Mocking the Oscars – or any made-for-TV awards spectacle with the fool’s errand of crowning the “best” in the arts – is a time-honored tradition. Sometimes it’s even important, as with last year’s backlash against the whiteness of that Academy Awards slate of Best Picture and acting nominees. (That paleness was a bit of an anomaly in recent times, as I’ll show in a bit.)

So let’s give the Academy its due: Expanding the Best Picture field – starting with 2009 movies – from five nominees to as many as 10 was a smart and ultimately necessary change with substantial benefits, no matter how you parse it.

In its blatant attempt to revive a scare-flick “franchise” that couldn’t even produce a second sequel, director F. Javier Gutiérrez’s Rings probably won’t make 2002’s The Ring and its 2005 follow-up relevant again, but the results are better than I expected – by which I mean the first 10 minutes are actually pretty good.

Nominees for the 89th Annual Academy Awards were announced this morning.

Well, that’s not exactly true.

It turns out they weren’t announced so much as revealed, because for the first time since the yearly nominations became an early-morning PR event several decades ago, contenders weren’t recognized in front of a gathered crowd of journalists and publicists. Instead, the news was delivered in a slick, 20-minute online presentation that also featured reminiscences from former Oscar nominees and winners such as Brie Larson, Glenn Close, and Terrence Howard, with Gabourey Sidibe wisely suggesting that when this morning's nominees eventually attend the ceremony, they should be sure to sneak in a flask. (That’s good advice for those watching from home, too.)

By now, we should be used to cinematic miracles from Martin Scorsese. But Silence, his 160-minute, decades-in-the-planning exploration of faith, is still something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before: a deeply redundant movie that isn’t at all boring. This sentiment was obviously not shared by the quartet of middle-aged patrons who exited the auditorium ahead of me complaining about the film’s length and dullness and their growling stomachs and the previews being “totally deceptive.” (Personally, I thought the trailers captured the haunting, enigmatic mood about as ideally as a three-minute spot, or a 30-second one on TV, ever could. Were these folks expecting Hacksaw Ridge 2: 17th-Century Gore?) Yet if you have the patience for it – and considering the many scenes of physical and emotional torture, the stomach for it – you may find the experience of Scorsese’s latest riveting. I may have been aware of the thematic and narrative repetition, but I never once yawned.