Ready to win your Oscar pool?

No finer actor? You won’t get any argument here. When news broke of Gene Hackman’s death, an editor asked me to name my favorite performance from the legend. I couldn’t answer. How do you choose? I settled on “The Royal Tenenbaums.” He was so good at making you love rogues and rascals.

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope’s Friday newsletter. You ready for the Oscars on Sunday? For a change, we’ve got some prizes up for grabs this year.

Final Oscar predictions in all 23 categories

Gravity has been defied and social media accounts deleted. Comeback stories have been heralded and our AI robot overlords have been held at bay — for now.

An intermission? Yes, please! A final curtain? Even better!

The 97th Academy Awards arrive Sunday after an awards season full of wild momentum swings, online trolling and internecine whisper campaigns that almost made me long for the day when Harvey Weinstein would personally take me to a movie theater just so I’d know how much people loved “Chocolat.”

Almost.

But here we are at the finish line and “Anora,” my favorite movie of 2024, the one I’ve been championing for the past several months, is about to win the Oscar for best picture. And … I don’t fully believe that it’ll actually happen. I distrust the Oscars so much that I picked “1917” the year my beloved “Parasite” won best picture, even though it was clear by the ceremony that Bong Joon Ho’s taut, discomfiting thriller had momentum — and history — on its side.

Then again, picking “1917” seemed like the safe bet, as it had won the top prizes from the Producers and Directors Guilds … just like “Anora” has done this year. Uh-oh. Will trusting those precursors blow up in my face again? No, dear friends, it will not. Because this time, I’m trusting the precursors and my feelings. “Anora” will win best picture.

How many other Oscars will it take? And might Sean Baker, “Anora’s” auteur, win Oscars for producing, directing, writing and editing the film, tying Walt Disney’s record one-year haul in the process? Break out your Oscar pool sheets as I run down and predict all 23 categories.

‘They were due’ — an Oscar narrative that deserves to die?

Does the best performance ever win the Oscar? Sometimes. Let’s not be too cynical. But even the most detached fan knows that getting to the podium requires a narrative, a story behind the story. So-and-so Worked So Hard. It was a Total Transformation. This was a Life that Needed to Be Told.

And then, one of the oldest narratives: They Were Due. After so many nominations and brilliant performances, how could they not have won yet? But does that logic hold water? I sat down with Times film editor Josh Rothkopf to discuss the substance of “dueness.” Does it work? Is it fair? And how is it playing out this year?

“At root, I think there’s something unfair about an actor winning for being due,” Josh writes. “It turns the achievement into more of a career nod and there are honorary awards for that. It steals focus from the confident work of preternaturally talented younger nominees who suddenly have to ‘wait their turn.’ (As if there’s any justice in that? Ask Glenn Close.) And it implies that an Oscar is something that an actor of a certain status inevitably should have, which I think is simply wrong.”

On principle, I agree. But because these are the Oscars — and, partly, because I’m a contrarian — I pushed back a bit.

Do we really want to live in a world where Al Pacino doesn’t have an Oscar? Say the academy gave that “Scent of a Woman” honor — largely chalked up to Pacino being “due” after never winning for so many years — to another actor. Would you be OK with an untelevised career achievement for him? A pat on the back because two wrongs don’t make a right? I wish Pacino had won for “The Godfather Part II.” But I was also moved when he finally won. I’m definitely going to smile if Demi Moore wins Sunday.

Thanks, as always, for reading. This will be the last time I’ll be in your inbox for a while, as the awards season has come to an end. But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day. Take care.