Movies the Oscars Will Overlook, but Shouldn’t

It happens every year. Some actor stands next to another performer or the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and they take turns telling you what’s up for an Oscar. Which means they’re also telling you what’s not. And “what’s not” tends to be as important as what is. And every year, I’m left wondering whether months of punditry and daily forecasts of awards-season weather pollutes what was scarcely a pure process to begin with.

Sometimes nomination day — which this year is Jan. 14 — brings a happy surprise or two. I, at least, never saw Keisha Castle-Hughes (“Whale Rider”) or Catalina Sandino Moreno (“Maria Full of Grace”) coming. But what if Academy voters didn’t have the Golden Globe nominees and the aggregation of critics’ prizes to narrow the field? On the one hand, thank God, because who knows where something like the best-picture dark horse “Mad Max: Fury Road” would be without them when the nominations are announced. On the other, I’m really curious what that experiment might yield.

But the bellwethers — so-called Oscar bait — tend to garner attention because they are generally released near the end of the year, and represent some ideal of the high-minded and the middlebrow, some ideal of importance. There are always exceptions. “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” has suddenly blasted its way into the conversation, a development that shall receive no dissent from me. But there’s a kind of movie that gets singed. It’s often small, was only sort of seen, and came out eons — I mean, months — ago. Something like “Woman in Gold” leaps to mind.

It’s a tough, funny, infuriating piece of business, in which a Vienna-born Los Angeles dress-shop owner (Helen Mirren) and a boyishly polite lawyer (Ryan Reynolds) fight the Austrian government for a Klimt painting the Nazis stole from her family. The story is based in truth, for what it’s worth. And after 15 minutes, you know you’re in good hands (Simon Curtis directed; Alexi Kaye Campbell did the script). Even the flashbacks to the affluent Jewish girlhood of Ms. Mirren’s character work.

“Woman in Gold” might be the epitome of middlebrow moviemaking, but it was released far enough outside the scrum that that classification wasn’t worth making. It’s just as good as and not too different from Stephen Frears’s “Philomena,” a best picture nominee of two years ago. I had a good time hissing at the devious Austrian bureaucracy and watching Mr. Reynolds discover that he can more than hold his own with Ms. Mirren, who in doing nothing special actually does quite a lot.

A few weeks before, I saw “Danny Collins.” I should say that I dragged myself because Al Pacino as a still-vital pop-star superstud who moves into a hotel and reconnects with a long-lost son and his family is an embarrassing idea. But everything about this movie, which Dan Fogelman wrote and directed, made me beyond happy, starting with Mr. Pacino, who explores new neighborhoods of his legendary excess. He’d seemed musty recently. Here, he’s a must.

His is a shameless piece of acting, but it’s driven by so much confidence, so much sexiness, that all that’s really embarrassing is how you ever doubted that he could still teem with this much louche charisma. Mr. Pacino is a Golden Globe nominee, and though I’m reluctant to credit the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for anything, I salute it for this. He also brings out the best in Annette Bening, Christopher Plummer, Bobby Cannavale, Josh Peck and Jennifer Garner. Whatever an “Oscar movie” is, this isn’t it, which is all the more reason to consider it. Every person I’ve forced to see it has been delighted. Why shouldn’t those people include the men and women of the Academy?

The same goes for “Results,” a loose, idiosyncratic, uncommonly warm romantic comedy from late spring. It opened in theaters around the same time as “San Andreas,” “Entourage,” “Aloha” and something called “Jurassic World,” and was available on demand. The reviews were more than decent. I wrote an ecstatic one. So did A. O. Scott.

“Results” presented two personal trainers in Austin, Tex., and the miserable New Yorker they can’t get into shape. Cobie Smulders and Guy Pearce play Kat and Trevor, the romantically dysfunctional trainers; Kevin Corrigan is Danny, the client; and none of those three have been better.

