BUFFALO, N.Y. — Hilary Knight was more impressed than surprised in discovering she was leading PWHL forwards in ice time three months into the league’s second season.

At 35 and one of the PWHL’s oldest players, the face of U.S. women’s hockey has always valued being someone capable of playing in every situation. In averaging nearly 22 minutes per game, the Boston Fleet captain also finds the playing time reassuring in putting to rest any questions following a drop in production last year.

It helps that Knight is injury free after being slowed by an ankle issue she chose not to address until last summer. What’s also true is Knight can focus more on playing after no longer being consumed by feeling a need to shoulder the burden of ensuring the launch of a league she helped establish went off without a glitch.

“We can all kind of just go out there and play a little bit more than before, right?” Knight told The Associated Press during the Fleet’s Takeover Tour stop in Buffalo last weekend. “You’re not having to worry about all the overhead, what’s going to happen and feeling responsible for a missed bus or whatever wrinkle arises.”

It’s liberating knowing the PWHL is in good hands. And the four-time Olympian and inaugural winner of the IIHF’s female hockey player of the year in 2023 is enjoying the chance to skate pain-free again.

“I feel like I don’t have as much tread on the tires considering how many minutes I have,” Knight said. “You know, it’s more fun where you can actually play the game that you’re used to playing at the level you want to play at.”

Last season, she finished tied for 31st with 11 points, and 14th with six goals while playing all 24 games. Knight failed to register a point in eight playoff games as Boston lost the final series in a decisive Game 5 to Minnesota.

Through Wednesday, she is tied for fifth with 17 points and tied for fourth with eight goals through 19 games, while her ice-time average ranks seventh among skaters when factoring in defensemen.

She has a point in all but six games this season, and has two game-winning goals, coming in consecutive outings as part of a 6-1 run that pushed Boston into third-place in the standings.

“This year, she’s really been able to settle in to be the hockey player we all know that she is,” Fleet general manager Danielle Marmer said.

Knight’s leadership in establishing the team’s culture was invaluable in a season Boston closed 4-0-1 to clinch a playoff spot. Marmer praised Knight for finding a defensive role by clearing pucks and blocking shots, particularly in a grueling semifinal series against Montreal, in which Boston won all three games in overtime.

“And that’s why she’s a winner,” Marmer said. “Even when she’s not putting pucks in the net and finding a way there, she’s finding a way to impact us in a way that allows other people to step up and put pucks in the net.”

Knight brings with her 19 seasons of U.S. national team experience in which she won Olympic gold in 2018 and three silvers, along with nine golds at the world championships. Barring injury, she’s already a lock to make her record fifth Olympic appearance next year in Italy.

Knight is the Fleet’s unquestioned leader.

She consults with coach Courtney Kessel on when the team might need a break from practice. She can keep the team loose with a joke or bring a competitive focus when the moment calls. Teammates are impressed how Knight seamlessly handles her many off-ice responsibilities — interviews, autograph sessions and promotional appearances.

“She’s truly a professional. I’ve learned so much from her,” said Fleet and U.S. national team goalie Aerin Frankel. “I think she’s an all-encompassing person and player. And when she puts her mind to do something, she does it.”

Age hasn’t slowed Knight. Two years ago, she scored her third world championship gold-medal-winning goal as part of a hat-trick in the United States’ 6-3 win over Canada. At the worlds last year, Knight finished tied for the tournament lead with 10 points as the U.S. lost the title game to Canada.

For all she’s done, Knight feels disappointed in failing to produce for Boston in the playoffs last year.

“It’s really fun to score. And if it’s something you’re supposed to be doing and you’re not doing it; it’s definitely tough,” she said.

And yet, her determination showed through in saying nothing, including her ankle injury, was going to prevent her from playing.

“That was sort of the mental battle of last year, wanting to show up for the team … with the understanding that I wasn’t where I would like to be,” Knight said. “But I was going to do everything I could in my capability when I was out there.”

