An eephus pitch is one of baseball’s many pieces of niche ephemera. It’s a weird trick throw that’s barely ever glimpsed in the professional game—an arcing lob of the ball, traveling at half the speed or less than a normal pitch; it exists only to catch batters off guard. In the director Carson Lund’s beguiling debut film, also called Eephus, a player named Merritt Nettles (played by Nate Fisher) specializes in tossing the pitch and rhapsodizes about its time-stopping sorcery: “It’s kinda like baseball. I’m looking around for something to happen—poof, the game’s over.”

If the previous paragraph made your eyes glaze over, you may not be the movie’s intended audience. But to me, these details are pure poetry, and so is Eephus. The plot-free hangout flick quietly has a ton to say about baseball’s eternal appeal, even as the sport weathers the passage of time. Set during the 1990s in Massachusetts, it follows the last recreational-league matchup between two groups of shambling, beer-guzzling baseball enthusiasts; they’re clashing once more before a planned development will pave over the site. Eephus is an elegy, but with just the barest hint of sentimentality—a shrugging send-off that simultaneously cares deeply about America’s pastime.

The film begins with the league’s sole enthusiast, Franny (Cliff Blake), settling onto the grass with his portable card table, his pocket binoculars, and his scorecard; slowly, the players begin to dribble onto the field. In red are the members of a team called Adler’s Paint, and in blue are the Riverdogs. The history between the two squads is irrelevant, and there’s barely any information to glean from their overheard dialogue. Instead, Lund (who also co-wrote the film’s script with Fisher and Michael Basta) revels in the minor details, such as the players’ many forms of inventive facial hair and their cute little practice rituals. The drama that does arise feels minor, too, such as a brief moment of panic when the Riverdogs realize that their ninth player hasn’t shown up yet, which would force them to forfeit.

[Read: Goodbye to baseball’s most anachronistic rule]

Otherwise, Eephus’s story never goes anywhere. Even though it’s clear that at least some of the actors know how to play the game, there isn’t much intense activity to take in. Over and over, the viewer sees shots of players briefly crouching in anticipation of something happening (namely, the delivery of a pitch to a batter), then relaxing when it doesn’t. That’s the magic of baseball: blissful anticipation, with the occasional chance for real action.

In lieu of narrative progression, Lund is singularly intent on generating an atmosphere that makes the viewer feel like they’re perched in the bleachers. The perfectly calibrated sound design contributes to this heavily; it is expansive and plangent, with the clack of the bat and popping of the ball heard more distinctly than the yelled instructions or friendly banter from base runners. The director’s attentive scene-setting helps transform Eephus into a dispatch from another era—a memory bouncing through the decades to somehow reach theaters today.

The throwback vibe is further cultivated by the cast, which comes across like a cheerfully old-school collection of performers. Among them is the Boston Red Sox alum Bill “Spaceman” Lee, one of Major League Baseball’s best-known practitioners of the eephus pitch back in the 1970s, who appears in a cameo role. The rest of the actors, most of them unfamiliar names, look like they could have walked onto the set through a time tunnel; their stringy beards, craggy faces, and protruding guts recall those of the players from Lee’s era. The renowned 95-year-old documentarian (and fellow Bostonian) Frederick Wiseman also joins to dispense pearls of wisdom in voice-over, dropping well-known quotations from the ball-playing greats between innings.

[Read: Climate change comes for baseball]

Looking backwards feels inherent to baseball, and I mean this in the warmest manner possible. The game is like the Academy Awards or burger making: an American tradition that, in my opinion, needs little in the way of reinvention. Still, although Lund isn’t going for any major tear-jerking moments, his movie invokes the melancholy sense of something important passing into the mists. None of the characters is able to use a smartphone or check social media, given the period setting, but the couple of kids sitting in the stands observe the amateur teams’ particular brand of fun as if it’s from the Stone Age.

