In one very big sense, the Oscars generally do matter: they greatly influence the movies that get financed and the pay scale that artists attain. This year happens to be one in which some unusually excellent films and artists have gotten nominations—and in which, for a welcome and long-overdue change, some of those films are centered on the lives of black people and some of those major artists are black. So, in one sense, this year’s Oscars matter exceptionally much. But, in another sense, win or lose, the results are already in.

“Moonlight” has been nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. That’s pretty amazing for a movie that cost a mere five million dollars to make. Its writer and director, Barry Jenkins, a total outsider who made his first feature, “Medicine for Melancholy,” for fifteen thousand dollars, is now a pillar of the industry—already. The world has outrun the Academy in acknowledging Jenkins’s centrality; whether the Academy catches up with the world is hardly relevant.

This isn’t the only recent year in which the year’s best Hollywood or off-Hollywood film (“Moonlight”) received Oscar nominations; Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” got nine (and won only in four minor categories), in 2015, and Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” got five (and won none), in 2014. When Scorsese finally won his belated Oscar for Best Director, for “The Departed,” from 2006, he needed it: en route from his past heroism to his latter-day renaissance, Scorsese, who works on a colossal scale with colossal budgets, needed to pass from the age of the studios to the age of the Medici, and that Oscar did the trick. Jenkins, by contrast, is where Scorsese was with “Taxi Driver,” which got four nominations and no wins—he has marked history and doesn’t need the Oscar to prove it.

In my predictions, I’ll balance punditry with pessimism—I’ve learned to assume that my favorite films won’t win. All along, I’ve been pretty sure that “La La Land” would be a lock for Best Picture; Hollywood loves nothing more than to see itself as a place where young people can fulfill their wildest dreams of stardom, and do so without any artistic compromise. But I think that “Moonlight” will win big, if not for the right reason. The right reason is simple: it’s by far the best picture on the list and the best movie that the industry produced all year. The reason it will win, though, is that the new American political regime is overtly racist, homophobic, and plutocratic, and many Hollywood people, like many people everywhere, are justly disgusted and angry. “Moonlight” is a fine and fierce work of art, but its very subject, a poor, black, gay young man, is, in its every detail, an affront to the Administration’s benighted sensibilities. If the voting had happened before the shock of the new post-Inauguration reality, “La La Land” would win, but the voting period runs from February 13th through today, while the outrages, in word and deed, spew daily from Washington throughout the nation and the world. “Moonlight” is a great movie, not a political screed, but current events transform its symbolic significance.

In 2006, “Crash” won for Best Picture and Ang Lee for Best Director, for “Brokeback Mountain.” For the next six years, the two awards overlapped, as they so often have throughout the history of the Oscars. (The Academy has been implicitly auteurist since before the word was coined.) But, in three of the past four years, the Best Picture and Best Director awards have been split, and I don’t think this is a coincidence. “Spotlight,” the last Best Picture winner, is a political film; “The Revenant,” for which Alejandro G. Iñárritu won Best Director, isn’t. The same was true, two years earlier, of “12 Years a Slave” and Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity,” respectively, and, the year before that, for “Argo” and Lee’s “Life of Pi.” (In 2015, there was Iñárritu’s “Birdman,” which won both Best Picture and Best Director; it wasn’t a political film but, rather, a Hollywood actor’s self-regarding lament and fantasy—akin to “La La Land.”) This year, I think we’re likely to see a similar split again, with Damien Chazelle, the director of “La La Land,” winning Best Director.

Best Actor is a tough call. Casey Affleck gave the best performance, in “Manchester by the Sea,” but Denzel Washington is the best actor, even if in “Fences,” which he directed and starred in, he lets the technique show much too much. As my colleague Michael Schulman has written, the allegations of sexual harassment and related lawsuits that Affleck has faced may stay the hand of some voters; if that’s so, the question is whether Washington will be the beneficiary or whether, in an altogether frothier register, Ryan Gosling, in “La La Land,” will squeeze through. I think it’s the year of substance over style (though, of course, “Moonlight” has both); Washington will win.

For Best Actress, nothing impresses like a tour de force, and the physical exertions that Isabelle Huppert invests in and endures in “Elle” are far showier than Emma Stone’s singing and dancing in “La La Land.” (I’m surprised that Taraji P. Henson didn’t get a Best Actress nomination for her strong, thoughtful performance in “Hidden Figures”; it’s rare for movies about intellectuals to show the synapses firing, and Henson evokes mighty mental energy with mere glances.) Huppert’s Oscar would, moreover, serve as a lifetime-achievement award, and a well-deserved one. In Hollywood, youth will be served, and nothing delights the industry more than anointing its new royals. But sex sells—“Elle” and Huppert will win.

Mahershala Ali is a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actor, and that’s as it should be (though Lucas Hedges’s work in “Manchester by the Sea” is impressive, both verbally and physically, for an actor who’s barely twenty). Alongside Jenkins, Ali is the cinematic man of the year, and his Best Supporting Actor nomination for “Moonlight” hardly scratches the surface of his vital presence. He could have been nominated for any or all of the films in which he appeared this year—whether for his role as a life-hardened gangster in “Kicks,” as a runaway slave in “Free State of Jones,” or, for that matter, as a male-chauvinist colonel in “Hidden Figures.” He’s the most old-school actor in the mix: for all his accomplished artistry, he doesn’t need to show off his exertions onscreen, because his mere presence brings a world of experience to life. I impatiently await his leading roles.

Best Supporting Actress is a weird category this year, not least because one of the nominees, Viola Davis, in “Fences,” ought to have been considered a lead actress. By contrast, Michelle Williams is on screen for only a few minutes in “Manchester by the Sea,” but they’re among the film’s most memorable moments (and, for some viewers, its very summit). Meanwhile, Naomie Harris’s performance in “Moonlight” opens wide emotional expanses in precise touches, and Octavia Spencer, in “Hidden Figures,” delivers the film’s emotional payoff no less than Williams does in “Manchester.” Spencer has won an Oscar, but Davis hasn’t, and I think that this will be her year.