Movies Survived 2020. The Oscars Diversified. There’s More to Do.

At the pandemic Oscars, anything could happen. Here are the lessons from the nominations: The good, the bad and what needs fixing.

There was a moment last summer, right around the time that “Palm Springs” arrived on Hulu, where if you were thinking about whether the Academy Awards would happen in 2021, you might have wondered if this rinse-and-repeat romantic comedy might be the sort of thing that could wind up a best picture nominee. There are 9,000 eligible Oscar voters, none of whom is me, but “Palm Springs” had a seriousness of purpose and an undercurrent of rage — two people meet at a wedding then, thanks to a time-space wormhole, keep meeting at that same wedding — that I found seductive. And, given the rinse-and-repeating we’ve been doing all these months: predictive. It was a Metaphor of Its Moment. The director Max Barbakow and the screenwriter Andy Siara understood how to merge a funny leading-man (Andy Samberg) with an uninhibited character actor (Cristin Milioti) and broad comedy with the existential dread of science fiction. It was a dumb movie. It was shockingly emotional. Alas, it was also probably too bright, too absurd and released too early in the year for any voter’s serious consideration. By March 15, nomination day, it had indeed gone unconsidered. I had another wishful moment in the fall, after I saw the “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” a Netflix comedy that Radha Blank wrote and directed. This one starred Blank as a washed-up Harlem playwright whose midlife creative crisis has lured her into underground Brooklyn rap. It’s a satire of New York’s art scenes and of whatever Black authenticity is now supposed to be. It’s also a bearhug of bygone American filmmaking priorities — intimacy, emotional truth, framing. The movie is shot almost entirely in black and white and demonstrates an abiding, stress-free nostalgia for the persona-driven romances of prime Woody Allen, for learning-to-crawl Spike Lee.