Out of the Blue: Oscar alert: some great movies and actors to watch

Hey, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine, Russia. Lay down your arms.

Time for a cease-fire and a cigarette.

It’s Oscar weekend, your chance to marinate in the fabulousness of America. From straw hut to yurt to dacha, throw a log on the stove, fire up the satellite dish and gather the tribe around the flatty. Oh the pageantry, the glamour, the humans without wrinkles.

The Academy Awards are broadcast in 200 countries. It’s the sine qua non of awards shows, even with a flawed voting process, freighted as it is with so many old white men.

This year there’s not a single minority nominee in the top acting categories, appalling when you consider the demographics of this country. Still, as an older white guy myself, I will use this bully pulpit to prognosticate the winners and proffer my own favorites.

The year offered great and important films about the resilience of the human spirit, the ability to endure soul- and bone-crushing adversity — “Unbroken,” “Wild,” “Selma,” “The Theory of Everything” and even the Edward Snowden documentary, “Citizen Four.”

There were films about artists who obsessively risk all to achieve creative transcendence — “Whiplash,” “Top Five,” “Big Eyes,” “Mr. Turner,” “Birdman,” and I’d include the delightful and forgotten “Chef” and the fabulous and hardly seen James Brown biopic, “Get On Up.”

And finally, we had four noble films about the theme that never flags, war — “Fury,” “Unbroken,” “American Sniper” and “The Imitation Game.” (Five actually, when you consider the documentary “The Last Days of Vietnam,” a harrowing account of the first of our current string of military failures). A stark reminder that war is hell, but great for the box office (westerns and Nascar take note).

We’ve been told who will be the winners in the acting categories — Michael Keaton, Julianne Moore, J.K. Simmons and Patricia Arquette. “Boyhood” was the early favorite for Best Picture, but like a horse gaining steam down the final stretch, “Birdman” is said to be the film to beat.

And that suits me just fine. What an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, with dazzling, uninterrupted tracking shots taking you seamlessly from one kinetic drama to another. So well-staged, with a searing narrative, crackling dialogue — and interior monologues — fully-realized characters and pathos to spare. This is the movie that grabs you by the throat and never lets go.

And the extraordinary Keaton gives the performance we all knew he was capable of: naked, vulnerable, unrelenting. A fascinating, tour de force by an awesome auteur, Alejandro Innaritu.

But wait, what about that other best picture? No, not “Boyhood.” “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

Another unfathomable experience. Wes Anderson creates entire universes of quirky delight. No one working is anywhere near his creative level — except, of course, the untouchable Coen brothers.

“Grand Budapest Hotel” is a singular achievement in original storytelling, set design, editing, art direction, characters and snappy, literary dialogue worthy of the screwball comedies of the 30s — but hipper.

Although comedic actors rarely win, Ralph Fiennes was amazing as the fastidious Monsieur Gustave, the greatest concierge of his time, a bisexual dandy who made the hotel great, partly by sleeping with his wealthy-widow clientele.

While some critics have groused that it all adds up to some weightless frivolity, look closer and you will see the story is told from the sad and frayed present, long after the grand hotel has faded and the central characters have been extinguished by the fascists. It was actually the foretelling of yet another war movie.

If he doesn’t get Best Picture, I hope Anderson sweeps everything else. His time has come.

BILLY FRIED has a radio show on KX93.5 from 8 to 10 p.m. Thursdays called “Laguna Talks.” He is the chief experience officer of La Vida Laguna and member of the board of Transition Laguna. He can be reached at [email protected].