By MARK KENNEDY

NEW YORK (AP) — David Johansen, the wiry, gravelly-voiced singer and last surviving member of the glam and protopunk band the New York Dolls who later performed as his campy, pompadoured alter ego, Buster Poindexter, has died. He was 75.

Johansen died Friday at his home in New York City, according to Rolling Stone, citing a family spokesperson. It was revealed in early 2025 that he had stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor.

The New York Dolls were forerunners of punk and the band’s style — teased hair, women’s clothes and lots of makeup — inspired the glam movement that took up residence in heavy metal a decade later in bands like Faster Pussycat and Mötley Crüe.

“When you’re an artist, the main thing you want to do is inspire people, so if you succeed in doing that, it’s pretty gratifying,” Johansen told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2011.

Rolling Stone once called the Dolls “the mutant children of the hydrogen age” and Vogue called them the “darlings of downtown style, tarted-up toughs in boas and heels.”

“The New York Dolls were more than musicians; they were a phenomenon. They drew on old rock ‘n’ roll, big-city blues, show tunes, the Rolling Stones and girl groups, and that was just for starters,” Bill Bentley wrote in “Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen.”

The band never found commercial success and was torn by internal strife and drug addictions, breaking up after two albums by the middle of the decade. In 2004, former Smiths frontman and Dolls admirer Morrissey convinced Johansen and other surviving members to regroup for the Meltdown Festival in England, leading to three more studio albums.

In the ’80s, Johansen assumed the persona of Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-styled lounge lizard who had a hit with the kitschy party single “Hot, Hot, Hot” in 1987. He also appeared in such movies as “Candy Mountain,” “Let It Ride,” “Married to the Mob” and had a memorable turn as the Ghost of Christmas Past in Bill Murray-led hit “Scrooged.”

Johansen was in 2023 the subject of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s documentary “Personality Crisis: One Night Only,” which mixed footage of his two-night stand at the Café Carlyle in January 2020 with flashbacks through his wildly varied career and intimate interviews.

“I used to think about my voice like: ‘What’s it gonna sound like? What’s it going to be when I do this song?’ And I’d get myself into a knot about it,” Johansen told The Associated Press in 2023. “At some point in my life, I decided: ‘Just sing the (expletive) song. With whatever you got.’ To me, I go on stage and whatever mood I’m in, I just claw my way out of it, essentially.”

David Roger Johansen was born to a large, working class Catholic family on Staten Island, his father an insurance salesman. He filled notebooks with poems and lyrics as a young man and liked a lot of different music — R&B, Cuban, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding.

The Dolls — the final original lineup included guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan — rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed and Andy Warhol in the Lower East Side of Manhattan the early 1970s.

They took their name from a toy hospital in Manhattan and were expected to take over the throne vacated by the Velvet Underground in the early 1970s. But neither of their first two albums — 1973’s “New York Dolls,” produced by Todd Rundgren, nor “Too Much Too Soon” a year later produced by Shadow Morton — charted.

“They’re definitely a band to keep both eyes and ears on,” read the review of their debut album in Rolling Stone, complementary of their “strange combination of high pop-star drag and ruthless street arrogance.”

Their songs included “Personality Crisis” (“You got it while it was hot/But now frustration and heartache is what you got”), “Looking for a Kiss” (I need a fix and a kiss”) and a “Frankenstein” (Is it a crime/For you to fall in love with Frankenstein?”)

Their glammed look was meant to embrace fans with a nonjudgmental, noncategorical space. “I just wanted to be very welcoming,” Johansen said in the documentary, “’cause the way this society is, it was set up very strict — straight, gay, vegetarian, whatever… I just kind of wanted to kind of like bring those walls down, have a party kind of thing.”

Rolling Stone, reviewing their second album, called them “the best hard-rock band in America right now” and called Johansen a “talented showman, with an amazing ability to bring characters to life as a lyricist.”

