The Oscar nominations are out. Four movies were nominated for both Best Picture and Best Director, so those are the presumed frontrunners among the BP nominees:

“American Sniper”

“Birdman” – Best Director

“Boyhood” – Best Director

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” – Best Director

“The Imitation Game” – Best Director

“Selma”

“The Theory of Everything”

“Whiplash”

I saw “Birdman” a couple of months ago, but have never thought of anything very interesting to write about it. In brief, Michael Keaton, who played Batman for Tim Burton a quarter of a century ago, plays a washed-up movie star of three “Birdman” superhero blockbusters who is trying to regain credibility by mounting a worthy Broadway drama based on that Raymond Carver short story that everybody studies in creative writing class. We peek in on backstage drama and comedy as Keaton tries to keep his sanity together on the rocky road to opening night.

It’s pretty good but repeatedly fails to be brilliant. It’s worthy of one of the eight Best Picture nods, but it’s kind of disappointing. One problem is that the bravura bar is awfully high for backstage plays and movies, such as “All About Eve,” “Kiss Me, Kate,” “All That Jazz,” “Show Boat,” “Cabaret,” “The Producers,” “Noises Off,” “Moulin Rouge,” “The Real Thing,” and “The Real Inspector Hound.” A movie about putting on a show isn’t like a movie about baseball statistics where you get a degree of difficulty bonus. Putting on a show is what people who make movies do, so you need to standout in some fashion, such as in witty dialogue or song and dance numbers.

The main gimmick in “Birdman” is that super cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (“Gravity,” “Tree of Life,” “Children of Men”) shoots each scene in one long handheld take. (There are claims that the entire movie is in one long take, but the screenplay drags out over a week or so, so what’s the point of that?) Enormous amounts of effort must have been devoted to planning each long take, but at what opportunity cost? What if some of that effort had instead been devoted to the story, characters, dialogue, acting, and look of the movie? D.W. Griffith invented the modern system of cuts a century ago and, you know, it probably doesn’t really need to be dis-invented.

And to the extent that the long takes succeed, which they largely do (this is not at all a bad movie), you end up thinking this material might work better as a play.

“Boyhood” — Another film with a gimmick, this one was shot intermittently over 12 years as a boy grows up in Texas. It’s an autobiographical mash-up of the boyhoods of director Richard Linklater and actor Ethan Hawke (very good as the father) in the kind of Artsy Texan families I was familiar with from having attended Rice U. A very nice little movie, but one better suited to be a sleeper hit that you stumble upon on cable with no expectations rather than being The Frontrunner for Best Picture. It’s kind of like that little silent comedy “The Artist” a few years ago that got immediately swept up in Best Picture hype so nobody had a chance to see it with low expectations.

I wrote about “Boyhood” here and then again here when The Atlantic denounced the movie for White Male Privilege because it’s about a boy much like the boys Linklater and Hawke were instead of Michael Brown.

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” — A crypto-gimmick movie: practically every set appears to be made out of frosting in this tribute to the baked goods of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I enjoyed this movie more than anything this year other than “Guardians of the Galaxy,” but that’s partly because of my low expectations: I can’t stand Wes Anderson movies because they look like they are going to be funny but then they’re not. But this one won even me over, and Anderson did it without listening to criticisms like mine. He doubled down on everything that drove me crazy about his films, making this the Wes Andersoniest Wes Anderson movie.

I wrote about it here.

“The Imitation Game” would be an okay Placeholder Best Picture winner. The theory of the Placeholder winner is that nobody really knows what the future will think of which movie ought to have won, so in the meantime you might as well give it to something respectable, most often a biopic about how some classy Englishman singlehandedly defeated Hitler. This Alan Turing biopic isn’t as entertaining as The King’s Speech, but it’s not bad. I wrote about it here.

By the way, that Timothy Spall didn’t get a Best Actor nomination for playing grumpy early Victorian painter J.M.W. Turner in “Mr. Turner” I can only attribute to Mike Leigh’s failure to do a rewrite adding in how, when you stop and think about it, Turner’s watercolors are what beat the Nazis.

“Whiplash” is a small movie in the Happy Just to Be Nominated group. It’s about a student at Juilliard who will do whatever it takes to be the drummer in the school’s top jazz band, including putting up with the tyrannical, manipulative conductor played by J.K. Simmons, who finally gets an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting actor.

Simmons came to attention as editor J. Jonah Jameson in “Spider-Man” back in 2002 and has worked nonstop since then as the Witty White Male Authority Figure. (I don’t know why “Saturday Night Live” doesn’t routinely employ somebody who can play this role — Phil Hartmann could, and he made funny scores of otherwise excessively whimsical sketches just because all the zaniness was played out in front of somebody who looked like he was responsible for getting things done). About a decade ago I observed that Simmons appeared to be in about a quarter of the movies I went to and I wouldn’t mind if he were in the rest of them. (Here’s Simmons in “Burn After Reading” as the CIA boss.)

“Whiplash” is a pretty good movie up until the Awful Ending — a lengthy drum solo — takes all the energy out of the theater. Drum solos stopped being cool when The Ramones came along and “Whiplash’s” drum solo reminds you why.

“Whiplash” called to mind two theories: that success in the arts depends upon having a sense of rhythm (something I completely lack), and that a sense of rhythm is one of the few positive traits that doesn’t correlate with IQ.

I haven’t seen “American Sniper,” “Selma,” or “Theory of Everything.”