When Saturday Night Live announced that Timothée Chalamet would be both the host and musical guest on this week’s episode, the reaction was largely: huh?

What would Chalamet, a skilled actor not usually known as a musical artist, perform? Would he revive his high-school rap alias Lil Timmy Tim? Reprise his role as Willy Wonka? Or would he just sing Bob Dylan songs, considering he has been on a long promotional tour for his turn as the folk artist in the biopic A Complete Unknown? Would he come out strumming hits such as “Blowin’ in the Wind”?

He did sing Dylan songs last night—but notably, he did not feature the most popular stuff. Chalamet’s musical numbers were inspired interpretations of Dylan deep cuts, including “Three Angels” and “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.” His performances were weird, smart, and entertaining, and a way to show people that his dedication to Dylan has been serious.

Chalamet’s hosting stint was clearly strategic. Oscar nominations came out on Thursday, and his name was called as expected, making him, at 29, the youngest two-time nominee for the Best Actor category since James Dean. Chalamet highlighted the achievement in his monologue, explaining that he was in his SNL dressing room when he heard the news. “The entire creative team worked extremely hard bringing to life the brilliant artist Bob Dylan, a man whose music and career has become a guiding light to me,” he said, earnestly. No jokes could be found in that statement, which sounded like the kind of thing you’d say on the stage of the Dolby Theatre, holding a trophy.

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But as Chalamet would quickly remind viewers: Although his work has been praised quite a bit for someone who has yet to hit 30, he also hasn’t won all that many awards. “I just keep losing,” he said. “And each time, it gets harder to pretend it doesn’t sting.” That prompted a montage of Chalamet at various awards shows hearing the likes of Gary Oldman and Mahershala Ali get their name called instead of him, his angular face barely masking disappointment by the end. He told the SNL audience that he would use this hosting opportunity to give the acceptance speech he’d been carrying around and handed an envelope to a person seated in the audience to announce his name. However, that was a set up for another joke: The winner inside the envelope was not Chalamet but the cast member Kenan Thompson. Still the monologue had a sincere tone overall; Chalamet, rather than seeming like a sore loser, cannily presented himself as an underdog.

In the episode’s sketches, Chalamet was an enthusiastic participant (as he has been the past two times he’s hosted), throwing himself into characters including an overly enthusiastic bungee-fitness instructor, a nurse who does CPR by farting on faces, and a dog at a park meeting other pups. Though these were proficient moments of comedy, the two musical sets were where he really showed off.

He didn’t play the famous songs that appear in A Complete Unknown, which tracks Dylan’s emergence in the 1960s folk scene. Instead, Chalamet pulled out what he called his “personal favorites”—and revealed choices that appeal to Dylan fanatics rather than casual listeners.

He first sang a medley of “Outlaw Blues,” off the 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home, and “Three Angels,” from 1970’s New Morning, each rendition receiving its own elaborate, deliberate production that proved this was no half-hearted effort. He wore big, bug-eyed sunglasses during the more upbeat “Outlaw Blues,” rocking and dancing across the stage as lights flashed to the tune. For the latter song he sat down next to the electro-pop artist James Blake, who backed him up with vocals and keys, and slowed down, reciting the song as if it were a poem. During the second musical break, Chalamet, perched on a stool, demonstrated his acoustic-guitar-strumming technique on “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” a Dylan song sometimes associated with its Elvis Presley cover.

When an actor portrays a renowned musician in a movie, it’s not a given that they have actual musical talent. Chalamet’s promotional tour for A Complete Unknown emphasized the fact that he performed all its songs himself; even that, however, could be written off as pure mimicry. Simply imitating Dylan did not seem to be Chalamet’s aim on SNL, however. The actor presented his own interpretations of Dylan’s music, melding the Nobel Prize winner’s artistry with Chalamet’s own streetwear-influenced style and more contemporary musical tastes—as evidenced by the presence of Blake’s signature wail.

[Read: Bob Dylan’s carnival act]

For anyone who was questioning Chalamet’s commitment to playing Dylan—including potential Oscar voters—the night was proof that the actor’s engagement with the musician went beyond the pure confines of the cinematic role. And for those who thought that Chalamet doing double duty on SNL might be a joke, the thoughtful way in which he approached his job as musical guest may have quieted any doubt. Not only did he pay respect to Dylan; he made clear that he can put on a show that’s all his own.

God said, “Let there be light”—everyone knows that. But God did not specify what color light, and this would eventually prove problematic.

In the age of the LED light bulb, consumers have an unfathomable range of lighting options. This has, perversely, made the task of pleasantly illuminating our homes harder, not easier. The culprit is not LED technology per se, but the bafflingly unhelpful way in which LED bulbs are labeled.