Decades later, the Dolls’ influence would be cherished. Rolling Stone would list their self-titled debut album at No. 301 of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, writing “it’s hard to imagine the Ramones or the Replacements or a thousand other trash-junky bands without them.”

Blondie’s Chris Stein in the Nolan biography “Stranded in the Jungle” wrote that the Dolls were “opening a door for the rest of us to walk through.” Tommy Lee of Motley Crue called them early inspirations.

“Johansen is one of those singers, to be a little paradoxical, who is technically better and more versatile than he sounds,” said the Los Angeles Times in 2023. “His voice has always been a bit of a foghorn — higher or lower according to age, habits and the song at hand — but it has a rare emotional urgency.

The Dolls, representing rock at it’s most debauched, were divisive. In 1973, they won the Creem magazine poll categories as the year’s best and worst new group. They were nominated several times for The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame but never got in.

“Dirty angels with painted faces, the Dolls opened the box usually reserved for Pandora and unleashed the infant furies that would grow to become Punk,” wrote Nina Antonia in the book “Too Much, Too Soon.” “As if this legacy wasn’t enough for one band, they also trashed sexual boundaries, savaged glitter and set new standards for rock ‘n’ roll excess.”

By the end of their first run, the Dolls were being managed by legendary promoter Malcolm McLaren, who would later introduce the Sex Pistols to the Dolls’ music. Culture critic Greil Marcus in “Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century” writes the Dolls played him some of their music and he couldn’t believe how bad they were.

“The fact that they were so bad suddenly hit me with such force that I began to realize, ’’I’m laughing, I’m talking to these guys, I’m looking at them, and I’m laughing with them; and I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I was no longer concerned with whether you could play well,” McLaren said. “The Dolls really impressed upon me that there was something else. There was something wonderful. I thought how brilliant they were to be this bad.”

After the first demise of the Dolls, Johansen started his own group, the David Johansen band, before reinventing himself yet again in the 1980s as Buster Poindexter.

Inspired by his passion for the blues and arcane American folk music Johansen also formed the group The Harry Smiths, and toured the world performing the songs of Howlin’ Wolf with Hubert Sumlin and Levon Helm. He also hosted the weekly radio show “The Mansion of Fun” on Sirius XM and painted.

He is survived by his wife, Mara Hennessey, and a stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey.

Amy Lindgren

The storm is still raging in terms of cuts in the federal workforce, but we’ve come to the last of three columns on the topic of navigating a buyout offer or potential layoff.

These articles haven’t been focused on the current situation for federal workers — partly because it’s changing by the hour, and partly because it’s so far from normal. Instead, the advice highlights what most people could do when faced with a buyout offer or potential layoff.

As a quick recap, Part 1 in this short series described steps for responding to the buyout offer itself, while Part 2 looked at factors to consider when weighing whether or not to accept. Today we’ll pivot to the broader scope of what to do before anything is initiated, when you only suspect trouble may be coming.

These tips are presented in categories that have a lot of overlap; just mark the steps that feel like to-do items for you and jump in on those that are time-sensitive.

On the job

• Review your employee manual or work agreement to understand rules that might apply. There’s no guarantee, but this knowledge could provide leverage for future negotiations.

• Download what belongs to you, such as kudos letters and training certificates. Now is also the time to make (appropriate) work samples, to use later in an interview or portfolio.

• Eliminate personal items from paper and digital files. Family photos and personal contacts will all be toast if you store them on a company device that gets shut down on short notice.

• Gather contact information for colleagues. This will pave the way for later networking. Within ethical bounds, individual clients and vendors could also fit this step. To be safe, you could ask each one for permission. In either case, do refrain from copying lists — that could be considered theft of company property.

• Gather your things. No need to be obvious, but it’s good to have less stuff at work at this stage. Desk drawers, book shelves, break room, locker, bench space, your car or truck if it’s company-issue … making a list will help ensure nothing gets left behind. It could also protect you somewhat if your things are boxed up on your behalf by someone else.