Lund cited the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 masterpiece, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, as an inspiration for Eephus. The comparison is apt on a surface level; Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a famous example of “slow cinema” set in a soon-to-be-closed Taipei theater—an antiquated edifice not unlike an aging ballpark. The film discursively follows some of the picture house’s regulars as they attend its last showtime. Beyond their similar presentations, it’s also Eephus’s kindred spirit thematically: Each one is a quirky ode to a particular hobby that is still extant in our life, albeit becoming something of a relic. Eephus succeeds as a beautiful portrait of a specific pastime. It’s also, delightfully, a low-stakes hang with some dudes swigging Narragansetts—much like baseball itself.

A caretaking humanoid robot in Japan, prayers for Pope Francis in Brazil, the Royal Shrovetide Football Match in England, a polar-bear-plunge record attempt in the Czech Republic, a performance at the Academy Awards in Hollywood, a skijoring competition in Colorado, and much more

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When watching the 97th Academy Awards, there was a clear divide between the A-listers and the rest of the film industry. Winners in less glamorous categories were played off relatively quickly, while Best Actor winner Adrien Brody gave a lengthy speech about his life in the film industry.

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The director Sean Baker probably didn’t predict this outcome  while he was filming Anora, his latest small-budget indie project, in the snowy Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach—that a couple years later, he’d be accepting Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It was one of five prizes that his spiky indie dramedy collected on Hollywood’s biggest night. After a drawn-out awards season in which the biggest contenders seemed often in flux, Anora dominated at a fun if elongated Oscars ceremony.  This year’s Best Picture winner also took home Best Director, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editing. Four of those trophies went to Baker, tying a record for individual wins in a night with the legendary Walt Disney; Anora’s young star Mikey Madison received the Best Actress trophy, in a fairly shocking upset over the widely tipped-to-win Demi Moore.

Anora is an unconventional Oscar juggernaut. As Baker reminded audiences from the stage, it’s a true indie picture, made for $6 million and with no huge names in the cast. But after  a triumphant debut at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it won the coveted Palme D’Or, Anora continued marching toward industry-wide recognition. The movie’s success is the culmination of a career that’s seen Baker making the most of shoestring budgets and filming whole movies on an iPhone. But Anora—which bested blockbuster heavyweights like Wicked and traditional awards fare like A Complete Unknown—was an especially incongruous winner this year, as it received its flowers during a notably old-school Academy Awards ceremony. This year’s show reminded me of the extravagant, zingy celebrations of cinema from my youth, with a highly competent host leading the viewer through nearly four hours of speeches, montages, and musical numbers.

[Read: The filmmaker who wants to wake us from the American dream]

Some might see the event’s duration as a problem. Indeed, concerns over the Oscars’ length have led to some strange truncations of the show in recent years. (Remember in 2022 when the producers cut some awards categories from the live broadcast, presenting them before it began?) This year reused the 2024 ceremony’s fairly ingenious solution to the runtime problem: Just start the whole shebang earlier. The live broadcast started at 4 p.m. in Los Angeles, which meant even the comparably roomy proceedings wrapped up during primetime on the east coast. And though some familiar causes of bloat, such as performances of each of the Best Song nominees, were absent, nature abhors a vacuum and this year’s showrunners found plenty of other superfluous moments to include.

To be clear: I think the excess is great. The Oscars should be long, indulgent, and for the fans; the ceremony happens once a year, and it should be staged at the same absurd scale as something like the Super Bowl. Any attempt to impose rigor and order on them tends to backfire in some unexpected way anyway. This year, the show’s 97th edition, there was very little tweaking to the proven formula. Conan O’Brien served as emcee, about as seasoned a choice imaginable for a first-time host, and he did exactly what an Oscar host is supposed to do: tell pithy jokes about the nominees, do a couple of silly, scripted bits, and otherwise keep things moving with a smile on his face. O’Brien has been a pro at that sort of thing since I was in elementary school.

The choice of O’Brien as host also set the expectation that this was probably not going to be a politically charged Oscars. The comedian’s brand is more focused on irreverence than commentary; he offered one glancing gag noting that Anora is about “standing up to a powerful Russian,” but little else in that vein.. He took a couple of cheerful swipes at the Best Actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón over her past inflammatory tweets, but otherwise steered clear of Oscar politicking, too; this was not a night where it felt like an attendee might take the stage to slap a presenter. Instead, the tone was self-serious, yet still fun, as exemplified by musical numbers celebrating the leading ladies of Wicked, the recently deceased producer Quincy Jones, and the James Bond franchise.

