Members of the Pioneer Press sports staff who cover the Vikings forecast Sunday’s game in London against the New York Jets:

DANE MIZUTANI

Vikings 23, Jets 13: Aaron Rodgers has tormented the Vikings over the course of his career. Fortunately for the Vikings, it appears Father Time has finally caught up to him.

JOHN SHIPLEY

Vikings 31, Jets 17: Vikings settle into role of favorite with a spite win against their former nemesis — even if Harrison Smith is the only guy left who remembers — as Jets pay for Vikings’ bad second half last week against Packers.

CHARLEY WALTERS

Vikings 31, Jets 28: Vikings are the home team in London. QB Aaron Rodgers has elevated the Jets to mediocrity while Vikings QB Sam Darnold has elevated his team to terrific. Great story.

By MARK LEWIS

STAVANGER, Norway (AP) — Wars, a refugee crisis, famine and artificial intelligence could all be recognized when Nobel Prize announcements begin next week under a shroud of violence.

The prize week coincides with the Oct. 7 anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which began a year of bloodshed and war across the Middle East.

The literature and science prizes could be immune. But the peace prize, which recognizes efforts to end conflict, will be awarded in an atmosphere of ratcheting international violence — if awarded at all.

“I look at the world and see so much conflict, hostility and confrontation, I wonder if this is the year the Nobel Peace Prize should be withheld,” said Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

As well as events roiling the Middle East, Smith cites the war in Sudan and risk of famine there, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and his institute’s research showing that global military spending is increasing at its fastest pace since World War II.

“It could go to some groups which are making heroic efforts but are marginalized,” Smith said. “But the trend is in the wrong direction. Perhaps it would be right to draw attention to that by withholding the peace prize this year.”

Withholding the Nobel Peace is not new. It has been suspended 19 times in the past, including during the world wars. The last time it was not awarded was in 1972.

However, Henrik Urdal, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, says withdrawal would be a mistake in 2024, saying the prize is “arguably more important as a way to promote and recognize important work for peace.”

Civil grassroot groups, and international organizations with missions to mitigate violence in the Middle East could be recognized.

Nominees are kept secret for 50 years, but nominators often publicize their picks. Academics at the Free University Amsterdam said they have nominated the Middle East-based organizations EcoPeace, Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun for peace efforts between Israelis and Palestinians.

Urdal believes it’s possible the committee could consider the Sudan Emergency Response Rooms, a group of grassroots initiatives providing aid to stricken Sudanese facing famine and buffeted by the country’s brutal civil war.

The announcements begin Monday with the physiology or medicine prize, followed on subsequent days by the physics, chemistry, literature and peace awards.

The Peace Prize announcement will be made on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo, while all the others will be announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. The prize in economics will be announced the following week on Oct. 14.

New technology, possibly artificial intelligence, could be recognized in one or more of the categories.

Critics of AI warn the rise of autonomous weapons shows the new technology could mean additional peace-shattering misery for many people. Yet AI has also enabled scientific breakthroughs that are tipped for recognition in other categories.

David Pendlebury, head of research analysis at Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information, says scientists from Google Deepmind, the AI lab, could be among those under consideration for the chemistry prize.

The company’s artificial intelligence, AlphaFold, “accurately predicts the structure of proteins,” he said. It is already widely used in several fields, including medicine, where it could one day be used to develop a breakthrough drug.

Pendlebury spearheads Clarivate’s list of scientists whose papers are among the world’s most cited, and whose work it says are ripe for Nobel recognition.

“AI will increasingly be a part of the panoply of tools that researchers use,” Pendlebury said. He said he would be extremely surprised if a discovery “firmly anchored in AI” did not win Nobel prizes in the next 10 years.

Hollywood loves a navel-gazing satire about the movie business. Audiences do too, when given a good reason, from the upbeat mockery of 1952’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” to the excoriation of a studio executive in 1992’s “The Player,” to the empty platitudes about representation in 2023’s “American Fiction.” But don’t look for any of that wit or bite in HBO’s eight-episode series “The Franchise,” which is little more than the TV equivalent of a boiled piece of chicken.

“Tropic Thunder” might actually be the better comparison. The 2008 comedy was premised on the idea that filmmaking isn’t a miracle of controlled chaos, it’s just chaos. But at least it had things to say about hubris and bad judgment, whereas there are no ideas animating “The Franchise.” Just as crucially, the jokes don’t land, maybe because the show also lacks the courage to bite the hand that feeds.

Creator Jon Brown’s credits include “Veep” (from Armando Iannucci, who is also an executive producer here) and “Succession” (created by another Iannucci alum, Jesse Armstrong) and those titles might be selling points for some, but I’m not sure the smug, fast-talking snark that defines this style of comedy has legs. We can disagree, but if you watched HBO’s short-lived and far less acclaimed “Avenue 5” — yet another Iannucci project that Brown worked on — you have a sense of what “The Franchise” has in mind, which is very little at all.

Somewhere in England, a cast and crew are at work on a superhero movie called “Tecto: Eye of the Storm” and the tunnel vision of a crass Kevin Feige-esque studio executive (Darren Goldstein) has him making all kinds of harsh, panic-driven dictates. “Without our tentpole, we don’t have a tent,” he says, “and without a tent, we get eaten in our sleep by nine-year-old TikTok kids with superhero fatigue, which is not a real illness and a scam.” Instead of understanding the job at hand, the director (Daniel Brühl) treats this formulaic megaproject with the seriousness of Shakespeare.

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Egos abound and no one seems particularly good at their jobs, but that’s beside the point. They are self-absorbed and mildly obnoxious, with their endless tantrums and humiliations, but rarely is their desperation funny. Everything feels like it’s in air quotes, and while the show acknowledges the sexism that exists amongst many movie fandoms, it conspicuously ignores the racism (maybe because Brown decided “Tecto” would only star white actors). It’s impossible to parse the movie’s lore, which is an intentional and a halfway decent gag, but is that what we’re going for: Halfway decent? No one says the word “streaming” once. The series could have been made 15 years ago, that’s how little it has to say about the current anxieties around the theatrical side of the business.

“The Franchise” is an exercise in watching good actors struggle through terrible scripts, namely Himesh Patel as the harried first assistant director, Lolly Adefope as the third (there is no second assistant director, which may be the most subtle of jokes) and Richard E. Grant as a seasoned theater actor who can’t believe he signed up for this garbage. Aya Cash is the producer gritting her teeth until she can move on to something less soul-crushing, and Billy Magnussen is the deeply insecure, possibly untalented star. Collectively, they more or less ignore their hapless director and it’s conspicuous that Brühl has no comedic point of view for the character. Then again, the show doesn’t either.

“The Franchise” — 1 star (out of 4)

Where to watch: 9 p.m. Sundays on HBO (and streaming on Max)

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.