• Review current health insurance. How much would it cost if you continued this plan after a job loss and had to pay for it yourself?

Personally

• Manage your health care. If you won’t be leaving for awhile, you can hustle now to schedule preventative appointments — which is an appropriate use of your paid sick time, by the way.

• Secure extra financing, such as an additional credit card or a home equity line of credit. You may not envision needing this but it will be harder to do when unemployed.

• Accelerate other plans if logical. Changing homes or finishing a degree are two examples of things that might be better accomplished before job cuts are announced.

• Consider changing your withholding to increase your take-home pay. Only do this if you can use the excess to fund emergency savings or pay down expensive debt.

• Consider taking a side job, to provide a cushion, no matter how small.

Moving forward — if cuts seem imminent

• Start shopping for your own phone, computer, printer, or any other equipment you rely on that’s currently provided by the company.

• Ask for letters of recommendation from your boss or key colleagues. Letters are better than securing a promise to be a reference, but both are valuable.

• Create a personal directory of company contacts such as your boss, HR, and others you may need to reach after leaving.

• Update professional memberships. If the membership is in your name, it belongs to you. Switch the contact information to reflect your personal email and phone, then create a new password.

• Prepare your materials. Update your résumé and swap LinkedIn recommendations with co-workers if possible.

• Set meetings. Networking, financial advisers, career strategists, the unemployment office — basically anyone who can help you hit the ground running are people you want to meet with.

Or…

If nothing has been announced but you suspect your boss needs to make cuts, consider offering yourself for a layoff. This will help you customize the terms and effectively structure your own buyout. Just don’t quit on your own, unless you have a definite place to land. Otherwise, you’ll likely lose the chance for severance, unemployment, or other benefits that are dependent on being forced out.

Related Articles

Working Strategies: Weighing the buyout offer Part 2, personal considerations

Working Strategies: Responding to a worker buyout offer – Part 1

Working Strategies: Second Sunday Series: Using AI tools for résumés and cover letters

Working Strategies: Book review: Getting along better with folks

Working Strategies: Recognizing ‘gotcha’ job interview questions

Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.

LOS ANGELES — I’ll let you in on a secret: I lose my play-along Oscar ballot every year. Hey, I’m a critic who can’t help voting her heart while championing what should have been nominated instead. This Sunday, I’ll be rooting for these contenders — and elbowing my watch party to catch up with one of these overlooked never-rans as soon as the teleprompters chase the last winners offstage.

The 97th Academy Awards will be held on March 2 at the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood. The show will kick off at 6 p.m. CT.

The 2025 Oscars telecast will air live on ABC and stream live on Hulu. Those with cable subscriptions also can use their credentials to access the livestream on abc.com and the ABC app.

This is the first year that the Oscars, which Conan O’Brien will host, will stream live on Hulu. In prior years, cord-cutters needed subscriptions to platforms with live TV tiers such as Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV or FuboTV to catch the show.

Best picture

“Anora”

“The Brutalist”

“A Complete Unknown”

“Conclave”

“Dune: Part Two”

“Emilia Pérez”

“I’m Still Here”

“Nickel Boys”

“The Substance”

“Wicked”

Should win: “Dune: Part Two.” Last March, it didn’t take a snort of spice to see visions of Denis Villeneuve clutching multiple Oscars for his follow-up to 2021’s “Dune: Part One.” The first “Dune” earned 10 nods and won six. Shockingly, this superior sequel only snagged four nominations — best picture plus three technical categories — when it deserved to gobble them up like a Shai-Hulud. “Part Two” boasts every quality you’d want in a best picture. It’s an ambitious, intelligent, grand-scale masterpiece, an immaculately crafted crowd-pleaser that never backs down from making its audience squirm. While Villeneuve clearly adores Frank Herbert’s original 1965 novel, his clever tweaks have rejiggered its 60-year-old themes to fit exactly this moment in time, dialing up the book’s female strength and the shivers we get as Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides convinces a land of zealots that he alone can save them. This year’s awards for director and adapted screenplay should have been locks, plus supporting actress for Zendaya and lead actor for Chalamet, who delivers a performance with twice the octave range of his Bob Dylan while riding backward on a sandworm screaming in fictional Fremen-ese. I like most of this year’s nominees just fine — I even love a few — but I’m convinced that decades from now, we’ll consider “Dune: Part Two” the movie of the year.

