It was one of the funniest lines of the night: 'This is freaking insane, and I have one before you, which is also crazy.' Toward the end of her acceptance speech, Cassandra Kulukundis, onstage as the winner of the Oscars' first casting award ever for her work on One Battle After Another, shouted out the movie's director, Paul Thomas Anderson. Her tongue-in-cheek jab spoke to their history as creative partners, and to the fact that Anderson had been nominated 14 times for an Academy Award heading into Sunday night. Those 14 nominations might as well have been shared between them: The two have been working together since Anderson's first feature, 1996's Hard Eight. (Anderson would end up winning his first Oscar later that evening, for Best Adapted Screenplay.) Even the most casual moviegoer can understand the importance of casting directors. The job requires working closely with a film's director to select the actors who eventually appear on-screen. That means choosing the right performers for the right parts, searching for the kind of chemistry that will enliven a film while sifting through scores of fresh, unheralded talent. Casting directors can make or break an actor's career'or the success of a film itself....

On Friday morning, an explosion shook the Dubai International Financial Centre, the United Arab Emirates' equivalent of Wall Street. According to Dubai authorities, air defenses shot an Iranian drone, which struck a building on the way down. The blast was about 1,200 yards from the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and close to the Israeli consulate. It was close enough to my apartment that it sounded like someone was out on the balcony practicing the cymbal crash from the climax of Mahler's Second Symphony. The government of Dubai says no one was hurt. But Dubai's status as the hub of Middle Eastern commerce has sustained a palpable hit, and some finance types will probably prefer to do business in a city outside the range of Iranian drones. One of the revelations of this war is just how many people outside Dubai are delighting in the thought that the city-state might be humbled. Dubai has worked for decades to earn a reputation as a fun, safe place to make and spend money. Until recently, the most harrowing scene near the Burj Khalifa was the fictional one where Tom Cruise climbs its exterior in the fourth Mission: Impossible movie. Many wanted to partake in this life (preferably on the inside of the buildings), and some prominent influencers'such as the manosphere's high priest of misogyny and homosociality, Andrew Tate'have moved here and seem ready to naturalize. But quite a few others loathe Dubai and are savoring its comeuppance....

Besides the music, the main appeal of raving is the feeling: of heads jolting to the sound of the beat, and sticky bodies rubbing up against one another as night turns into day. Lost in the groove, dancers escape from modern life'and decades after raving's emergence in the 1980s, people are still looking for existential meaning at the club. On the outskirts of cities, or under concrete bridges, they slip into their finest nylon-spandex blends, metallic-paper-clip chains, and plastic sunglasses. Whatever ennui the dancers feel, they might, at least, break through it in communion with other disaffected selves. The possibilities and limitations of raving as an escape are the concern of Sirat, a film by the French Spanish director Oliver Laxe, which imagines paradise as an illegal rave guarded by towering speakers in the middle of the Moroccan desert. Nominated for Best International Feature Film and Best Sound at the upcoming Academy Awards, Laxe's movie follows Luis, a middle-aged Spanish father searching for Mar, his missing daughter. He suspects she might be hiding at an open party in the Moroccan desert''in the south, near Mauritania,' as one reveler describes it'and along with his preteen son, Esteban, he goes to find her....

The run-up to the Academy Awards is a fun, ridiculous, and loopy monthslong stretch. It also encourages something vital to Hollywood's artistic ecosystem: Movie studios, in the hopes of achieving Oscar glory, put money toward more stylistically challenging projects, rather than consistently aiming for the broadest common box-office denominator. But when the ceremony itself finally nears, I find myself desperate for it to be over'especially in a year like this one, when the Winter Olympics have pushed the Oscars into mid-March, extending what already feels like an endless trail of precursor events ahead of the ceremony. My primary note after this awards gantlet: Please hold the Oscars earlier next year. My exhaustion with awards season itself, however, is mitigated by my appreciation of the films'2025 was an exciting year for cinema; the two Best Picture front-runners (One Battle After Another and Sinners) generated serious fanfare in a time otherwise fraught with industry drama and the politics of corporate mergers. One Battle has enjoyed overwhelming praise since its September release, but Sinners'which was in theaters nearly a year ago'has never faded from the conversation. The result is some down-to-the-wire races in several major categories....