Here’s a hard truth: the Oscars aren’t for everyone. The speeches, the inane interviews, the chintzy dance numbers — it’s a bloated ceremony that is as off-putting to some people as it is appealing to others.
If you’re one of those people who isn’t going to be watching the 2024 Oscars, you probably need some suggestions for what to do instead. And you can do worse than watch some movies on Max. You should watch the three movies on the list below. One is a 2023 hit starring a Dune: Part Two lead actor, another is an underrated fantasy, and the last is a modern comedy classic.
Need more Oscar recommendations? Check out how to watch the 2024 Oscars for free, 2024 Oscar predictions, 10 biggest Oscar snubs ever, 10 best Oscar-winning movies ever, 10 most Oscar-nominated movies ever, and 5 great Oscar-winning movies on Amazon Prime Video.
In need of some more streaming recommendations? We also have guides to the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, and the best movies on Disney+ that are worth looking through.
Just because Wonka wasn’t nominated for any Oscars doesn’t mean it’s not worth a watch. An all-ages hit from last December, Wonka stars Dune: Part Two star Timothée Chalamet as Willy Wonka, the iconic character from Roald Dahl’s children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its first movie adaptation, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. This prequel shows how Wonka became the world’s greatest inventor, magician, and chocolate maker.
Wonka has what you’d expect a movie like this to have: amusing musical performances, candy-colored visuals, and Hugh Grant as a grumpy Oompa Loompa. Wonka is a charming movie that will make you forget about the Oscars by reminding you of all those delicious sweets you could be consuming.
Craving a feast for the eyes? The Green Knight will do just fine then. Director David Lowery’s visually dazzling adaptation of the famous 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight casts Dev Patel as King Arthur’s egotistical nephew Gawain, who must challenge the titular Green Knight and achieve glory for his kingdom.
The Green Knight boasts an impressive casts that includes Oscar winner Alicia Vikander and a pre-The Batman Barry Keoghan. More importantly, the movie incorporates surrealistic, breathtaking imagery to both update the millennia-old story and ground it in the ancient past. The Green Knight is unlike anything you have ever seen, and is perfect to watch on a night honoring the entertainment industry’s best and brightest.
“That’s all.” With those two words, an iconic phrase was born, and a seemingly ordinary movie transformed into an enduring comedy classic. Adapted from Lauren Weisberger’s popular novel of the same name, director David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada chronicles recent college graduate Andy Sachs’ (Anne Hathaway) stressful tenure as a low-level assistant to Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the silver-haired editor in chief of Runaway Magazine and the titular devil who, yes, wears Prada.
Not much more can be said about this movie except that almost 18 years later, it’s just as sharp, clever, and entertaining as it was in 2006. Streep’s great, of course, as are Hathaway and Stanley Tucci, but it’s Emily Blunt (nominated at last for Oppenheimer) who steals every scene she’s in as the condescending co-assistant Emily. She views Andy and everyone else in the world with a contempt that’s not veiled in the slightest.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?