Should’ve been a contender: “Better Man.” The academy has expanded its international ranks and it still couldn’t find enough voters to get behind the Robbie Williams monkey movie. What do you think America will witness first: a female president or our begrudging acknowledgment of Britain’s cheekiest pop icon? (C’mon, guys — Williams has sold more than 75 million records.) While perfectly decent, “A Complete Unknown” is the kind of routine rock biopic that’s begun to sound as wheezy as a junk-shop accordion. “Better Man” takes the genre electric. Irreverent and relentlessly entertaining, it boasts more imagination in a single number than most musicals manage in their entire running time. If you need to feel that cinema is alive and singing, that energy is here in both the big swings and tiny details. How about we make a deal? Just pretend that it’s a fictional biopic a la “The Brutalist” and go see the darned thing already.

Director

Sean Baker, “Anora”

Brady Corbet, “The Brutalist”

James Mangold, “A Complete Unknown”

Jacques Audiard, “Emilia Pérez”

Coralie Fargeat, “The Substance”

Should win: Baker. The director of “Tangerine,” “The Florida Project” and “Red Rocket” excels at thrusting subcultures onto the screen, the dicier, the better. Now it’s Baker’s turn to hoist a prestige statuette. “Anora” is arguably his most mainstream film: a screwball comedy welded onto the class struggle between a Brighton Beach stripper and her Russian oligarch in-laws who want to dispose of her like an empty magnum of champagne. Momentum is on Baker’s side: After his recent wins at the Directors and Producers Guild Awards, he delivered a barn burner of an acceptance speech at the Indie Spirits on behalf of “all the indie-film lifers who are holding on and fighting the good fight.” Baker is the advocate independent cinema needs — an auteur who’s not ashamed to entertain. I’d love to see him command center stage again on Sunday.

Should’ve been a contender: Molly Manning Walker, “How to Have Sex.” “Anora” fans must catch up with Manning Walker’s debut posthaste. Set at a party hotel in Crete, “How to Have Sex” is another dramedy that feels like modern anthropology framed in neon, a madcap tale of drinking, debauchery and reckless decisions. Sixteen-year-old Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce, fantastic) has gone on holiday to cut loose. Her insistence that she’s having fun — no really, so much fun! — becomes its own hangover. Baker needed eight films to land his first Oscar nomination. Hopefully Manning Walker can get there sooner.

Lead actress

Cynthia Erivo, “Wicked”

Karla Sofía Gascón, “Emilia Pérez”

Mikey Madison, “Anora”

Demi Moore, “The Substance”

Fernanda Torres, “I’m Still Here”

Demi Moore stars in “The Substance.” (Christine Tamalet/Mubi/TNS)

Should win: Moore.”The Substance” is a proud mess. I don’t love this Grand Guignol about a Hollywood actor literally killing herself to stay gorgeous, but I’m thrilled that this year’s best picture montage might include a shot of a blood-spattered Walk of Fame. The film itself is a simple idea with the sensationalist impact of the very first bikini. (Heaven help us if writer-director Coralie Fargeat puts her skills into political commercials). Still, Moore deserves every ounce of this award. By sheer force of will, she makes us believe that “The Substance” has substance.