Walk into a well-stocked hardware store, and you will find two main types of bulbs to choose from: “soft white” and “daylight.” (Let’s ignore the existence of Wi-Fi-enabled smart bulbs, which are a solution in search of a problem.) Soft white sounds like it will be the whiter of the two, when in fact it is the more golden option. Daylight sounds like it should be warm and natural; it is instead cold and ugly. The confusing nomenclature has led an untold number of people astray, condemning them to harsh lighting that makes everything in a home, including its residents, less attractive.

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For about 99 percent of human history, all artificial light was incandescent, meaning the by-product of heating something to the point that it emits visible radiation. First came fire; then oil lamps, candles, and gaslight; and, finally, Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulb, which operates by heating a filament until it glows. The light produced by an incandescent bulb has a yellow-orange color to it, which we accordingly describe as “warm.” In John Updike’s 1960 novel, Rabbit, Run, Harry Angstrom looks through his neighbors’ windows at dusk and sees, past the pale glow of their black-and-white televisions, “the warm bulbs burning in kitchens, like fires at the backs of caves.”

Incandescent lighting, however, is inefficient: It literally generates more heat than light. This is why budget-conscious institutional settings have long tended to use fluorescent light, which looks awful but uses much less energy. And it is why Congress passed legislation in 2007 mandating the phaseout of incandescent bulbs in favor of LEDs, which use even less. (Donald Trump rolled back that mandate, and then Joe Biden unrolled it; in his second term, Trump is all but assured to un-unroll it.) An LED light works under a wholly different principle from an incandescent one. Instead of heating a filament to the point where light is produced as a by-product, LEDs send electricity through a semiconductor in a way that causes energy to be released as visible photons.

“The first generation of LED lights were just heinous,” Bevil Conway, an artist and a neuroscientist who specializes in color perception, told me. The bulbs emitted a harsh blue-white light by default, creating a terrible first impression for the technology. But the industry has figured out how to “tune” LEDs to generate essentially any color or shade, including something very close to the warm yellow-white of a classic bulb. LEDs still have their share of issues—as I write this, the light in my apartment’s entryway is flickering erratically, as if haunted—but they can glow as warmly as the incandescents of old, while lasting much longer and using much less energy.

If, that is, you can figure out which one to buy.

LED light bulbs are not generally labeled as “warm” or “cool”; that would be too easy. That information is typically buried in the fine print on the side or back of the box. Instead, they have those perplexing labels—remember, “daylight” is cool (despite sounding sunny); “soft white” is warm (despite sounding pale)—and a color temperature, which is measured on the Kelvin scale. You might intuitively think that a higher Kelvin number corresponds to warmer light, but listening to your intuition would be a mistake. In fact, higher-energy light appears cooler. The “soft white” label generally corresponds to 2,700 degrees Kelvin light, while “daylight” is usually applied to 5,000 degrees Kelvin.

What we have here is a classic case of marketing that makes sense to the people selling the product, but not to the people buying it. Indirect natural daylight is, technically, pretty blue. (Perhaps you are familiar with the sky.) When the light-bulb industry labels its 5,000-Kelvin bulbs “daylight,” it’s trying to helpfully indicate that you’re getting a blue light—never mind the fact that a dinky white light bulb does not actually approximate the feeling of sunlight. As for soft white, that “goes back to the incandescent era, where the light emitted from your standard household [bulb] was marketed as ‘soft white light,’” Tasha Campbell, a senior product marketing manager at Signify, which sells Philips-brand light bulbs, told me.

Cold white might have its uses—interrogations, morgues—but the home is not one of them. If you live in an urban area, you can see what I mean by walking around after dark and looking at the windows of an apartment building. If your neighborhood is like mine, most will emit a cozy, warm glow, like fires at the backs of caves. But a troubling share—perhaps one in 10, or one in five—will instead emit a grim, sickly pallor. Those are the daylight apartments.

Bizarrely, some of these apartments are inhabited by people who were not tricked into purchasing terrible lighting, but actively chose it. These are the victims of an extensive body of online propaganda. One popular theory holds that daylight bulbs have a special capacity to help you focus on what you’re doing. “Daylight bulbs are perfect for areas where specific work or detail-oriented tasks are performed,” advises The Spruce, in an example typical of the genre. “These rooms include kitchens, offices, and basements. Bathrooms may also be a good place for daylight bulbs, providing ample light for getting ready.”

