True story: one night not too long ago, I went out for a drink wearing an Iron & Wine t-shirt. “Look at you!” said a girl at the bar. “You’re so cool in 2005!”

She was right. Folk was hip in 2005. Sufjan Stevens’s Illinois and the Decemberists’ Picaresque came out that year, and Sam Beam, more commonly known as Iron & Wine, was at the peak of his folksy, lumbersexual powers. Iron & Wine’s latest release, Archive Series Volume No. 1, harkens back to that time, before Beam adopted a bigger band and slicker production, when he was still just a soft-spoken guy with an acoustic guitar.

The first volume of the Archive Series contains 16 tracks recorded circa 2002, songs that didn’t make the final cut onto Iron & Wine’s debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle. Those who prefer that album to 2013’s Ghost on Ghost or 2011’s Kiss Each Other Clean will celebrate. The things that made Iron & Wine so compelling 10 years ago abound here: endearing lo-fi production, delicate guitar, thoughtful melancholy, songs about rivers and songbirds. “Slow Black River,” “Beyond the Fence,” and “Everyone’s Summer of 95” are classic Beam: songs that could stand with the best of the Iron & Wine discography. Still, Archive Series remains a collection of demos and throwaways—it’s nostalgic, intriguing at times, and a tad disappointing.

The Archive Series seems more interesting as a career move than as a group of songs. The Decemberists came back from a “hiatus” in January with What a Beautiful World, What a Terrible World, and Sufjan Stevens has announced that his first album in five years, Carrie & Lowell, will be a return to his “folk roots.” Iron & Wine, currently between labels, has offered up music Beam wrote 13 years ago rather than new material. At a time when his old peers seem to be moving forward by retracing their steps, Sam Beam seems uncertain of where to go next.

This one is a dead-heat between Alejandro González Iñárritu for Birdmand and Richard Linklater for Boyhood. Both men have claimed major awards in the run-up to Sunday’s Oscars, but to make the call, you have to defer to the numbers. While Linklater has won a BAFTA and a Golden Globe, Birdman cleaned up at the SAGs and González Iñárritu won the Director’s Guild of America award. That last one is the prize worthy of your attention. In the past 67 years, 60 of the directors who won the DGA for best director also took home the award at the Academy. Statistically speaking, González Iñárritu looks like the most likely winner.

Boyhood certainly has its faults but if there’s a prize it deserves, it’s Best Director. Boyhood’s greatest asset is the novelty of the project; it’s Linklater’s brainchild and greatest cinematic success. He deserves the top prize for ushering Ellar Coltrane through an 11-year project, guiding amazing performances by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, and successfully keeping track of the millennial pulse. There’s some hope for Linklater; it’s possible that Birdman will simply be too odd (read: interesting) for the Academy to stomach. But they also love films about film (see The Artist, 2011), so González Iñárritu will probably take home the statue.

The game changed in 1980 when Prince released Dirty Mind and Robert Christgau consequently declared, “Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.” Sex came to the charts in an unprecedented fashion, showing everyone from Jagger to disco divas what true eroticism sounded like. Starting in 1980, Prince released an album almost every year that decade, each one pushing sex onto the Billboard and into your ears with a force and consistency never seen before or since.

The two new albums from Prince, Art Official Age and PLECTRUMELECTRUM, make you pine for those glory days—today, no one sits on ’80s Prince’s throne, not even Prince himself. There’s a dearth of pure, unadulterated sexiness, a gap in the musical landscape. Rihanna’s eroticism is too kitsch, Beyoncé’s too political. As for male musicians, there’s only the creepy brand offered by R. Kelly and (shudder) Robin Thicke. A sad state of affairs indeed.

PLECTRUMELECTRUM is only worth mentioning in a dismissal. It’s a collection of half-baked rock tunes, casual jam sessions that picked up some hip-hop beats in post-production. Art Official Age, on the other hand, at least sounds like a Prince record, if far from his best. It attempts to channel the risqué brand of rock, funk, and R&B that titillated the world thirty years ago. It has the familiar funk and the brash, horny attitude that contributed to 21 percent of births between 1980 and 1989. But regrettably, though predictably, it too falls short.

The Purple One is 56 now and just as short as ever; while his rhythms are still steamy, they’re mediocre and disappointingly familiar. Plus, he can be overly self-aware. The cover art for “Breakfast Can Wait,” Art Official Age’s first single, made headlines with a snapshot of Dave Chappelle holding a tray of pancakes, a joking response to the comedian’s now-famous Prince impersonation. Lyrics like “a kiss on the neck when she doesn’t expect” are a little too heavy-handed to be sincere. Perhaps this kind of forced camp is a necessary move at this point in Prince’s career, but it subtracts from the primal appeal that seduced boys and girls across the world in the ’80s.