[Read: Conan O’Brien understood the assignment]

These segments were conceptually loose—why was The Substance star Margaret Qualley suddenly onstage jerking her limbs to Paul McCartney’s Bond theme song “Live or Let Die”? I couldn’t really tell you, but the moment felt like the kind of forgettable, florid nonsense that graces even the most polished of Oscar ceremonies. Every year, the show’s producers try to think of new ways to celebrate movies, but the hoariest methods are usually best. There were some playful twists this year, however, such as performers addressing craft-award nominees directly to spotlight their work, or the stage opening up to reveal the orchestra playing the nominated scores.

But largely, Oscar night was pleasantly familiar, a respite after years of relatively chaotic ceremonies. This year’s event did have a little more pep to it than last year, when Oppenheimer swept the big awards, however. Several films picked up trophies: Behind Anora in number of wins was The Brutalist, which ended up taking three categories (Best Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Score). Dune: Part Two and Wicked each earned two technical trophies, while Emilia Pérez, the nomination leader, won for Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Song. Emilia Pérez’s turnout in particular was a fall from seeming dominance, perhaps precipitated by Gascón’s controversy.

Or perhaps not. Anora reigned supreme at many of the guild awards that presage the Oscars, which tend to be the best predictors of these things. Despite the film’s offbeat subject matter—about a sex worker who impulsively marries a Russian oligarch’s son—and its screenplay filled with hectoring insults and curse words, Anora is a screwball romantic comedy at its heart. Its story clearly spoke to the widest swathe of voters, even if many pundits predicted that the tonier, more highfaluting adult drama Conclave would emerge as a consensus winner. (That film, about a Papal conclave gathering to select a new Pope, had to make do with a sole win for Adapted Screenplay.)

Baker, a chipper presence each time that he took the stage, passionately read from a piece of paper for his Best Director win. He argued for the primacy of the theatrical experience, a message that he’s been pushing throughout this awards season. Intentionally or not, the show around him was doing the same, harkening back to an older Oscars vibe—before streaming cinema and shortened cinematic “windows” were a problem anyone in the audience had to deal with. Anora is currently one of the lowest-grossing Best Picture winners ever, but its $15 million domestic gross is a relative success for such a small-scale work in this day and age. Baker’s hope, which is one I share, is that his Oscar success will spur studios to re-evaluate the importance of both the moviegoing experience and art that reaches beyond big-budget homogeny. The Oscars, amidst all their silliness, remain one of the best ways  to get people watching interesting films of all sizes.

A documentary makes a statement in support of Palestinian rights, while other artists break barriers in film diversity.

As soon as Conan O’Brien strode onto the Oscars stage Sunday night, he looked like he belonged there. He was self-deprecating, telling the crowd to sit down before he continued, even though no one was standing. He found Demi Moore in the audience and greeted her with a grin; he had just played a pre-recorded clip of himself emerging out of her back as a nod to her work in the Best Picture-nominated body horror film The Substance. He took several steps across the set and quipped, “I’m walking to show I have control of the stage.”

He really did have control. O’Brien has never hosted the Academy Awards before, but the comedian seemed like a veteran of the gig as he kicked off the show. That’s in part because he spent three decades working in late-night television—writing bits, interviewing celebrities, and commanding all kinds of audiences as a host. As the writer Vikram Murthi observed last year, O’Brien “is one of our last classic entertainers.”

But O’Brien’s success at the Oscars is also a result of his ability to balance the silly with the serious; every now and then, he even embodied both at the same time. His tonal agility as a performer made him well-suited to a ceremony that came on the heels of two major events—the presidential election and the wildfires in Los Angeles that destroyed entire neighborhoods—while Hollywood itself has been enduring a tricky time: Studio productions have largely vacated Los Angeles after the pandemic and the dual strikes, streaming platforms continue to disrupt the traditional theater business, and a series of scandals have plagued several of the nominees seated inside the Dolby Theater. O’Brien has been going through a rough few months, too; his parents died within days of one another in December, and he evacuated his home amid the fires. His job, on top of charming both the A-listers in the room and those watching at home, requires knowing when and how to make his audience not only laugh, but also listen.