The implication is that, until LEDs were invented, everyone was fumbling around in dangerously warm light, unable to chop an onion without losing a finger or read a book without going blind from eye strain. This is preposterous. High-quality cool light can have some advantages for rendering color and detail, which is why it might make sense for, say, an art museum. But if Marcel Proust could write In Search of Lost Time by incandescent lamp, you don’t need 5,000 Kelvins to write an email.

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A related theory, popular within the lighting industry, holds that daylight bulbs are “energizing.” A video on the Philips website, for example, says, “Use ‘daylight’ to create a bright, energizing setting for improved concentration.” There’s a kernel of plausibility here. Manuel Spitschan, a professor at the Technical University of Munich who has studied the effects that different-color temperatures have on humans, told me that light suppresses the pineal gland’s production of melatonin, the hormone that tells our brains it’s time to get sleepy, and that blue light suppresses it more than yellow light. The daylight-bulb theory is that cool artificial light will mimic the sun’s “melanomic daylight illuminance” more than warm light will, thus keeping us more alert.

The hitch in this theory is that the pineal gland produces melatonin only when it’s dark out. This means that to the extent that cooler bulbs suppress melatonin, they do so mainly in the time when our bodies are trying to help us get ready for bed, not during business hours. Moreover, Spitschan said that the intensity of light “has a much stronger effect than the color temperature.” When it comes to alertness, very bright beats very white.

Because the world is a big and varied place, I’m willing to believe that some people genuinely prefer a cooler bulb, just as some people presumably prefer Bob Dylan’s most recent albums to his 1960s masterpieces. Good for them, I guess. For everyone else, let there be light—but, for God’s sake, let it be warm.

In the years since it began a committed effort to diversify and expand its membership, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has weathered strikes, the pandemic shutdown of theaters, and constant hand-wringing about declining TV ratings and potential cultural irrelevance. But one trend has remained consistent for the Academy Awards, the voting body’s annual big event: The Academy has been getting more and more international. This year’s nominations, announced today (six days later than planned, after a delay in recognition of the horrific Los Angeles fires), confirmed the extent to which Oscar voters’ tastes have shifted. The French-produced, Spanish-language musical Emilia Pérez received the most nominations of the day, accompanied by several other movies that premiered—and were big hits—at European film festivals.

The Academy nominated 10 films for Best Picture, leaving room for some of the biggest blockbusters of last year. The musical Wicked (10 nominations) and the sci-fi sequel Dune: Part Two (five nominations) were two of 2024’s highest-grossing films, racking up hundreds of millions more in box-office grosses than most of the other Oscar contenders. But if you want to gauge the true awards favorites, looking at the Best Director category, where only five hopefuls get picked, is usually more useful. Each of this year’s directors is a first-time nominee in the category, and four worked on features that mainstream moviegoers might consider unorthodox: Alongside the filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, there’s the indie darling Sean Baker’s Anora, a raunchy dramedy about a sex worker; the actor turned filmmaker Brady Corbet’s 215-minute historical drama, The Brutalist; and the relative newcomer Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, one of the few horror films in the Academy Awards’ history to resonate with voters. The writer-director James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown—a musical biopic that’s seen as conventionally attractive Oscar fare—stands out as the anomaly of the group. That Mangold’s film was also the only one to skip the international-festival circuit further suggests a turning tide for the Academy’s preferences.

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But Emilia Peréz, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last year, is a unique case among those five front-runners—it’s a Netflix-branded movie. The streamer has spent years striving for the Best Picture title, only to narrowly miss out again and again. Netflix made what seemed to be likely bets over the past half decade with Roma, The Irishman, Mank, The Power of the Dog, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Maestro, and over and over again, Netflix’s most prestigious work has gotten a ton of nominations but walked away without the biggest trophy. (In the cases of Roma and The Power of the Dog, the company at least left with the consolation of Best Director.) That track record is partly because of Netflix’s tendency toward backing fairly artsy, auteur-driven movies; the hope apparently has been that a director such as Martin Scorsese and David Fincher would be enough to draw viewers and votes. But the paltry Oscar showing thus far is likely also because, as a streaming-first studio that remains fairly hostile to cinematic releases, Netflix has a more polarizing status in Hollywood than most of its peers.

Could Emilia Pérez be the contender to break that streak? If so, it’ll be a slightly confounding win that could spark another thousand think pieces about the Academy’s continued drift from popular opinion. It’s a non-Hollywood film with very little English dialogue, a gonzo musical about a Mexican cartel leader (played by Karla Sofía Gascón) who fakes her death, transitions into a woman, and then tries to build a more authentic life. Emilia Pérez won major accolades at Cannes, but its post-festival reception has been more muted; it has weathered waves of backlash from multiple sides since its November debut on Netflix. The company has pushed all of its resources into the movie anyway, clearly seeing the potential for nabbing the big prize in a diffuse field; it’s already triumphed at the Golden Globes. But Netflix has come close and missed before, so it’s perhaps too early to be bullish on Emilia Pérez’s chances.

