Good morning. The 98th Oscars will be happening on Sunday − we have more to prepare you for the awards below, along with a closer look at civic duty in Beirut and our Prime Minister’s visit to Oslo.

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Hi, I’m Barry Hertz, Film Editor for The Globe, and I’ve spent the past few weeks (maybe months is more accurate?) getting ready for this Sunday’s Academy Awards. And that includes getting my hands, well, dirty.

About 30 minutes into Paul Thomas Anderson’s excellent drama One Battle After Another – the odds-on favourite to take home the Oscar for Best Picture – the director pauses the action to deliver one heck of a needle-drop: a snippet from Dirty Work by Steely Dan.

The rhythmically upbeat but lyrically dark musical cue speaks to the particularly chaotic state of self-loathing that Leonardo DiCaprio’s ostensible hero, the burn-out revolutionary Bob, is reckoning with in the moment.

But you also couldn’t have picked a better single to soundtrack this particular Oscars race.

When it comes to the gossip, allegations and out-of-context soundbites overwhelming this year’s awards conversation, there is plenty of dirty work to go ‘round.

While every edition of the Academy Awards offers its own cycle of mudslinging – a practice of wounding other films in the hopes of saving your own, which was perfected into a dark art by Harvey Weinstein, even if it preceded his reign of terror by decades – the current discourse feels particularly muddy.

Over the past three months, moviegoers (and of course Academy Awards voters) have been compelled to ponder the following questions: Was Marty Supreme director Josh Safdie’s creative split from his brother, Benny, the result of on-set impropriety? Does Hamnet ’s Jessie Buckley hate cats, and thus, should we hate her? Is DiCaprio a Zionist? Is his director Anderson one as well? Should Sinners star Michael B. Jordan publicly denounce his friendship with Jonathan Majors, after the latter’s conviction for assault? Why doesn’t Blue Moon ’s Ethan Hawke have an articulate position on the Israel-Gaza war? Does Timothée Chalamet hate opera and ballet? Why is someone like Kevin O’Leary anywhere near the Oscars? (Curiously, a sizable amount of the chatter has been directed toward Marty Supreme, which suggests that some players in Hollywood would like to remind the film’s insurgent indie distributor, A24, who really runs this town.)

The stories have been pushed by a variety of methods, from legitimately sourced trade-media reports to blind-item social-media whispers to questionably edited video clips. But the fact remains that the narratives are all being pushed in one way or another, to the point that dialogue about the actual quality of the films feels ever-more diminished.

Every Oscar season has its villain. Last year, Emilia Perez and its tweet-addicted star Karla Sofia Gascón took the dubious honour, with The Brutalist (and its use of artificial intelligence) close behind. But this year’s discourse feels close to assembling a veritable Legion of Doom in which there are more bad guys than good.

Will any of the talk make an impact Sunday night? We’ll see. But as audiences, we at least have the power to collectively rise up and tell Hollywood that, to borrow the immortal words of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, we don’t wanna do your dirty work no more. We’re fools to do your dirty work. Oh yeah.

Tune back in on Sunday, when we’ll have an image gallery and a roundup of best, worst and weirdest moments of the night.

Keep reading:

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• In The Voice of Hind Rajab, director Kaouther Ben Hania aims to make history
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