As Sunday’s Oscars ceremony approached, it seemed to be shaping up to be a showdown between the vampires and the revolutionaries, between Sinners and One Battle After Another. In the end, One Battle After Another won both best picture and best director, but it was a very good night for Sinners, too, including an original screenplay award for writer and director Ryan Coogler.

There were some surprises over the course of the evening, including a rare tie in the live action short category, a remembrance of Robert Redford that included Barbra Streisand singing a bit of “The Way We Were,” and Jimmy Kimmel stepping in just long enough to make some pointed comments about media censorship. But let’s go over some of the major takeaways.

A celebrated director gets his Oscar.

Paul Thomas Anderson won best director for One Battle After Another after three previous nominations for There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza. Anderson had already won several major Oscar precursor awards this year, including top directing prizes at the BAFTAs and from the Directors Guild of America, so he was the odds-on favorite. The other nominees in the category were relative newcomers: Ryan Coogler, Josh Safdie and Joachim Trier were all first-time directing nominees; Chloé Zhao was nominated (and won) for Nomadland at the ceremony in 2021.

Michael B. Jordan won a rare acting award for a genre movie.

Michael B. Jordan won best actor for his portrayal of twin brothers in Sinners.

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Sinners is a drama, but it’s also very much a genre film. It’s horror. It’s vampires. Those are not the kinds of films that most often win Oscars for actors. But Jordan, with his first nomination, won over performers from much more traditionally awards-friendly films. Three of those actors (Leonardo DiCaprio, Timothée Chalamet and Ethan Hawke) already had multiple acting nominations before this year.

The last actor to win for a genre film might have been Joaquin Phoenix for Joker, since that was technically a comic-book movie, but that one did away with most of its genre trappings and pressed itself into a dramatic mold, which Sinners emphatically does not. Before that, while definitions of genre aren’t bright lines, you might have to go all the way back to … Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, if you consider that horror? Maybe even further? At any rate, it’s a great win for an actor who has been beloved at least since The Wire almost 25 years ago, who’s been doing rich and varied work ever since. His victory is also a win for his lengthy and fruitful collaboration with Ryan Coogler in Sinners, but also in Fruitvale Station, Creed and Black Panther.

Amy Madigan, the award-winning straight-up monster.

Amy Madigan won best supporting actress for her performance in Weapons.

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(We don’t mean Amy Madigan the person, of course.) Madigan won best supporting actress for her deeply unsettling and entirely singular performance as Aunt Gladys in Weapons, which is even more fully a horror movie than Sinners. While the nominated cast members from Sinners — Jordan, Delroy Lindo and Wunmi Mosaku — play regular people who are swept into an unreal situation, Madigan is playing, essentially, the boogeyman (boogeywoman?). It’s thrilling to see the Academy recognize a performance that is as weird and funny and scary as just the last few minutes of what Madigan does in Zach Cregger’s terrifying story of a town that sees a whole classroom full of its children disappear.

The casting Oscar makes its debut.

Cassandra Kulukundis won the Academy’s first award for achievement in casting for her work on One Battle After Another.

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This was the first year that there was an Oscar for casting, which is very much overdue — there have been casting Emmys for ages. It was easy to argue for any of the nominated casting directors. Marty Supreme and The Secret Agent both deploy nontraditional actors in some roles, Sinners and One Battle both use a wide variety of well-known and well-regarded stars in interesting ways, and Hamnet places most of the weight of an enormously heavy story on the shoulders of just a couple of performers, including best actress winner Jessie Buckley.

Cassandra Kulukundis, who won for One Battle After Another, not only has been working with Paul Thomas Anderson for ages, but she also worked on casting (get this) for both The Brutalist and Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle. But all the nominees have tremendous resumes. Francine Maisler, who was nominated for Sinners, was the credited casting director for Arrival, Creed, Baby Driver, Widows, and Challengers! Honestly, the biggest problem in the category was that everybody couldn’t win.

A first in the cinematography category.

Autumn Durald Arkapaw accepts the award for best cinematography for Sinners.

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Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who won best cinematography for her work on Sinners, was only the fourth woman, and the first woman of color, to be nominated in the category. She becomes the first woman to win. Sinners is a sumptuously, inventively, beautifully shot film, and the cinematography is one of the core crafts that makes it so effective.

In case you’re wondering about the title of the new feature comedy receiving its world premiere at SXSW, be advised that The Dress Up Gang is an alt-comedy troupe that has attracted a following for their videos and television series. They’ve now parlayed their popularity into their first feature film directed, written by and starring its members. The result is Plantman & Blondie: A Dress Up Gang Film, which is about as wacky as its moniker suggests.

Full disclosure: I was previously unaware of the troupe, although several of its members — such as Frankie Quinones, Cory Loykasek and Kirk Fox — are familiar from such television shows as What We Do in the Shadows, Physical and Jury Duty, respectively. What I do know is that this sort of offbeat comic material, best suited for short videos and sketches, can be very difficult to pull off in a feature-length film, as the recent The Napa Boys proved. Humor is of course subjective, but what this effort mostly seems to indicate is that the Dress Up Gang’s brand of comedy is an acquired taste.

The shaggy dog story involves the main characters of Cory (Loykasek), a work-at-home employee for a small-time parking lot company in Los Angeles, and Donny (Donny Divanian), a cyclist who chides him for leaving the wan fiddle leaf plant he’s just purchased in his car during a heat spell. Their nicknames stem from the fact that Cory is, well, blonde, and Donny is a neighborhood vigilante obsessed with protecting neglected houseplants. 

Their paths cross again when Cory accidentally hits Donny’s bicycle with his car and, as penance, agrees to drive him around town for a week to do errands. In the process, Cory becomes aware of his passenger’s extracurricular activities, which include breaking into people’s homes and rescuing plants he deems at risk.

