Hollywood’s biggest night is on Sunday, coming off of an absolute rollercoaster of an award season. We’re only now getting a clear frontrunner with Anora, Emilia Perez has gone from social media pariah to social media pariah that may actually lose now, and multiple nominee surprises have shaken up people’s predictions, including my own. The Substance may end up being the most deranged movie to gain major Oscar attention and/or wins since Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Walter Salles’ incredible drama I’m Still Here beat the odds to gain a Best Picture nomination that, in my opinion, it deserves to win. As always, though, you have likely already heard all this, which is why I like talking about the stuff that you probably haven’t, like the shorts. As is usually the case, there were a lot of good shorts this year, some great, some okay, and at least one where I’m questioning who’s even voting for these. At the very least, I’m highlighting the animated ones.

The animated shorts in particular included an especially disappointing snub with Don Hertzfeldt’s ME, which did make the shortlist but not the nominees, dashing my hopes that the Academy will give him at least one well-deserved Oscar. While I like to say that the animated Oscar shorts are where anything is possible, it was particularly more true this year than last year. Many of the films featured take full advantage of the medium, and even the shorts with the heaviest subject matter convey it in ways that live action simply can’t. Here are the nominees for Best Animated Short film.

Beautiful Men tells the story of three bald brothers who have traveled to Istanbul for a hair transplant. However, a misunderstanding results in only one of them actually getting the opportunity, and it isn’t long before insecurities and conflicts boil to the surface. I typically love watching the Oscar-nominated animated shorts for films like this, and to see them get wider exposure (even if the presence of animated drama for adult audiences still results in the Academy treating it like a disposable medium for kids). This short, however, is severely lacking. The stop-motion animation and puppet designs are great, and there are some amusing moments, but really, there’s not much here. In addition, the ending felt really rushed, as if the filmmakers didn’t know how to conclude the piece. I have heard people predict this short will win (mainly on GoldDerby). Last year, the Academy went for the weakest choice with War is Over!, but at least the politics at the time justified why they would pick it. Here, I really don’t see anything that leads me to believe that this has a chance, and while I support animation like this, I will be disappointed if it wins.

In the Shadow of the Cypress I already covered last year when it played at the Tribeca Film Festival, during which it won the award for Best Animated Short. That win qualified it for this year’s Oscars, where it’s currently nominated. A dialogue-free short from Iran, it’s about a former captain living in a house by the sea, whose PTSD strains his relationship with his daughter. My thoughts on this haven’t changed much since Tribeca. This short does a great job using animation to express difficult themes, and I loved how much surrealism was present. In terms of the five, I’d say that this is definitely one of the better nominees.

Daisuke Nishio has had a notable career in anime, directing a good amount of the Dragon Ball franchise among other things. His short film Magic Candies is an absolute delight and is, in my opinion, a strong frontrunner. The short is about Dong-Dong, a lonely boy who plays with marbles. He goes to buy some new ones, but what he thinks are marbles turn out to be candies. Not just any candies, either. After eating one, the sofa starts talking. Dong-Dong figures out how the candies work and soon gains a new perspective on life. Heartfelt and extremely funny, this was a joy to watch. It’s animated in CGI at a low-frame rate, essentially using 2D anime production techniques in a 3D environment, but what it lacks in fluidity it makes up for with extremely detailed art design. Honestly, I went into this thinking it was stop-motion because the CGI was so good. One of my favorite jokes it this is the use of onscreen text exclamations. While common in anime and manga, the use of it in a 3D setting I found incredibly humorous and inventive. I’d say of the five shorts, this was one of my favorites, and I’d put it as my pick for the winner. Of particular note is the fact that the film qualified for the Oscars for winning the Grand Jury Prize after premiering at the New York International Children’s Film Festival. The festival is one of the best places to watch international and independent animation in New York City, and I hope to cover this year’s festival soon.

I feel like dark takes on children’s’ television is a bit of an overused premise (Pib and Pog is one of my favorite examples), but Wander to Wonder takes it in a direction I genuinely did not expect. In the 1980’s, Wander to Wonder was a beloved kids’ TV staple, in which a friendly live-action host and three friendly stop-motion monsters teach children educational lessons. That is, until the creator and host died an untimely death (we don’t find out how, but whatever happened, nobody has removed his body). Now his three animated co-stars, amusingly revealed to be further stop-motion puppets wearing monster costumes, are alone, running out of food, and making increasingly desperate episodes for an audience that may or may not be there. This is honestly one of the darkest, bleakest animated shorts I’ve seen the Oscars nominate, and as a creative, it really hit me hard. As a mediation on how creations take on lives on their own (or if you just have an overactive imagination and think this) it’s absolutely devastating, even as I’d call some of it darkly comic. I can’t for certain say that this really deserves to win, but it definitely left an impact on me.

