Is it just me, or has this Oscar season lasted five years? Maybe it's because the Barbenheimer phenomenon has been with us since the summer. Or maybe we've just heard one too many times that Bradley Cooper spent half a decade learning how to conduct for "Maestro." Whether you are a casual observer or an Oscar completist who is now cramming in a few more animated shorts, it all ends Sunday, with the ninety-sixth Academy Awards. Much is already known, or widely assumed: we're likely to hear the word "Oppenheimer" several times, Da'Vine Joy Randolph ("The Holdovers") is a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actress, and Jimmy Kimmel will be back to poke fun at Hollywood and move things along.

If the six projects presented at a recent TV documentary pitch session held at the Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Paris share relatively few thematic or stylistic points in common, when taken as a whole, the diverse titles relay two incontrovertible truths: While advances in filmmaking technology now offer industry creatives unprecedented freedoms, when it comes to hooking the audience, nothing beats a good story well told. Three of the six projects presented at the Rendez-Vous forum reflect the format's growing technological trends. To offer competing visions of the future, Mad Films/Camera Subjective's speculative science-fiction project "2080" will use CGI, motion capture and some of the digital production techniques pioneered by Disney's "The Mandalorian," whereas to open a window into the past, France Televisions/Program33's historical doc "The Joan of Arc Case" will use detailed digital recreations of 15th-century France. On a similar front, the four-episode edutainment project "Science in Archeology 3.0," directed by Alexandra Barbot and Ste phane Jacques, produced by Roche Productions, and handled internationally by Lucky You, looks to employ recent advances in digital mapping, photogrammetry, and scanning techniques to recreate digital models of the ancient world. At the pitch presentation, co-director Alexandra Barbot likened the digital recreations to "entering Ali Baba's cave," arguing that these new model could rekindle that same spark of discovery that lit up so many young imaginations.

There are eight films nominated to win Best Picture at the 2019 Academy Awards. Following an impressive 94 percent score in predicting last year's Oscars, a San Francisco-based technology firm, thinks it has correctly predicted the winner for Sunday night's show. Unanimous A.I. uses its so-called "swarm A.I." technology to create an artificial intelligence comprised of a hive-mind of dozens of movie experts. The firm regularly predicts the results for the World Cup, NFL games, politics, and even Game of Thrones plot lines. This week, it shared the results of its 2019 Oscar predictions with Inverse.