Listen, comedy films have been constructed around flimsier premises. But those premises are usually, you know, funny, which this one really isn’t. Nor is the supporting character of Fox, played by Kirk Fox (making up original names doesn’t seem to be in the troupe’s wheelhouse), Cory’s ex-con friend who brags, “I used to teach tennis to Pablo Escobar,” and whose frequent words of advice always include film references. “I don’t like it,” Fox says about Cory serving as Donny’s chauffeur for a week. “You saw Collateral?”

Nor is the running gag of people constantly complimenting Cory on his gecko t-shirt. Nor is the scene in which Cory trips on mushrooms on Hollywood Boulevard (which is probably true of half the people walking there). Nor is the sight of Donny wielding a Super Soaker as a weapon. Nor is the subplot in which Donny’s victims, one of whom makes his living as a “water sommelier” (and yes, I know they exist), band together as the “Next Door Boys” to get to the bottom of the neighborhood’s plant thefts. 

Featuring so many plugs for Chick-fil-A that one hopes the producers got a good product-placement fee or at least free catering for the film shoot, Plantman & Blondie might have been amusing enough as a brief sketch, although frankly even that’s doubtful. Stretched out to feature length, it drags unmercifully, with its laughs-per-minute ratio in negative numbers.

The performers, who also include such non-Dress Up Gang members as Kevin Nealon and Kate Berlant, are clearly talented. But their film has the feel of an improv exercise badly in need of further development.

Big Girls Don’t Cry is notable for two impressive debuts: It’s writer-director Paloma Schneideman’s first feature, and its star, Ani Palmer, has never before acted onscreen. Together, they illuminate a messy, searching vibrancy in the story of Sid, a sex-curious small-town 14-year-old who wants more than anything to be cool. The movie — the first produced feature from A Wave in the Ocean, a filmmaking course led by Jane Campion — is alive to the ways that girls, eager for acceptance, can pretend to be tougher and more experienced than they are, and adds the complicating element of queer attraction to the emotional confusion.

Schneideman’s keenly observed drama could have been more concise on its way to its culminating New Year’s Eve party, but this story of the summer holiday break in rural New Zealand pulses with a powerful sense of place and terrifically charged scenes of chaotic intimacy, its exceptional performances led by Palmer, Rain Spencer and Noah Taylor.

The movie is set in in 2006, when cellphones aren’t yet smart and the stuttering screeches and hisses of the dial-up internet form a kind of soundtrack to the teen social scene. Sid lives in a remote coastal corner of New Zealand’s North Island, in a rambling house she shares with her distracted, short-tempered father, Leo (Noah Taylor), a frustrated painter who makes a living doing lawn maintenance, and whose wife left not just him but the country.

Sid, who has been checking out sex chat rooms, embarks on a mission of sorts as her summer break begins — a pursuit that quickly means leaving her level-headed best friend, Tia (the excellent Ngātaitangirua Hita), in the dust. With gifts of alcohol from her father’s stash, she toadies up to older girls Lana (Beatrix Wolfe) and Stevie (Sophia Kirkwood-Smith), and though it’s only a matter of time before alpha meanie Lana turns on her, something like friendship develops. (Karen Inderbitzen Waller’s costumes are fully in sync with the notion of youthful investment in the number-one priority of looking cool.)

In the nearby beach town Ōmaha, the three girls are drawn into the party scene led by rich kid Kyle (Ian Blackburn). One of the many out-of-towners who arrive for the summer, he holds court in a spacious waterfront house where his parents are never home — and where Leo does the yard, as revealed in a scene of excruciating mortification for Sid.

As she tries to navigate and climb the teenage social hierarchy, Sid inflicts no small amount of damage on herself and others, beginning with an impulsive self-piercing. Her transparent lies become more pathetic as she tries to convince herself as well as her frenemies that she’s knowledgeable and experienced when it comes to sex.

It’s not just Lana’s popularity that draws Sid; she has a crush on her, though she doesn’t yet have a language for her attraction to girls. Using the computer at Tia’s house, she logs into the instant messenger account of Diggy (Poroaki Merritt McDonald), Tia’s brother, and flirts with Lana, going so far as to ask her for racy photos. But as she continues to ingratiate herself to Kyle and his crude, immature buddies while evading their expectations, someone even more compelling than Lana grabs her attention. Her sister, Adele (Tara Canton), home from college for the holidays, has brought a classmate with her, American exchange student Freya. Rain Spencer (The Summer I Turned Pretty) imbues the role with a sensual aura and self-confidence reminiscent of Léa Seydoux.

Dispensing offhand worldliness and wisdom through a steady stream of pot smoke, Freya ignites something in Sid. Her kindness, too, is no small thing for a girl whose mother is far away and who’s in constant conflict with her father and sister; Schneideman and her cast grasp the ways families gripe and snipe at one another.

Freya ignites something in Leo, too, who prepares a fancy dinner the night of her arrival and later presents her with a Dylan Thomas book. In Taylor’s superb performance, Leo is both comically cantankerous and utterly heartbreaking. The friction between Sid and Leo, with its awful explosions and exquisite rapprochement, is the most satisfying thread of the narrative.

With the fine contributions of production designer Sarah Cooper and cinematographer Maria Ines Manchego, Schneideman captures the pristine beauty of the setting and the exultation of bodies in water, as well as the unvarnished patina of lived-in spaces. Through the eyes of an ambitious girl who, in the way of teenagers immemorial, is using borrowed language as she fumbles toward her own, Big Girls Don’t Cry is a strong portrait of a memorable season in the sun.