Then, there’s “Dune: Part Two,” a movie so expensive looking, so smoothly, tastefully, artfully done that it’s easy to remain passive in the face of all that’s weird about it. But look! It’s Stellan Skarsgard, plumped, pursy and a-vape, as a baron whose kink, in part, arises from stadium-size gladiatoring. When this series is complete, many hours will have been spent watching Timothée Chalamet as the Chosen One amid a war over seasoning. It’s “Lawry’s of Arabia,” “Lost in Spice.” The race delivers double-feature Chalamet. In “A Complete Unknown,” he boldly reimagines Bob Dylan as a figure of tremendous petulance. Otherwise, it might be the most conventional thing you could hope to see about a once-in-a-lifetime weirdo; and that counts as kind of weird.

“Nickel Boys” unfolds during Dylan’s ascent but in Jim Crow Florida as opposed to Greenwich Village, so, essentially a different planet. Colson Whitehead wrote a novel by the same name, yet this movie is less a feat of adaptation than a wholesale dreaming of what Whitehead composed. It’s been shot so that we see only what its two protagonists experience, through their eyes — friendship, abuse, self-estrangement. That simple choice — to personify the camera — might be as close to “avant-garde” as a best picture nominee has come since whenever Terrence Malick was last on accolades duty.

These films serve puke and pus and anal rape. At least three culminate in a wild plot twist that deepens the meaning of what preceded it rather than cheapens it. I lost count of all the witch imagery on offer. In “Dune,” witches are a spice of life. “The Substance” might be the grossest movie to come this close to topping the Oscar pile since “The Exorcist”; although, really, by its final, watch-through-a-tarp minutes, it makes “The Exorcist” look like “The Sound of Music.” These movies sense, in their own ways, that we’re past whatever used to pass for normal, including “best picture” itself.

Before 2009, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made the mistake of expanding the crop of nominees from five to as many as 10 and then just to 10, the quintets usually included what I had thought of as the Fifth Movie. It was artier or poppier, more indie and more from somewhere else (like Mexico or Sundance) than its fellow nominees, less of a hit or just a bona fide box-office sleeper, more likely to be directed by, say, Robert Altman or Paul Thomas Anderson. Was it the one with no director nomination? Can I prove that, say, “Crash” was the Fifth Movie of the 2006 nominees? I can’t. (Maybe that movie was “Capote.”) “Crash” willed its way to “sleeper.” It won. But it’s an all-time best picture upset because it reeked of squeaker. (It also just reeked.)