Netflix’s biggest challenger appears to be the distributor A24. The independent company acquired The Brutalist after its successful debut at the Venice Film Festival. The movie is a large-scale American epic made for a comparatively small budget, a supersize film (with an intermission) about topics that have resonated with Oscar voters for decades: tortured male geniuses, the long shadow of World War II and the Holocaust, the struggle of art against commerce. It’s an excellent film, as well as the kind of big movie that has won Best Picture many times. A24 mounted a slow Christmas rollout as a way to build buzz with not just critics but audiences too, including putting the movie on IMAX screens. The plan has worked thus far, and the breadth of awards-season attention, including Oscar nominations for all three main cast members—Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, and Guy Pearce—might be enough to take the movie all the way. But simmering backlash to The Brutalist’s knottier second act—and, to a lesser extent, some scuttlebutt regarding the use of AI—could do it in; that the feature peaks about halfway through has become something of a prevailing opinion.

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The other big favorites will probably have to settle for slightly less notable trophies. Anora won the Cannes equivalent of Best Picture and has received a slew of other awards nominations, but after getting passed over at the Golden Globes, it somehow feels like an outside shot in every category (except maybe Original Screenplay for Baker). Wicked was an audience sensation that got warm reviews (if not outright raves), but it seems competitive only for the design trophies. Conclave, a robust grown-up drama about the Vatican choosing a new pope, missed a predicted slot in Best Director, suggesting a broad sense of “liked but didn’t love” among voters. Dune: Part Two will be treated as its predecessor was: a technical achievement, first and foremost.

Two smaller-scale nominees that snuck into Best Picture, I’m Still Here and Nickel Boys, benefited from passionate reviews and well-run campaigns by their respective distributors, Sony Pictures Classics and Amazon MGM Studios. Another competitor, The Substance, sustained its festival buzz with a solid box-office run; pundits’ worries that its lurid material might be too polarizing for staid awards voters have now been swept away, and the lead actor, Demi Moore—who won a Golden Globe for her performance earlier this month—looks like the top candidate for the Best Actress trophy. Meanwhile, two films that debuted and played well at North American film festivals—and which critics assumed were in Best Picture contention—ended up just missing out: A Real Pain, which was still nominated for Best Supporting Actor (the recent Golden Globe winner Kieran Culkin is a favorite) and Original Screenplay, and Sing Sing (which got three other nominations, including Best Actor for its star, Colman Domingo).

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The one movie that defies many of the trends among this year’s Oscar crop—particularly its lean toward a more international, film-festival-friendly lineup of nominees—is A Complete Unknown, as old-fashioned an Oscar picture as they come. It’s an American-produced biopic from a reliable, well-liked filmmaker (James Mangold) featuring a major star (Timothée Chalamet) playing a national icon (Bob Dylan); it’s largely traditional but with a slightly arty twist. Critics and theatergoers alike have praised the movie, and Chalamet in particular has enjoyed a great year: Between a buzzy press tour and his starring turn in fellow Best Picture nom Dune: Part Two, he appears to be well positioned to earn Best Actor. But in the end, Chalamet might be too “normie” for the big trophy. That reading stands in stark contrast to the Oscars of even 10 or so years ago, when the Academy favored movies such as Argo and Spotlight, mature Hollywood dramas that told well-known true stories in effective ways. This year’s ceremony, to be hosted by Conan O’Brien on March 2, will demonstrate just how much that consensus has shifted.

*Lead image credit: Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic. Sources: Sony Pictures Classics; A24; Page 114 / Why Not Productions / Pathé Films / France 2 Cinéma; Bettmann / Getty.

During the years-long height of the British superstar Robbie Williams’s fame, I’d often wonder why he struggled to cross over to true global recognition. Williams, for those who are unfamiliar, started out as a member of the wildly beloved English boy band Take That in the early 1990s. After leaving the group in 1995, right when its success was cresting, Williams transformed himself from potential pop-culture footnote into icon. A slew of blockbuster albums made him a household name across the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia—but not in the United States, where his early-2000s attempts to gain traction made little progress. Perhaps the country had too many of its own idols—or perhaps, as the new musical biopic Better Man argues, Williams was too gleefully self-deprecating to sincerely make the sales pitch.