He proved adept at the task from the jump. In some moments during his monologue, he played the role of the conventional Oscars emcee: He encouraged the crowd to applaud Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, the stars of Wicked, for their performances at the  beginning of the show. He poked light fun at the Best Picture nominees, and teased some of the assembled actors by showing their pre-fame headshots. (The image shown for Timothée Chalamet, for instance, was that of a sonogram.)

Yet he also played the unruly jester: He championed Babygirl, a 2024 film that was snubbed by the Academy, and skewered Amazon’s recent purchase of the James Bond franchise. He also deployed several harsh punchlines about the actor Karla Sofía Gascón, whose resurfaced tweets—a series of bigoted missives, including one about the Oscars themselves—essentially sank her Best Actress campaign. After the crowd gasped at his reference to Gascón, O’Brien seemed delighted, pointing at the audience, rubbing his hands together, and even jogging in place. “I’m having fun,” he said, smiling impishly.

O’Brien’s giddiness was key to his opening act. It softened the strangeness of some of his gags, whether it was verbally sparring with his longtime friend Adam Sandler, requesting the Conclave star John Lithgow’s help to shame speech-givers into wrapping up, or performing an ironic song-and-dance number about not wasting time onstage the way that previous hosts and presenters have. These moments aren’t new to awards shows; Sandler has become a pinch hitter for live TV lately, and practically every Oscars host calls out how long the ceremony runs. But O’Brien made plain how much he sought to entertain, to hold everyone’s attention at any cost.

Perhaps that’s why he successfully delivered the segment that others in his position would have tried to quickly gloss over: a serious, direct-to-camera appeal about the importance of filmmaking, especially during less-than-ideal times. “In moments such as this, any awards show can seem self-indulgent and superfluous,” he began, “but what I want to do is have us all remember why we gather here tonight. … Even in the face of terrible wildfires and divisive politics, the work, which is what this is about, the work continues, and next year, and for years to come, through trauma and joy, this seemingly absurd ritual is going to be here.”

He paused. “I will not,” he said as the crowd began to laugh. “I am leaving Hollywood to run a bed and breakfast in Orlando, and I’d like to see you there.” It was classic Conan: goofy and ridiculous, but earnest in his excitement, too. He’d said in an interview last week that all he wanted out of the hosting gig was “to have fun onstage.” He clearly did. So did those off of it.

My father-in-law, Bill, and I watch sports differently. Picture Clint Eastwood sitting in front of the TV with Jesse Eisenberg. When a college football game is on, Bill becomes serious, and my surface-level commentary—things like “Not looking good,” when Arizona State is trailing—is usually met with silence.

I wasn’t raised a college-football fan; casually saying terms like “Big Ten” or “Ole Miss” still seems unnatural to me. But as I’ve tried to get closer to Bill over the years by trying to understand the sport, I’ve learned important lessons about my own relationship to fandom.

For me, the most essential broadcast on live television has always been the Oscars. As a kid, the ritualized, fanfare-laden process for announcing the year’s best movie evoked a grown-up world I was excited to inhabit one day. But over time, Oscar angst has overshadowed my pure enjoyment of my “sport.” Like many movie fans, I experienced a blow to my sense of reality when I grew up and realized that terrible movies often win at the Oscars. The more I learned about the flawed nominating process, and the misconduct and exclusion tacitly sanctioned by the Academy and the wider movie industry—as crystallized by the #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo hashtags—the more I struggled to maintain the idea that the ceremony “mattered.” And I don’t seem to be alone. The ratings trend for the Academy Awards has shown a decline for much of my adult life.

