TAKE THE WEIRD MOVIE …

➽ SAY YOU WANT an Oscar. What kind of project will get you there? One school of thought says to play an important figure from history, perhaps one who struggled with illness or addiction, in a performance that requires at least five hours in the makeup chair. That road map absolutely exists—just look at Oppenheimer, Nyad, or Rustin, all of which earned nominations for their stars this year. But as the Academy has expanded its membership over the past eight years, a different path has opened up. New voters are younger, more global, and more comfortable letting their freak flag fly. “Things that would’ve not been considered possible because they’re too risqué, that’s not the case anymore,” says one awards strategist. Increasingly, the offbeat passion projects are the Oscar movies. Emma Stone won her first Oscar for La La Land, a nostalgic, retro-hued musical that was the most middle-of-the-road awards play you could draw up. Afterward, she seemed to have made a conscious choice to lend her star power to alienating auteurs like Yorgos Lanthimos, with whom she has made three movies and counting. The second was last year’s Poor Things, in which she spends significant chunks acting like a baby and/or totally nude and which won her a second Oscar. The season before saw three of the four acting trophies go to the stars of Everything Everywhere All at Once, a time-jumping sci-fi comedy in which butt plugs play a pivotal role. Of course, underneath their avant-garde trappings, both Poor Things and EEAAO turn out to hide universal messages about acceptance and empowerment. That’s the new Oscars model: quirky films that, as one agent puts it, are “still palatable but feel fresh to the older Academy.”