Eight women. Five spots. Who’s in?

Salaries of $500,000 and up are a “dime a dozen”? Makes me think the good folks at Kraft Heinz are being a little stingy with this job posting to drive the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile around the country for a year. But I’m guessing the hot dogs are on the house, so there’s that.

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope’s Friday newsletter. The Caesar salad that came to Christmas? C’mon. Everyone knows you don’t win friends with salad. Let’s look at the week’s news.

Not enough room for all the deserving lead actress nominees

After the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. vote earlier this month, I heard from a few readers who were either upset or amused — sometimes both — that the group cited four women for lead performance and four men in supporting. LAFCA went to gender-neutral categories for acting in 2022, a move that in itself still rankles people. And some were now surmising that we had engineered a vote that would promote women and diminish men, in the process making some kind of statement, though they weren’t clear on exactly what that was.

Critics groups’ choices can, in fact, sometimes be statements. But critics also tend to be a little challenged when it comes to math — that’s why we got into writing and not, say, accounting or chemistry — so the idea that we could manage in real time to keep a running track of point totals in these categories and pull off a calculation like this is silly. Really, it simply confirms what we’ve known for months: The lead actress category is stacked this year. And there’s not enough room for all the women deserving an Oscar nomination.

The women LAFCA lauded — Marianne Jean-Baptiste (“Hard Truths”) and Mikey Madison (“Anora”) won, with Demi Moore (“The Substance”) and Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”) finishing as runners-up — make a good set of starters, but only Madison figures as a sure thing to earn an Oscar nod. So I decided to sift through the category in a recent column to see if I could make sense of how it might shake out. Spoiler alert: I’m not entirely sure I did. I might keep changing my mind on this category right up until the nominations arrive on Jan. 17.

Oscars shortlists arrive with good news for The Times

The motion picture academy announced its Oscar shortlists this week, winnowing contenders in 10 categories including international feature and documentary feature. If Elton John, Brandi Carlisle, Pharrell Williams and Robbie Williams make it to the final round for original song, the performance spots at the 97th Oscars could be fun. (Alas, no Miley Cyrus’ “Beautiful That Way,” which closes the Pamela Anderson drama “The Last Showgirl.”)

Jacques Audiard’s musical soap opera “Emilia Pérez” picked up two original song mentions and led all movies with six acknowledgments. The hit Broadway adaptation “Wicked” was next in line with five.

L.A. Times Studios earned two shortlist mentions in the documentary short category, for “Planetwalker” and “A Swim Lesson.” The studio won the Oscar last year with “The Last Repair Shop.”

“A Swim Lesson,” directed by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, follows instructor Bill Marsh as he helps kids learn to love the water. You can watch it here. “Planetwalker” profiles John Francis, who took a 17-year vow of silence, renounced motorized transportation and began walking across the United States, looking for a deeper appreciation of our relationship with the planet. Check it out here.

A scene from “A Swim Lesson,” Oscar shortlisted for documentary short.

(L.A. Times Studios)

‘Nickel Boys’ arrives in theaters today

I was still sorting through my feelings about “Nickel Boys” when I sat down with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor for coffee at the Telluride Film Festival in September.

“I’ve had people that have seen it tell me it’s tough,” Ellis-Taylor told me. “I think that we have been conditioned as moviegoers, particularly in this country, to have an expectation of how we should feel watching a film. I want to be an advocate for cinema that is not palliative. I think a lot of times, people want to come into a space that is saying: ‘We are unearthing a tragedy, a brutality against American children.’ But somehow they want to leave that space feeling good.”

“Nickel Boys,” which opens in Burbank and Century City today, is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel about the friendship between two Black boys at a cruel Florida reform school in the early 1960s. Director RaMell Ross tells the story subjectively from the point of view of his protagonists, a bold conceit that is, as Ellis-Taylor notes, challenging and, for some, distancing.

“I never questioned whether or not it would work,” Ross told The Times recently. “Allowing [a viewer] to be simultaneous with the experience of someone else is what’s missing from human beings’ capacity to be vicarious.”

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in “Nickel Boys.”

(Orion Pictures)