Should’ve been a contender: Andra Day, “The Deliverance.” Another great performance in a go-for-broke horror flick about a woman well over the verge of a nervous breakdown. (And like “The Substance,” she’s the main reason to watch it.) Day’s first leading role in 2021’s “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” earned her an Academy Award nomination. “The Deliverance,” also directed by Lee Daniels, is only her second big part, and proves Day has the talent to be up here every year. Based on a real-life episode of alleged demonic possession, it stars Day as an exhausted single mother who comes to believe that Satan is controlling her kids. Ellen Burstyn was nominated for a similar part in “The Exorcist,” although “The Deliverance” is no “The Exorcist.” With Day’s co-star Glenn Close having a catty blast in a leopard-print pushup bra, the film starts goofy and stays that way. But Day muscles through her scenes with conviction.

Lead actor

Adrien Brody, “The Brutalist”

Timothée Chalamet, “A Complete Unknown”

Colman Domingo, “Sing Sing”

Ralph Fiennes, “Conclave”

Sebastian Stan, “The Apprentice”

Should win: Brody. After “The Pianist” made him the youngest lead actor winner in history, Brody learned that skill doesn’t guarantee success, especially not in a business where financiers have final say on what gets green-lit. For over a decade, his career path has included detours into forgettable international action-dramas — the kind of paychecks artists accept when their opportunities aren’t measuring up to their ambitions. This time, he seems to understand fictional Hungarian architect László Tóth as thoroughly as if they were shadow twins sticking up for each other’s ferocious talent.

Should’ve been a contender: Cillian Murphy, “Small Things Like These.” Sure, Murphy just took home the award for grappling with the shortsighted calculations of nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. He’s even better as Irish coal-seller Bill Furlong, another man forced to fight his conscience when he discovers that his local convent doubles as a labor camp for unwed moms. Emily Watson plays the manipulative mother superior who slips Bill an envelope of cash to buy his complicity. For this broke father, it’s an offering he can’t afford to refuse.

Supporting actress

Monica Barbaro, “A Complete Unknown”

Ariana Grande, “Wicked”

Felicity Jones, “The Brutalist”

Isabella Rossellini, “Conclave”

Zoe Saldaña, “Emilia Pérez”

Should win: Saldaña. Between “Avatar” and “The Avengers,” Saldaña has spent the last decade painted blue and green. Now, she’s poised to claim gold. I’ll be honest: I didn’t know she had “Emilia Pérez’s” Rita in her. But Saldaña is terrific as the Mexican lawyer who undergoes her own metamorphosis during the film, transforming from a harried wallflower to a swaggering activist who accuses cartel thugs of corruption while dancing the Roger Rabbit. Parts like this have a way of changing an actor’s trajectory. I’m curious to see how Saldaña seizes her moment.

Should’ve been a contender: Aubrey Plaza, “Megalopolis.” People were befuddled by Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-the-making passion project, a rococo take on the collapse of an empire. One person who wasn’t: Aubrey Plaza. She often seemed like the only actor onscreen who knew exactly what movie she was in. Abrasive, shallow and giddily watchable, her Wow Platinum — what a name! — twiddles her clawed fingers like a femme fatale dead certain she can charm her way to the top. Still having a hard time trying to pin down the film’s tone? Just look at her.

Supporting actor

Yura Borisov, “Anora”

Kieran Culkin, “A Real Pain”

Edward Norton, “A Complete Unknown”

Guy Pearce, “The Brutalist”

Jeremy Strong, “The Apprentice”

Should win: Culkin. Let’s get blunt: Kieran Culkin couldn’t lose this award if he tried. Which befits his “A Real Pain” character, Benji, an extrovert who insults his way into winning over a Polish tour group. Benji is caustic, needling and selfish — the kind of guy who hogs the window seat, the shower and everyone’s attention. Smashing through social norms like a rampaging bull, he forces us to question whether life might be more meaningful when you stop being polite and start getting real. I’ve thought about his performance every day since I saw the movie. Even if the Dolby Theatre gets swallowed by a sinkhole before Culkin can claim his trophy, Benji will stay superglued in my mind.

