up on screen, Elle has appeared in more than 80 film and TV roles, from “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Super 8,” to “The Neon Demon,” “The Beguiled,” and “A Complete Unknown.” She received an Emmy nomination for “The Girl From Plainville.”

In “Sentimental Value,” she plays Rachel Kemp, a Hollywood actress who is wooed by Danish filmmaker Gustav (best supporting actor Oscar nominee Stellan Skarsgård) to star in his latest project – only after his own actress-daughter, Nora, has rejected him. The script is a deeply personal one, and Kemp finds herself struggling with the emotional depths of the role – a character based on Gustav’s suicidal mother.

At 27, Fanning received her first Oscar nomination for “Sentimental Value.”

Referring to Rachel Kemp, Fanning told The Hollywood Reporter, “We’re at different phases, but there was a little feeling while playing her that maybe I was looking back at a younger version of myself in this world.”

Fanning had just completed filming the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” and was preparing for a film in New Zealand, when her agent called. She told the Los Angeles Times podcast The Envelope, “[He] said, ‘Joachim Trier has a new film and there’s a part for an American actress in a role, even though the film is predominantly in Norwegian. It’s going to film in Oslo.’ And from that moment, I was like, ‘Oh, I have to do this.’ I’m a really instinctual person. And I get feelings. I feel like I’m a little psychic.”

She said she wanted to avoid Rachel coming off as a silly character. “I saw the pitfalls that I could have fallen into,” she said, “the cliches that maybe could happen, that she could become kind of a joke. So when I talked to Joachim, I was happy to know we were on the same page of how we wanted Rachel to be presented.

“Joachim and I talked a lot about, maybe the struggles or the pressure that Rachel’s feeling in her own career. People are really quick to – especially women – put us into a box of limitations and tell you what you can or can’t do. I feel like I’ve been really lucky to navigate that. The show that I did, ‘The Great’ [in which she played Catherine the Great], I really felt like I broke out of that mold a little bit. People probably knew me most for ‘Maleficent’ … I felt like I came into my own a little bit.

“And I think that’s what Rachel is when we find her, that’s what she’s yearning for. That’s what she’s struggling with – she feels like this emotion inside her that she wants to unleash, but no one’s really [seen] her for her talent. … When she meets Stellan’s character, there’s something that he sees in her that she hasn’t experienced before. And so, playing Rachel, I feel like she’s a very different actress than me. But there was part of me that felt like I was kind of drawing from my younger self of maybe how I felt in the past and kind of bringing that into Rachel – and the discovery of being moved by a text.”

Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, “Sentimental Value”

Norwegian actress Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas grew up in an acting family – her parents ran a theater company. But in addition to acting credits in European TV, she also worked as a dental hygienist, a drama teacher, and caregiver for the elderly. She told USA Today, “In the nursing home, you’re working with people who have lived long, long lives, and for a lot of them, those lives are slipping and they can’t remember. So, you’re a detective, in a way, trying to figure out who these people are. That’s what you do as an actor – you’re looking for what’s underneath.”

In Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” Lilleaas plays Agnes, the younger sister of Nora (played by best actress Oscar nominee Renate Reinsve), siblings who have each experienced trauma growing up in their broken family. When their father, Gustav, returns following the death of their mother, their own relationship is tested.

Lilleaas won best supporting actress from the National Board of Review for “Sentimental Value.” This is her first Oscar nomination.

In a Q&A held at last fall’s New York Film Festival, where “Sentimental Value” had its New York premiere, Lilleaas said the depth of the script resonated with her in many ways, like a novel. 

“This whole sisterhood, working with the theme of sisterhood, is really interesting, that they lived the same life, but of course like all siblings it’s completely different. I think for Agnes she’s able to be a safer and more secure person because she had a protector growing up, which is really beautiful, and so she could be her sister’s protecter in adulthood because of that.