Bill’s preferred form of entertainment always intrigued me, seeming to offer a less tense viewing relationship than I had with the Oscars. Though as I learned more about the game, unlikely parallels between our favorite sports seemed to pop out. For instance: As the TV industry has changed in the streaming era, both live sports and awards shows (despite having fallen from previous heights) remain some of the highest-rated programming—and throughout their history, both have relied heavily on TV to help build and maintain their cultural relevance. The original 1929 Academy Awards “ceremony” was a dinner during which statues were dispersed quickly to a preannounced list of winners. In 1941, sealed envelopes and the element of surprise were added. Not until 1953, when the event was first televised, did it become, as host Bob Hope put it at the time, “Hollywood’s most exciting giveaway show.” Over the rest of the 20th century, the Oscars were a standout night of TV programming, even in a monocultural era when seemingly everything on the tube was, by today’s standards, appointment viewing.

College football games were occasionally televised in the 1930s and ’40s, but the sport started airing widely on TV in the early ’50s, around the same time as the Oscars. As Daniel Durbin, the director of the Institute of Sports, Media and Society at USC Annenberg told me, TV helped expand college-football fandom beyond students, alumni, and local fans. “As national television became the dominant financial medium and support for sport, the NCAA and college leadership sought to make the game and its championships more profitable by expanding its TV footprint,” he said.

[Read: College football’s power brokers are destroying it]

Like the Oscars, the sport has also evolved to become more TV friendly. For most of its history, the national champion was decided by a poll, rather than on the field—and without a championship game, there was no yearly climax (or, for that matter, an opportunity to make money through TV commercials). A championship game finally materialized in 1998, but college football relied on a byzantine system where a computer algorithm would essentially determine which two teams competed for the title. Eventually, this system was supplanted by the College Football Playoff, in which a committee-selected pool of teams—ostensibly the country’s best—compete until one becomes the champion. Crucially, the refinement of the championship process has also created the addition of high-profile games that “matter,” making college football more important for a longer period of time—and keeping it on television.

I came to understand some of the vagaries of the selection committee from talking with Bill, who, like many college-football fans, has a lot to say about them. The 2024 committee, Bill told me, “didn’t look at strength of schedule,” which takes the win-loss records of a team’s opponents into account. That means that big teams can look like they’re coasting to the championship by devouring hopeless little fish without proving their mettle against any great whites. To make matters uglier, coaches and heads of conferences openly lobby for their teams’ inclusion.

The idea that the playoffs are subject to bias and influence felt relatable to this Oscars fan. As the Academy Awards ceremony became more popular over the years, it became less casual—and less pure. Any devoted Oscar fan who once believed in fairness would’ve stopped after the 1999 awards, when Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture. Behind the scenes, Shakespeare producer Harvey Weinstein had waged a lobbying campaign to push his movie ahead—and it worked. At the time, the film critic Jack Mathews wrote that Weinstein’s awards campaigns created “the appearance of influence-buying” and were “tainting the Oscar process, making Miramax a Cold War villain, and demeaning the films themselves.” Any Oscars fan can point to some year where the result seemed obviously rigged and even now, after the Academy has refreshed its voting body, it still always feels like the wrong movie can somehow win.

At breakfast a while back, Bill was thumbing through the sports page of The Wall Street Journal, and I noticed he was looking at a story about the latest minor scandal: the near-collapse of the Pac-12 conference, a consequence of teams now jockeying to join conferences that can offer them more TV revenue. I told Bill how the erosion of college football felt like the controversy-plagued, constantly shifting environment around the Academy Awards. He just let my words hang in the air, and then looked back down at his paper, but it felt like, on some level, we had seen each other in a new way.

[Read: Here’s who will win at the 2025 Oscars]

As time has gone on, I’ve shed the expectation that Bill will nod along at such comparisons between the two. Instead, he waits patiently for me to finish my latest speech, and once I take a breath, proffers some complaint of his own—usually about something like a blatant case of targeting against Arizona State that didn’t get called. In his way, he’s commiserating—telling me to stay focused on what’s happening on the field, not the politics. Bill is no Pollyanna about college football, but he seems to accept the broader structure of the sport even as he recognizes its flaws. Where I feel paranoia and cynicism, Bill just shakes his head and moves on.

