Only pundits know, and even they don't really know much. "The Academy declared 276 films from 2021 as Oscar-eligible, and much of the responsibility for spotlighting films falls on bloggers and columnists." But Film Twitter isn't real-life voting. - Variety
The musical Mrs. Doubtfire closed temporarily because of Omicron and will not reopen until April. "The hiatus left the show’s cast, crew and musicians without work ... but said he thought it was the best way to attempt to preserve their jobs longer term." - The New York Times
In this production, via recordings, "singers from six prison musical groups — a mix of over 100 men and women who are incarcerated as well as about 70 community volunteers — are the ones singing the 'Prisoners' Chorus.'" - NPR
Talk less; play more. When people used their hands to build a model Los Angeles, they made "bioswales, pedestrian zones, unearthing creeks long covered over by asphalt, storage sheds and bathing facilities for homeless people, more light rail, lower curbs, urban farms." - Fast Company
The artist Abdas do Nascimiento dreamed of a museum for Black art in his country, but "after years in exile during a military dictatorship in Brazil, he died in 2011." Now the Black Art Museum has a temporary, but powerful, home. - The New York Times
On the good side, "you no longer have to shell out hundreds of dollars for a VHS set or rely on pirated versions of new episodes with subtitles made by fans who took liberties of their own in the translation." On the other side, wow, so many streamers. - Vulture
A Virginia museum has loaned the statue to Europe but won't loan it to a gallery in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, so that gallery has started to sell NFTs of images of the statue. The museum is not pleased. - The Guardian (UK)
Titane is not easy to parse. "Julia Ducournau is willing to explore the strange, to show us our own bodies, soft and hard, that surprise and fail us, that are the source of pain and pleasure, leak strange fluids, grow old or ugly." - Los Angeles Review of Books
Antoinette Crow-Legacy says the Jeremy O. Harris play "gives me freedom to be messy and complicated and blur the lines between right and wrong." - Los Angeles Times
A wildlife tracking method, specifically: "Mike Kestemont, computational text researcher at the University of Antwerp, and his colleagues used the 'unseen species' model, which uses a statistical approach to estimate how many species are missing from a field count." - LitHub
What's that about? "There’s a great artistic freedom in horror that’s perhaps not available in other genres. Obviously, in a drama, you can’t have a worm growing out of someone’s nostril, or something else so bold or artistic. But horror has really incredible freedom." - The New York Times
It's a bit alarming. "Farid and Nightingale asked participants to look at a selection of them and sort them into real and fake. Participants were correct less than half the time, with an average accuracy of 48.2%." And even with training, the percentage doesn't move much. - Fast Company
Toossi wrote one her plays going up in New York in white-hot anger after the Trump Muslim travel ban. "If all that ever gets produced of my work is just my stories about Middle Eastern people, I don’t think I would ever be upset." - The New York Times
"Maus galvanized a generation of comics creators to fill bookshelves with graphic narratives about the Holocaust and its inheritance and inspired a community of thinkers to engage analytically with these stories." Now they're also worried and angry. - LitHub