“There are some cracks, of course, like for everyone, but I think Agnes has chosen her life. She knows what she wants. We talked about that a lot actually. Her father and sister judge her a little, because it’s more conventional, her life. But it’s a very active choice that she makes. She wants love, she wants security and safety, and she wants a family, and she made that for herself. And she was able to because she’s able to receive love in a way that maybe Nora isn’t. But she also has traumatic experience with her father, with making a movie with her father, but she doesn’t necessarily know [it] was traumatic.”

Amy Madigan, “Weapons”

The clownish Aunt Gladys, in Zach Cregger’s jolting horror tale “Weapons,” is a pitiable fright when we see her: Orange wig, smeared makeup, cartoonish glasses, a wide grin, and a motormouth eager to soften her audience. But when she wields witchcraft, her true horror overtakes whatever empathy we may have felt toward her. She is a monster, with ice water in her veins, who cruelly uses her nephew, Alex, to further a vague plot that has thrown an entire town into turmoil when elementary school children disappear.

Madigan, who started as a rocker-performance artist, turned to acting, studying at the Lee Strasberg Institute, and appeared on stage, where she met future husband Ed Harris. Her film and television roles included “The Day After,” “Places in the Heart,” “Alamo Bay,” “Twice in a Lifetime” (which earned her an Oscar nomination), “Field of Dreams,” “Uncle Buck,” “Pollack,” “Gone Baby Gone,” and the TV drama “Roe v. Wade,” for which she won a Golden Globe.

For “Weapons,” director Zach Creeger told the Hollywood Reporter that casting the role of Gladys was vital, given that she was key to the film’s mystery. “If that character doesn’t work, this movie doesn’t work,” he said.

“Risky is kind of a really fun thing to participate in,” Madigan told Entertainment Weekly of how she developed the character. “I could create Gladys, and she’s a big personality, and it seemed to work for this, so that was very freeing. … Zach said to me kind of early on, ‘You just wait to see how people are gonna come to Gladys.’ And I kind of went, ‘Oh, well, let’s just see, Zach,’ and we’re in the middle of work. But he was actually correct.”

Working with the film’s hair, makeup, costume and special effects teams, Madigan conjured two looks for Gladys – her public face, and her startlingly decrepit, more witchy appearance. When they were doing tests, she said, “Zach was in sheer delight. ’cause that’s what he was hoping for.”

Madigan’s vivid portrayal of Gladys became a meme on TikTok, and a fixture among Halloween cosplayers. “People like Gladys. They want to hang out with Gladys,” Madigan told The Guardian. “Which I find kind of interesting. It’s crazy how people are responding to Gladys. But I have to accept that they’re also responding to me.” She said, of the nightmares Gladys may be causing to children fearful of a child-catcher coming for them, that she was taking it as a compliment.

Madigan won the Screen Actors Guild’s Actor Award for “Weapons.”

• “Weapons” has received one Academy Award nomination.

UPDATE: On Sunday, Amy Madigan won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for “Weapons.” At a press conference backstage, she said, “Horror, as we all know, was looked at like you’re at the little kids’ table at Thanksgiving. You’re just over there. Which, as we know, is not true. You just look at the great silent horror films that started our business.”

Of her character, Gladys, she said she felt an instant affinity: “I just knew that I could grab it by the throat. … Zach Cregger, our writer-director, we worked together, but he was just like, ‘Do it. Go for it.'”

Wunmi Mosaku, “Sinners”

Born in Nigeria to academics who emigrated to England, Wunmi Mosaku studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Her stage, TV and film roles led to a BAFTA Award for the TV series “Damilola, Our Loved Boy,” and a British Independent Film Award for best actress for “His House.” In Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” Mosaku plays Annie, a hoodoo practitioner in the Deep South, for which she earned her first Oscar nomination, and won her second BAFTA Award.

Mosaku talked with “CBS Mornings” about taking on the role: “There’s a distinction between voodoo and hoodoo, and so we had a hoodoo consultant [Yvonne Chireau]. I didn’t know anything about the culture, the spirituality, the connection to the Yoruba, the traditional religion of ifa – I didn’t know any of it. So, I went in completely clueless, complete blank slate. Except, actually, I did have a judgment, ’cause I was born and raised in a really strict Christian household and so I did have a judgment of ifa and voodoo and knowing it was all kind of connected to hoodoo. So I thought it was scary, and my mom was like, ‘Be careful, please be careful.'”