The credit for the crispness of their comedy goes to the writer and director, Andrew Bujalski, who’s happy to fill dead space with awkward behavior. He began as a director of so-called mumblecore. His superb first film, “Funny Ha Ha,” released in 2005, instigated the genre. But his filmmaking has matured beyond mumblecore’s self-imposed artistic and social limitations, though not at the expense of Mr. Bujalski’s interest in the struggle to make human connections, to articulate oneself and be understood.

At some point, Kat gives Trevor some inconvenient news, which he processes by rotating his body through his arms as he hangs from a pull-up bar. What’s funny is that this is obviously how Trevor does his thinking and his emoting: through random expressions of fitness. That, and the fact that he’s doing those pull-ups not in a gym but in a hallway outside his kitchen.

Mr. Bujalski has come up with a movie that understands the peculiar chemistry of personality and occupation. Danny has come into a fortune and therefore doesn’t work. With no job to offset his borderline obnoxiousness, he becomes insufferable. The character is maladroit, but Mr. Corrigan gives this potbellied, balding guy all the cool and sadness he can muster. His scenes with Ms. Smulders have a gemlike gleam. Kat is hard, detached from her feelings, obsessed with perfection and almost pathologically opposed to surrender.

The movie wasn’t built for awards, but it deserves them, anyway. None are likely to come from the Academy, for the Oscar tailwinds blow elsewhere. But with voting on nominations closing on Friday, Jan. 8, there’s still time to aim industrial-strength wind at certain tails. If that kind of gale-force attention is good enough for, say, Beyoncé’s hair, it should be good enough for “Results,” which is beyond good enough for the Academy.

I’ve mentioned this as being one of the best American comedies since James L. Brooks’s “Broadcast News,” which had a similar triangle and not-dissimilar romantic sensibility. Oscars-wise, Mr. Brooks did pretty well (seven nominations, including best picture and original screenplay). “Results” is that film for the “gig economy,” in which instability breeds awkwardness and doubt as opposed to Mr. Brooks’s film, in which personal and professional stability heightens confidence.

And if you’re giving out prizes, must the recipients all be moral heavyweights? Couldn’t a few just feature a heavyweight? Couldn’t a few be “Creed”? On the one hand, it’s just a boxing movie. On the other, it is the best boxing movie I’ve seen in a long time. The director Ryan Coogler understands how bodies in motion can tell a story as well as George Miller understands how to harness frenetic motion as a narrative device in “Fury Road.” But Mr. Coogler’s achievement suffers a comparative disadvantage with Mr. Miller’s. No one’s seen anything like “Fury Road.” Anyone who’s seen “Rocky” has basically seen “Creed,” especially the Academy. In 1977, it gave “Rocky” the best picture Oscar, paving the way for generations of boxing fantasies with great white heroes.

Setting aside Mr. Coogler’s intelligent adjustment of the racial temperature — it’s a reconsidering of the original movie rather than a rebuke — there is the rousing fact of his skill. The script takes the simple premise of an underrated light-heavyweight and doesn’t oversell melodrama. Adonis is the son of Rocky’s late foil-turned-friend, Apollo Creed. And there is honor in his compulsion to box. Mr. Coogler gives the compulsion emotional contour.

The movie’s got two wildly convincing fights, one done in a single take, another done to take your breath away. Then there’s the hard grace of the acting. What Michael B. Jordan and Sylvester Stallone bring out in each other is funny, tender, earnest and not the least bit flamboyant. Mr. Jordan will just keep getting better with time; somehow Mr. Stallone has been made very good because of it. Mr. Stallone might have taken a chance on Mr. Coogler, but Mr. Coogler also took a chance on him. No one’s leaning on nostalgia to move you. Your excitement is earned.

Is there something undignified in pleading with 6,000 or so strangers to make room on their Oscar nomination ballots for movies they’ve skipped or never heard of? Of course. But discovery is one of the joys of moviegoing. You just never know — even when the pundits insist that you do.