Childhood views on romance is the subject of Yuck!, a French short that I know ran quite a bit of the festival circuit. A group of kids view in disgust as they see adults kissing (some claim to have even seen them “doing it”), but it isn’t long before one boy finds himself attracted to a girl, and wanting to kiss himself. I’ve definitely seen this topic explored before, and this was a particularly cute example. I appreciated how the characters’ lips glow when they’re in love. Overall, though, I don’t see this as much of a contender as some of the other ones. It was definitely a fun watch, however.

As for the animated features, this was a particularly strong year. My pick is The Wild Robot, but overall I’d say they’re all worth watching. Even the weakest nominee, Inside Out 2, still had one of the best depictions of mental health issues I’ve seen in animation. There’s been talk that Flow could end up taking home the big prize which, if that were to happen, would be notable in that a low-budget dialogue-free film made in Blender would beat out several other productions with much higher production values. Anyway, we’ll see who ends up winning on Sunday. (Although if they make another crack about these movies being for children the year Memoir of a Snail is nominated, I swear to God…)

Combining science fiction and supernatural forces is a common occurrence in a lot of genre fiction, but in Kalki 2898 AD, well, the title says it all. Kalki is the name for the prophesied final incarnation of Vishnu, said to usher in a new epoch of existence. Suitably, this film, one of the largest productions in Indian history and the start of a cinematic universe, takes place at the end of the world. It has a cast of the nation’s biggest names, and a production that pulls out all the stops for visuals and set design. It’s also a pastiche of some of sci-fi’s biggest franchises with actual religious mythology thrown in. In short, it’s nothing less than one of the year’s most epic films by definition, but is it any good? As it turns out, yeah, it is. It’s not great, but I was really pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

It’s the year 2898, and Earth is a hellscape run by the 200-year-old totalitarian Supreme Yaskin. A war has left only the city of Kasi, and the planet’s resources are dominated by The Complex, a large structure of the world’s elite that has been forcibly taking fertile women for the deadly and consistently failed experiment Project K to extend Yaskin’s lifespan. The forces of Yaskin, the Raiders, have been searching for the hidden city of Shambhala, whose rebel residents foretell the coming of Kalki. Meanwhile, one of the kidnapped women, SUM-80, has managed to remain pregnant longer than any of the other women, which may be a sign of Kalki’s coming. Also meanwhile, Bhairava, a bounty hunter, longs of the day when he can enter The Complex and make a new life for himself. Also also meanwhile, Ashwatthama, who has spent the last 6,000 years cursed by Krishna with immortality, realizes the prophecy of Kalki may be at hand. All of these people ultimately converge when SUM-80 manages to escape The Complex, as it becomes extremely apparent that something bigger than anyone can fathom is about to happen.

First of all, I don’t normally say this, but seeing as how this has a major release in the US, I feel like I need to. If you don’t know anything about the plot of this movie, I would look it up first. While heavily inspired by pre-existing franchises, the backbone of the plot is the actual mythology and epic poetry of Hinduism, specifically, the Mahabharata. The film opens not with a future dystopia, but with a lavish recreation of the events of the poem, which are key to the story as a whole. However, as someone who isn’t versed in the mythology, it was pretty easy to follow along. It’s a combo of science fiction and faith that actually ends up working pretty well.

Speaking of lavish production values, this is also among the most expensive Indian movies to date, and you can see where they put the money in. The production design is incredible, and really wears the film’s influences on its sleeve. There’s visual splendor on full display, from hellish desert dystopias, to beautiful mythical cities, to a musical number set in the elite corners of the Complex where greenery and opulence abound. There’s even a devastating hand-drawn animation sequence of the historical events leading up to the film. It looked great on the big screen.

However, visuals only go so far, especially if your film runs a full 3 hours, but for the most part, I was entertained. I can’t ignore that this movie feels like several major sci-fi franchises thrown into a blender, but as a pastiche applied to scripture, it works really well. It does drag at a certain point though, but never to the extent where the length felt too much, and there’s a lot of plot here. The cast is great, but Prabhas steals the show as bounty hunter Bhairava. Like a combination of Han Solo and Spike Spiegel, he’s a clear comic relief in an otherwise dismal world. As in other films I’ve seen with him, he has a charisma and screen presence that, based on audience response alone, Hollywood’s biggest celebrities wish they could have. (The film also contains a hilarious and unexpected meta-cameo involving him that I won’t spoil here.) The action sequences are top-notch overall, with an absolutely epic climax and a lot of emotional weight.

Without spoiling the movie, some last-minute plot twists did feel a tad out of nowhere (even in-context), and some scenes could’ve been heavily trimmed, but overall, this one impressed me. As the first part of a cinematic universe, it does a great job of setting up an epic story based on real-life mythology that actually made me anticipate the next installment. While cliched and a tad long in the tooth (there is an intermission, but my screening didn’t include one), I’d recommend this to people looking for epic genre cinema they might otherwise not seek out.