A raft of stars are back in the Oscar race. Producer-star Frances McDormand plays a low-income woman in a van in Chloé Zhao’s road movie “Nomadland,” which took home the Golden Lion at Venice as well as the Toronto People’s Choice award. McDormand nabbed Globe, Spirit, SAG, and Critics Choice nods, and won the BAFTA. McDormand’s only problem: she’s won two Oscars. And Viola Davis has won one (“Fences”). She landed Globe and CCA bids for her larger-than-life title role in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (Netflix), George C....

First, the cold, hard numbers: Per preliminary data from the Nielsen Live+Same Day ratings system, this year’s Oscars telecast drew 9.85 million total viewers and a 1.9 rating among the key demographic of adults 18-49. That’s a drop-off of 58.3 percent from the 2020 telecast, which pulled in 23.64 million viewers and landed a 5.3 rating. These ratings mark all-time lows for the Oscars, following last year’s all-time lows. However, the Academy Awards are not alone....

“I always sort of reviled show business,” Kline said in an interview over lunch this month. “It was always repugnant to me. I’m really someone who’s resistant to showing my face in general.” His movies are a different story. “Funny Pages,” Kline’s zany, subversive debut feature, ought to free him of any past baggage and establish an authentic new creative voice. The semi-fictionalized plight of 17-year-old cartoonist Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) who undergoes a series of depraved misadventures as he attempts to pursue his dreams in suburban New Jersey, the movie bears a noticeable thematic link to the early work of the Safdie brothers as well as their writing cohort Ronnie Bronstein, whose cringe-worthy character study “Frownland” is an obvious precedent....

Here’s the official synopsis from the streamer: “‘Oxygen’ is a French survival thriller directed by Alexandre Aja. The film tells the story of a young woman (Mélanie Laurent), who wakes up in a cryogenic pod. She doesn’t remember who she is or how she ended up there. As she’s running out of oxygen, she must rebuild her memory to find a way out of her nightmare.” Aja first rose to international prominence as a horror filmmaker in 2005 with the French slasher film “High Tension,” which caught the attention from Wes Craven, who then tapped Aja to helm the remake of Craven’s 1977 classic “The Hills Have Eyes....

The real-life besties continued their long-running prank, this time on O’Brien’s “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast. Rudd dropped by the podcast to tease a (faux) show he’s developing as a scripted narrative podcast for Audible. As Rudd listed the all-star cast that signed on to lend their voices to the series, including Adam Scott, Ken Marino, and Celia Watson, O’Brien listened as though it was fact. The series supposedly stars Rudd as a publicist who falls in love with a woman working in a craft store in New Orleans: Lifetime rom-com movie, much?...

I hate the “Perry Mason” moment. Growing up the son of a small town defense attorney, nothing would grind my father’s gears like seeing a TV lawyer badger their witness into an admission of guilt, or suddenly introduce new evidence that they themselves uncovered. The former rarely happens, and the latter is a convenient fallacy cooked up by efficiency-minded screenwriters — lawyers aren’t private investigators. Except, of course, if you’re Perry Mason....

Johnson leads the latest Jane Austen adaptation of “Persuasion” for Netflix, premiering on the streamer July 15. The quiet longing of protagonist Anne Elliot will soon be known stateside, thanks to theater director Carrie Cracknell making her feature directorial debut with the Netflix film. Cracknell famously directed Jake Gyllenhaal in Broadway’s “Seawall/A Life” and most recently Vanessa Kirby in “Julie” and also helmed 2012 short film “Nora,” commissioned by the Guardian, the Young Vic, and The Space theaters....