Bill’s attitude has rubbed off on me. This year, the movie with the most nominations is Emilia Pérez, in my view a so-so film whose star has said some pretty odious things online. The conversation around Emilia Pérez has come to focus on the awards-campaign sideshow, and not at all on the movie’s theoretical merits. In past years, this all might have unsettled me, but I’m Bill-pilled now. If Emilia Pérez still wins Best Picture over a competitor with stronger fundamentals like Anora, it’ll be annoying, sure. But if Bill can suspend his disbelief and keep moving, with an eye toward the future, why can’t I?

In truth, the Oscars matter every bit as much as college football, which is to say, as much as we collectively want them to matter. On some level, football—a coliseum-style violent spectacle that damages the brains of many young participants—should be passé. Instead, its viewership is only growing. Similarly, the Oscars are a combination Borscht Belt variety show and fashion gala for the wealthy. Yet cinema itself is a struggling art form that many of us want to persist, and here in the United States, the Oscars are deeply embedded in the movies as we understand them. They’re not just a certificate of merit for the year’s most notable films; maybe movie fans should also think of an Oscar statue as something more like a championship trophy, a thing Bill intuitively understands to be won in an arena of competition via an entertaining but questionably fair process.

Perhaps I could’ve saved myself a lot of angst by embracing this mental sleight of hand earlier in life, but I’m glad to move forward with a clearer perspective. So yes, I will be watching on Sunday to see who wins. Bill, however, won’t be joining me. “I don’t like to waste time watching crap,” he told me.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

In today’s reading list, spend time with our writers’ takes on some of the buzziest movies of the past year.

How to Lose an Oscar in 10 Days

The star of the year’s most nominated film torpedoed her chance to win the trophy—in audacious fashion.

By Shirley Li

Is Anyone Shocked by Babygirl?

Don’t turn to Nicole Kidman for a frank accounting of what sexual domination looks like.

By Caitlin Flanagan

The Oscars Have Left the Mainstream Moviegoer Behind

The Academy found its nominees on the international film-festival circuit, not at the movie theater.

By David Sims

The Movie That Mattered Most in 2024

Blink Twice anticipated the culture shift that defined the year.

By Sophie Gilbert

The Failed Promise of the New Captain America

The first intriguing Marvel sequel in years quickly wastes its potential.

By David Sims

A Horror Movie About an Atheist Who Won’t Shut Up

The hollowness at the center of Heretic

By McKay Coppins

The Film That Rips the Hollywood Comeback Narrative Apart

The Substance is one of several recent movies that scrutinize older female performers’ struggle to stay relevant.

By Shirley Li

The Week Ahead

The 97th Academy Awards, hosted by Conan O’Brien (streaming tonight on Hulu)

Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s new sci-fi-comedy film about a disposable space worker who dies and regenerates to help colonize an ice world (in theaters Friday)

Daredevil: Born Again, a Marvel action series about a blind lawyer who fights crime (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Grad School Is in Trouble

By Ian Bogost

Jennie Bromberg was somehow still exuberant last weekend about her future career in public health. In January, she interviewed for a competitive Ph.D. program in epidemiology at the University of Washington, one of several to which she has applied. “I loved them. It was amazing,” she told me by phone while on a walk with her Australian shepherd. But the email that arrived from UW shortly after she got home was not the acceptance letter that she’d hoped for. Nor was it even a rejection. Instead, it said that she’d been placed in grad-school purgatory.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Here’s who will win at the 2025 Oscars—and who should win. There was never a movie star like Gene Hackman. America now has a minister of culture. Six older books that deserve to be popular today Goodbye to baseball’s most anachronistic rule.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Did Russia invade Ukraine? Is Putin a dictator? We asked every Republican member of Congress. Why MAGA likes Andrew Tate The Putinization of America

Photo Album

A diver explores an underwater cave in the Yucatán Peninsula. (Alvaro Herrero [Mekan] / UPY2025)

Take a look at the winning entries in this year’s Underwater Photographer of the Year contest.

Emilia Perez, Wicked, The Brutalist and The Substance are some of the top films up for trophies at the Academy Awards.

When the 97th Academy Awards come to a close on Sunday evening, only a fraction of the evening’s attendees will go home with a coveted golden statuette. But for the award show’s more high profile nominees, the homes they’re returning to remain luxurious – regardless of whether or not they have a shiny, new trophy to…

Read more...