STILL ALICE

In Still Alice, newly minted Oscar winner Julianne Moore plays Alice Howland, a 50-year-old recently diagnosed with a hereditary form of Alzheimer's. At one point in the movie, after a series of not-bad days and pretty-awful ones, Alice and her family attend an off-Broadway production of The Three Sisters starring the youngest Howland daughter, Lydia (Kristen Stewart). We see Lydia enact Chekhov's dialogue with appropriate, impressive anxiety and fortitude, and our view of Alice in the audience suggests that she sees it, too. After the play ends, the family goes backstage to congratulate Lydia, and Alice, with carefully chosen words, praises her daughter for her complex rendering of Chekhovian heart and humanity. Lydia smiles and blushes; this might be the most interest her mother has ever shown in her acting career. Then Alice asks what play Lydia is doing next, and whether she'll be sticking around New York much longer. And in the reaction shot that follows, the heartbreak in Lydia's eyes verifies what we immediately suspect: Alice, at this moment, has no idea who Lydia is.

BLUE JASMINE

Woody Allen's new drama Blue Jasmine is modeled, both loosely and very specifically, on Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, and if you're familiar with that stage classic - or, really, with Williams' oeuvre in general - you can correctly presume that the movie will not end on a note of cheer. Yet for the life of me, I couldn't convince my face of that, because Cate Blanchett's almost impossibly fine performance in the writer/director's latest left me smiling so contentedly you would've thought the screening came with an open bar and complimentary full-body massage. Catching up with me on the way out of the auditorium, a friend, regarding Blanchett's portrayal, said, "I think I'm gonna be high for a week." I'm pretty sure I vocalized my agreement but was feeling too high to be certain.

TO ROME WITH LOVE

After Woody Allen's rather staggering success with Midnight in Paris - personal-best box-office, the man's first Academy Award in 25 years - I guess it was inevitable that critics, as a whole, would greet the filmmaker's follow-up project with a collective "meh." And that's certainly happened with Woody's new To Rome with Love. (Not that it matters, but the comedy is currently sitting with a "45-percent fresh" rating - i.e., "not fresh at all" - at the review aggregator RottenTomatoes.com.)

Before getting into what went wrong at last night's Academy Awards ceremony - and sadly, quite a bit went wrong - let's begin by addressing the one portion of the telecast that, for maybe the first time in Oscar history, went magically right.