The sad truth is that the time has come for Prince himself to pack up his penis and go home, ready or not. The sex on today’s charts lacks the electricity Prince once brought, but Prince can’t bring it any more. Artists like Rhye and FKA Twigs channel his spirit, but their chances of crossing over into wider pop consciousness are dubious. His throne still awaits a successor.

Fierce and light and young. Angel Olsen sings that line over and over at the end of “White Fire,” the standout track from her sophomore album Burn Your Fire For No Witness. Curiously, though, the lyric sounds neither fierce, nor light, nor young. “White Fire” is fraught with apprehension and the insight of a woman wiser since her last outing in the world. That paradoxical tension between fear and confidence is the heart of Burn Your Fire; it’s what makes it a phenomenal record.

At first, Burn Your Fire seems like your standard singer-songwriter fare: folkie with feelings gets introspective, writes some songs about sadness. Olsen complicates things, though, musically and thematically. She trades a worn-down acoustic guitar for a Telecaster and plays power chords where Sam Beam or Joni Mitchell would finger-pick. There’s an upbeat energy pushing the songs forward, a driving rock and roll and wry wit behind sombre surface vibes. Take “Hi-Five.” Olsen captures a bitter kind of fun, the joy of commiseration, asking “Are you lonely too? Hi-five! So am I!”

The punk rock infusion and clever lyricism make Burn Your Fire fresh and exciting, but it’s Olsen’s cautious flirtation with darkness that takes the album the extra mile. Each song confronts a demon with varying degrees of subtlety. Olsen hits gold when she strays furthest into despair, channeling Leonard Cohen circa Songs of Love and Hate in the long, poetic ballad “White Fire.” She doesn’t linger, though; she never revisits that solemn tone again. She follows her own advice: If you still have some light in you, go before it’s gone.

How many of the foreign films nominated for an Academy Award this year have you seen? That’s okay—forget I asked. I’m guilty, you’re guilty. Everyone’s guilty. All are punished.

And like me, you’re probably also guilty of never even having heard of La grande belleza (The Great Beauty) until this week. The latest film from Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, Beauty is a visual bacchanal with a surreal flavor and tastefully delivered moral; it’s also a Golden Globe-winner and a serious contender for an Academy Award. Sorrentino presents the tale of Jep Gambardella, a 65-year old man who wrote an acclaimed novel in his youth before becoming the king of Rome’s social scene. Picture a man equal parts Capote and Clooney, with a dash of Hefner for a kick. Then picture this man grappling with his existential discontents for the first time in his life.

Sounds hokey, no? It would be if Sorrentino hadn’t so masterfully crafted his story and its presentation. While The Great Beauty has a linear progression, Sorrentino constantly forces the story off course with seemingly arbitrary excerpts from Jep’s life. The random dinner parties and one-night stands don’t quite mesh with the assorted relationships and afternoon strolls in terms of narrative, but together they reveal a complete portrait of a magnetic personality. That personality is played deftly by Toni Servillo, whose performance is as graceful as it is compelling.

The Great Beauty asks the proverbial “big questions,” but with much more poise and poignancy than I could reproduce here. What I can tell you is how it asks them, because the answer is obvious—The Great Beauty is absolutely beautiful, unquestionably the most gorgeous film nominated for an Academy Award this year.

There were many ways Gravity could have gone wrong. On the surface the new film from veteran director Alfonso Cuarón seems little more than the story of Sandra Bullock stranded in space. Even in Cuarón’s capable hands, Gravity ran the risk of becoming some strange fusion of Castaway and Barbarella. Fortunately, the magnitude of Gravity’s successes outweigh its shortcomings.

Bullock plays Dr. Ryan Stone, a medical researcher turned astronaut sent on a one-off space expedition to install some ambiguous prototype system. Her character’s inexperience is balanced by veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney). When the Russians randomly decide to blow up one of their own satellites, a rapid storm of space debris is thrown into Earth’s orbit, destroying everything in its path, including Stone and Kowalski’s shuttle. The remaining 75 minutes of film present our protagonists’ fight for survival.

Nothing about Gravity’s plot is particularly exciting. Indeed, the movie is at its weakest when it tries to foreground the story. Dialogue is poor, character development is blunt. Clooney’s performance as Kowalski is just too George Clooney, and is probably the low point of the film.

All that aside, Gravity is a tremendous visual triumph. The heart of this film is the brilliant positioning of the action relative to Earth. Cuarón consistently frames shots with stunning images of the blue planet looming the background. The camera often pans from within the characters’ helmets to capture an insider perspective of outer space, perhaps one of the most effective uses of first person perspective in film history.

In all regards, the cinematography is beautiful. Gravity cultivates a respect for the depth and isolation of space equal parts compelling and terrifying. Critics have already begun to hail Gravity as a movie ten years ahead of its time, a landmark work. On the whole, that’s not true; the dialogue is too clumsy, the plot progression too overt. While it might not be a landmark for cinema, however, Gravity may be a landmark for cinematography.