After 10 years and much complaining from Gosling, ‘a minor adjustment’ has been made to the La La Land poster – but has film history been erased at the same time?

Emma, I have read a Vulture headline that says “Put Ryan Gosling’s Gay Little Wrist Back” but I forgot my password and I need answers.

Some La La Land fans are outraged at a new poster released to mark the 1oth anniversary of the film by Lionsgate, which has “corrected” Gosling’s bent wrist in his celebrated dance pose with Emma Stone.

Ryan Gosling und seine Hand freuen sich über eine Detailänderung am „La La Land“-Filmplakat, Bill Kaulitz hat noch schmerzende Jugenderinnerungen, und Lisa Müller zeigt sich mit ihrem besten Freund.

Contains spoilers: Emma Stone’s hard-faced corporate CEO has a lot of explaining to do when she is kidnapped by Jesse Plemons’s conspiracy kook. But in this film, asking whether someone is an alien seems an ordinary inquiry

Emma Stone as a kidnapped, shaven-headed pharmaceuticals CEO who might also be the ruler of an alien master race? It says a lot about director Yorgos Lanthimos that Bugonia was arguably his most straightforward film to date.

For this remake of the cult 2003 South Korean movie Save the Green Planet! we were invited into the unkempt home of beekeeper Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a paranoid conspiracy theorist whose internet research has led him to believe that aliens are poisoning his bees – and that only he can save life on Earth from extinction. He enlists his neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to kidnap high-flying Michelle Fuller (Stone), whose company Auxolith seems to have caused Teddy’s mother some kind of irreversible harm in the past.

From Marty Supreme to One Battle After Another, this awards run has been populated by a harder-to-love group of spiky characters

Broadly speaking, the best way to get an acting Oscar is to play someone lovable, or someone lovably hateable. Not every acting winner fits that binary, of course, but the history of all four categories is filled with fascinatingly bad behavior (Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, Louise Fletcher in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, JK Simmons in Whiplash) as well as expressions of sheer delight at the combination of actor and lovable character (Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love). This year’s crop of acting nominees isn’t exactly short of rooting interests: Michael B Jordan makes his pair of 1930s gangsters charming twice over in Sinners while still distinguishing between their individual nuances, and Benicio del Toro’s even-keeled activist is highly lovable in One Battle After Another. Elsewhere, though, there’s definitely a stronger-than-usual strain of characters who defy the usual standards of easy likability.

The importance of likability in an Oscar campaign is akin to its importance in a political one – though in the case of the Academy awards, performers are campaigning twice, for themselves as actors and, essentially, for their characters as part of the cinematic firmament. That’s why likability is arguably the secret accelerant to the longtime trend of the awards going to actors playing real-life figures. It’s not just about a physical transformation or seamless impersonation, because many of those biographical performance aren’t really that when you put them side by side with the real thing. It’s that extra rooting interest that comes from embodying Freddie Mercury, Winston Churchill, Stephen Hawking, Abraham Lincoln, Judy Garland – people who Academy voters probably already like or admire to some degree, at least in the abstract. Suffering, too, can help create an easier sense of empathy.