Nicole Kidman, left, and Harris Dickinson in “Babygirl.” (A24/TNS)

Should’ve been a contender: Harris Dickinson, “Babygirl.” Everyone came out of “Babygirl” talking about Nicole Kidman’s fearsome performance as Romy, a CEO in a sub-dom affair with her intern. But Dickinson’s Samuel is every bit as good, plus he’s got the added challenge that her character never bothers to ask his about his life. As a result, we don’t learn much about Samuel ourselves. What we do glean comes only from studying Dickinson’s face: Samuel’s probing eyes, his amused half-smile, his hesitance before he dares to order his boss to get on her knees. He’s taking his own baby steps toward domination — and that’s true for Dickinson too.

Adapted screenplay

James Mangold and Jay Cocks, “A Complete Unknown”

Peter Straughan, “Conclave”

Jacques Audiard, “Emilia Pérez”

RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes, “Nickel Boys”

Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley, “Sing Sing”

Ethan Herisse, left, and Brandon Wilson in “Nickel Boys.” (Orion Pictures/Zuma Press/TNS)

Should win: “Nickel Boys.” Ross and Barnes did more than rework Colson Whitehead’s award-winning novel. They reworked how scripts are written. Ross, who rose up out of documentaries with the 2018 Oscar-nominated feature “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” recently admitted he’d only ever read one screenplay before adapting this inspired-by-a-true-story tragedy about an abusive reform school in the Jim Crow-era south. Freed from convention, he and Barnes filled their pages with descriptions of sounds and smells, plus dialogue that often pipes in from offscreen. The result is an astounding first-person memory play that unspools like a waking dream (and nightmare).

Should’ve been a contender: Vera Drew, “The People’s Joker.” Speaking of rule breakers, how wonderful to watch Drew slap her own brand over the bat signal. “The People’s Joker” takes Drew’s autobiography as a struggling comic and hurtles it into the DC universe like a bat-grenade filled with mescaline. Half-prank, half-pastiche and 100% punk rock, the film’s mishmash aesthetics are due to the many artists who volunteered to build out Drew’s gender-bending Gotham City by any means necessary, from animation to stop-motion to miniatures. A film this visually chaotic should collapse, if not for the steel in Drew’s script. She’s costumed like a clown, but her screenplay is as confident as an antihero’s cleverest heist.

Original screenplay

Sean Baker, “Anora”

Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold, “The Brutalist”

Jesse Eisenberg, “A Real Pain”

Moritz Binder and Tim Fehlbaum, “September 5”

Coralie Fargeat, “The Substance”

Should win: “A Real Pain.” Eisenberg’s mousy David is as well-acted as Culkin’s crank. How apt that despite his character’s eagerness to please, Oscar voters still left his performance in the cold. Hopefully, they’ll balance out that snub here as “A Real Pain” puts every groan in exactly the right place. A pitch-perfect combination of pathos, pique and comedy, Eisenberg’s screenplay doesn’t allow any note to get pounded louder than the others. And while he nails David and Benji’s conflict in a single line — “You light up a room and then you s— on everything inside of it” — Eisenberg also allows his script space to breathe, like that quick insert of David quizzing his son about the height of the Burj Khalifa.

Julianne Nicholson, left, and Zoe Ziegler in “Janet Planet.” (Courtesy of A24/TNS)

Should’ve been a contender: Annie Baker, “Janet Planet.” Baker has a Pulitzer and a MacArthur genius grant and by all rights she should have an Oscar nomination too. “Janet Planet,” the saga of a grouchy preteen (Zoe Ziegler) and her bohemian mother (Julianne Nicholson) over one slow-burning summer, feels so organic you might think it scarcely has a script at all. Baker knows just how long to pause so that the audience will fill in her gaps with their own answers. As Nicholson’s lovelorn codependent shifts personalities as she changes from partner to partner, Baker asks how headstrong girls grow up to become malleable women. It’s a great question, even if her screenplay never says it out loud.