The director Michael Gracey adheres to the biopic genre’s basic contours. Better Man follows Williams’s hardscrabble youth, his rise to fame, and the ups and downs that came with notoriety, all punctuated by interpretations of some of his most famous tracks. This synopsis suggests that the film is a programmatic, musician-approved project, almost as if it’s designed to be an entry point for a new generation of fans. Except, get this: Williams is represented as a CGI chimpanzee. Like, a walking, talking, human-size chimp, portrayed and voiced by a combination of a motion-capture actor (Jonnie Davies), a musician (Adam Tucker), and Williams himself.

Why is he a primate? Better Man doesn’t ever explain—though in its trailer, Williams mentions feeling “less evolved” than everyone else—and none of the characters ever remarks on it. Instead, the meaning of the conceit is left in the hands of the audience. This decision is a baffling swerve for a celebrity biopic, one that will probably keep it from becoming an out-and-out sensation. But Better Man deserves to be treated as more than a strange curio: Despite the seemingly run-of-the-mill premise and the contrivance of the protagonist, it properly delves into its subject’s erratic persona, using the musical segments to advance the story instead of as mandatory breaks in the action. The result is one of the most thoughtfully constructed movies about a musician I’ve seen in years.

[Read: Bob Dylan broke rules. A Complete Unknown follows them.]

A core part of Williams’s appeal has always been his cheekiness, as the Brits would put it. Yes, he’s a handsome fella who sings catchy hits. But even though his stock-in-trade is sincere love ballads and toe-tapping anthems about having fun, Williams exudes the sense that he’s never taking any of the glitz around him too seriously. His narration throughout Better Man poses a possible reason for his devil-may-care attitude: It’s a cover for what he refers to as the clinical depression that has dogged him over the course of his career, especially at its peak. What better way to underline that than by removing his image from the film entirely?

The appealing presentation of chimp-Williams is helped by the fact that Gracey started his career as a visual-effects artist—he knows his way around computer-generated characters. His prior directorial effort was The Greatest Showman, a more conventional movie musical that tried to package the complex and problematic life of P. T. Barnum as a family-friendly inspirational tale. It made little sense, but it became something of a box-office phenomenon on the backs of Hugh Jackman’s bravado and Gracey’s steady hand behind the camera.

Better Man has not only similarly earwormy tunes but also a far richer subject than Barnum. Williams is a showman too, but he’s a rawer, more relatable one; he’s always worn his personal deficiencies on his sleeve, even on the biggest stage. Gracey’s attentive care with Williams’s discography is especially striking. Williams’s career could easily have been shot as a straightforward jukebox musical, running down the track listing of his greatest-hits CDs while sprinkling in some run-of-the-mill backstory material. Instead, Gracey rearranges the chronology, finding numbers that thematically match the events of his protagonist’s life. Williams performs the power ballad “Feel,” the lead single from his fifth solo album, to illustrate his tough childhood. The director re-creates the singer’s famed 2001 live rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” for Better Man’s grand finale; instead of just plucking another of the singer’s own numbers, he chooses to evoke one of Williams’s biggest inspirations.

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The film’s most jaw-dropping set piece is also perhaps its most timeline-flouting. After covering his difficult adolescence in the downtrodden industrial town of Stoke-on-Trent, Better Man turns to Williams’s early years in the music industry. Gracey captures the explosion of Take That’s crossover appeal—they climbed the ladder from small gay clubs to national arenas—in a scene where the band performs “Rock DJ,” Williams’s solo chart-topper from 2000. It unfolds as an unbroken, CGI-assisted camera move, with Williams and his bandmates—who, in real life, had nothing to do with the song—dancing through the streets of Central London, surrounded by a growing throng of fans. An artificial long take can sometimes come across as gimmicky, but it works tremendously well here, thanks in part to the creative choreography. Movie-musical directors must make certain decisions when mounting their big numbers: Should they throw everything into a wide shot, capturing the scale of the dance routines but making the world around them feel static? Or is it better to cut into the action constantly, highlighting the individual players but losing that sense of magnitude? The one-shot technique helpfully circumvents those questions.

Gracey makes an effort to innovate in several other ways, navigating around the musical genre’s visual conventions and limitations. A later scene, for example, renders the anthemic “Let Me Entertain You” as a dreamlike battle between Williams and his mouthiest chimp-demons. High points like these helped keep Better Man in my good graces even as the second half dips into excessively maudlin territory, as Williams wrestles with the strictures of fame. Still, some viewers might find the audacity of a hero that’s a CGI chimp impossible to overcome—especially those who know little about the real person (including what he actually looks like). Early box-office returns seem to indicate U.S. theatergoers’ disinterest, if not outright bafflement. But Williams has always thrived on the audience’s sympathy as much as their admiration, and Better Man finds a wonderfully goofy way to represent that with its charming, if unevolved, simian star.