Mosaku said she felt she had grown as a person, a mother, a wife, and a member of society through playing the character: “I feel like more connected to my ancestry because of it and more connected to my purpose because of it. I think it’s such a beautiful reminder that we’re all going to be future ancestors and, like, what we’re going to do with that our gifts and our energy into this world and how it will reverberate,” she said.  

Having played immigrants, Mosaku described to The Guardian that, as a youngster in England, she was discouraged from becoming fluent in her native language, Yoruba, because it would result in a “funny” accent. “That’s the stuff that’s really important,” she said. “You don’t appreciate the cost to people, the tax on a person’s spirit in order to assimilate into your country – and for what? It’s superiority. It’s ego. It’s brutal. It’s a cultural genocide.”

Teyana Taylor, “One Battle After Another”

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” a band of American revolutionaries takes on a militaristic government, in a story that, while based on a 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel, feels fiercely topically, as we witness militants attack a government detention center for undocumented immigrants. Perfidia Beverly Hills (best supporting actress Oscar nominee Teyana Taylor), a key figure in the armed band known as the French 75, displays a revolutionary zeal unmatched by her compatriots, even after giving birth to a child with a bombmaker known as “Rocketman” (best actor Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio).

Taylor is a Grammy-nominated singer, choreographer and music video director, whose debut album, “VII,” topped the R&B chart. Her next two releases, “K.T.S.E.” and “The Album,” went gold. Taylor also acted in several film and TV roles (her credits include “Coming 2 America” and “White Men Can’t Jump”). She received a phone call from Anderson about “One Battle After Another” in that most L.A. of situations: while she was stuck in traffic.

In an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Taylor described her character: “I think Perfidia is very complex. Perfidia has a lot of layers, and I think a lot of her layers are color-coordinated. That’s what I chose to do with her character. I wanted to color coordinate her layers!

“This is a woman who was unapologetically herself. Of course, selfish at times, but for whatever good reason she feels like that is, she’s also coming from the pressures of coming from a long line of revolutionaries. I think that’s a lot of pressure for a person. They need to carry it on. It becomes her identity. I think throughout her journey of trying to figure it out, we have motherhood and things get tough. You have postpartum depression. It’s a lot, and I think a lot of what we see in Perfidia is her being in survival mode and navigating all these different things.”

In a conversation for the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, Taylor talked about performing a scene that gives Perfidia a voice to the 16 years she was away from her daughter, reading a letter about her wishes for Willa.

“The original ending was me in Cuba, or Mexico. I was somewhere and we originally had that in there. Then he wound up taking it out and was like, ‘Let’s just do a letter.’ And I remember it was just me, [Paul], and our sound guy. We went to this room. It was actually the last day of filming, I think. And we did it in one take. And yeah, it was so emotional to get through that letter, but we took our time. I didn’t rush through it. Those were real tears. It was real emotion. And at the time, you know, our producer Adam Somner, we were losing him. He was dying of cancer and he was still coming to work every single day. It was a lot. So, it was getting through that letter, we were dealing with a lot. I was crying. Paul was crying. Our sound guy was crying holding up the boom mic. And I’m sorry, it’s a serious moment, but like, it was just so cute because it was just like we just couldn’t. It was a lot, and I was happy that it made it. …

“I’m really most proud of that part because, you know, you still have the music in the background, and I’m not in the scene for people to probably feel or see how powerful it was while I was reading it. So, it really does make my day when people bring up the letter ’cause you do hear what she’s been through within the 16 years. That’s her moment to kind of redeem herself and show that she’s not just, like, unhinged. You hear her heart in this letter. … And also, the questions are so valid. Are you happy? Do you have love? Will you try and change the world? You know what I’m saying? These are questions that I ask my children, you know, and they’re just five and 10. You know, do you feel safe? Do you feel loved? What do you want to be? What do you want to do? Like, these are real questions that you ask.”

Taylor won the Golden Globe for her performance.

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