Animated feature

“Flow”

“Inside Out 2”

“Memoir of a Snail”

“Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl”

“The Wild Robot”

Should win: “Flow.” A cat, a bird and a dog walk into a boat. Sounds like the makings of a joke, but when the waters start to rise, this simple, wordless tale deepens into a warm-blooded epic about teamwork and survival. Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis has an intuitive understanding of film language that harks back to the silent greats like Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. They knew how to tell a story that would make ’em weep from Burbank to Bangkok. Zilbalodis speaks meow, chirp and woof. More importantly, he’s fluent in human.

Should’ve been a contender: “Transformers One.” No one was asking for a “Transformers” prequel and no one could have predicted that it would be this good. The cartoon ditches Michael Bay’s greasy hormonal Earthlings to zoom back to the robots’ home planet of Cybertron, gorgeously rendered in the perfectly lighted pastels of an old Soviet sci-fi movie. The script nearly lives up to the visuals. A surprisingly affecting study of the rise-and-fall friendship between two bipedal machines who aspire to be cars voiced by Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry, “Transformers One” accomplishes the impossible: It convinces you these spark plugs have a soul.

Documentary feature

“Black Box Diaries”

“No Other Land”

“Porcelain War”

“Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”

“Sugarcane”

Should win: “No Other Land.” Of every film, this is the vital nominee that audiences have struggled to see. A partnership between four filmmakers (two from Israel, two from Palestine), “No Other Land” documents the Israeli government’s demolition of a small West Bank village over four years. The directors once struggled to hide their footage from seizure by the military who confiscated five cameras and a computer; now, absurdly, they’re finding it tricky to get their film out of the region as no U.S. distributor is willing to give it a theatrical run despite unanimous critical acclaim and an impressive streak of awards. You can catch one-off screenings of “No Other Land” in scattered cinemas this week. I highly suggest you do. You’ll clap twice as loud on the very good chance it captures a hard-earned Oscar win.

Should’ve been a contender: “Daughters.” Hold on to your hankies. “Daughters,” by directors Natalie Rae and Angela Patton, is about a daddy-daughter dance with more emotional buildup than every prom movie combined. The men are in prison. The children haven’t held their fathers’ hands in years. Ranging in age from toddlers to teens, these girls speak with a moral clarity that cuts through any defense of this country’s carceral fetish. Tender, honest and evocatively photographed, this documentary sticks to you like a boutonniere on a lapel.

International feature

“Emilia Pérez”

“Flow”

“The Girl With the Needle”

“I’m Still Here”

“The Seed of the Sacred Fig”

Should win: “I’m Still Here.” In 1970s Brazil, democracy is devolving into a dictatorship. The clues are there, but the citizens can’t convince themselves the threat is real. One parent waves off their teenager’s sudden interest in politics as a fad, like eating macrobiotics. “I’m Still Here’s” ascension into the best picture and lead actress races may be due to its overnight relevance. Yet, the combination of director Walter Salles’ fastidious craft with Fernanda Torres’ phenomenally layered performance more than merits its surprise nominations. I caught Torres’ turn as as a rich housewife who combats sorrow with a smile early last fall and can confirm it felt just as strong even before we started waking up to our own alarming headlines.

Should’ve been a contender: “Universal Language.” This powder-dry dramedy introduces itself as a presentation of the Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young People. Like everything else in the movie, it’s artifice that feigns at being fact. Matthew Rankin, a Canadian historian and prankster, has concocted a starkly enchanting Winnipeg where Farsi is the main language of storefronts, guided tours and everyday grievances, like the woman who gripes about sharing a bus with a live turkey. “‘How am I supposed to relax with all this gobbling?” she moans. Community, even human-avian fellowship, is the theme, with Rankin playing the stranger who learns that belonging isn’t a privilege — it takes participation.

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