Welcome back to The Big To-Do. Lots of countdowns this week, starting with single-digit days until the Oscars. While you wait, check out this streaming guide to all 10 of the best picture nominees, courtesy of the Globe’s Matt Juul, and take a crack at the Globe’s trivia quiz. The Celtics play host to the Mavericks tonight, and that countdown isn’t to a random midseason game but to the possible return of Jayson Tatum less than a year after rupturing his Achilles tendon. Twenty-eight or so hours later, Ryan Gosling hosts “Saturday Night Live,” with musical guest Gorillaz. And daylight saving time starts early Sunday morning, meaning sunset comes after 6:30 and the countdown to for-real spring shifts into high gear.

The Globe’s new weekly series, One Special Thing, travels to Pawtucket, R.I., home of Jordan’s Jungle. The store, writes the Globe’s Lisa Weidenfeld, “overflows with lush, green tropical plants, an orchid display, pots for every taste, a standalone coffee shop called the Hive Bar, a koi pond, and at the center of it all, a large enclosure for Popeye, an African grey parrot who helps complete the jungle vibe.” Perfect at the end of a long, cold winter.

Movies

Illustration ALLY RZESA/GLOBE STAFF

The Globe’s Academy Award trivia quiz “has a few hard questions hiding in plain sight.” Looking ahead to the March 15 ceremony, Globe film critic Odie Henderson offers 10 brainteasers, explaining, “Since ‘Sinners’ broke a 75-year-old record earlier this year by becoming the first film to earn 16 Oscar nominations (the record had been 14), this quiz is all about Oscar records and Oscar firsts.” If you get all 10, you deserve a prestigious award.

Jessie Buckley, an Oscar contender for “Hamnet,” plays the title character in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” That’s “bride” as in “of Frankenstein,” with Christian Bale as the monster. Set in 1930s Chicago, it delivers “stunning visuals, blatant production design artificiality, hat-tip to musicals, and skewed look at romance,” writes Henderson, awarding 2 stars. “[I]t’s a raging hot mess that isn’t without a clever idea or two.”

Pixar’s latest, “Hoppers,” “caters more to adults than children.” The story of Mabel, a nature preservationist transformed into “a cute little robot beaver,” is “a step down from what we expect from Pixar,” Henderson writes in a 2½-star review. “There was a lot of laughter at my screening, which means that your enjoyment ... is probably contingent on whether you find it funny. Unfortunately, I didn’t laugh very much.”

Baz Luhrmann’s documentary “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert” earns 3 stars from Henderson. “I can’t deny that Presley gave 110 percent to his audience at every show,” the acknowledged non-fan writes. “With a bit of narration and loads of concert and interview footage of Presley, ‘EPiC’ gives Presley control of the movie.”

TV & Streaming

Steve Carell and Charly Clive in "Rooster." KATRINA MARCINOWSKI/HBO 

“Rooster,” starring Steve Carell, and “Vladimir” share university settings and something more. The new series trade in “skepticism toward treating college students as wilting flowers who might be irreparably harmed by encountering the ambiguities of the big, bad grown-up world,” writes Globe TV critic Chris Vognar. And both “grow outward from their characters, which is why they’re both pretty good shows.”

Rachel Weisz stars in “Vladimir” as a married academic taken with the title character. Leo Woodall plays “a new faculty member and hot young novelist who captures the protagonist’s imagination,” Vognar writes. “We are in full-on female gaze mode, in a series that happily flips the stereotypical age/gender dynamic. ... Weisz has been fearless in her depictions of female desire, on big screen and small.”

In a time of TV turmoil, ‘Masterpiece’ stands strong. Since executive producer and head of scripted content Susanne Simpson took over in 2019, the Boston-based brand has driven ratings with “big feelings, beautiful people in costumes aplenty, and, of course, yearning, ” writes the Globe’s Meredith Goldstein. Ahead of the March 22 premiere of “The Forsytes,” she tells a financial and romantic success story.

Framingham-set “Ted” is back for a second season of the adventures of the titular “foul-mouthed talking teddy bear.” The mouth in question belongs to Connecticut native Seth MacFarlane, who joined three cast members, including Lowell’s Scott Grimes, to chat with the Globe’s Matt Juul “about their Masshole traits, what they miss about the ’90s, and why Bostonians may have the ‘worst accent in America.’”

“Network” is “a wild, messy, profane, profound, and hilarious piece of filmmaking.” What’s a 50-year-old movie doing in the TV section? “TV news was already veering toward infotainment,” Vognar writes, “and the corporate raiding of news media companies ... was already bubbling up. But [Paddy] Chayevsky’s free-swinging satire, which found its perfect match in Sidney Lumet’s high-intensity direction, clearly foresaw the shape of the things to come.”

Music

Jeff "Monoman" Conolly in the mid-'80s at The Channel. JIM MERRILL 

In the ’80s, Lyres frontman Jeff Conolly “commanded the stage with a snarl.” And today, as the 69-year-old deals with cancer, he still sounds a little snarl-y. “I don’t promote Jeff Conolly,” he tells the Globe’s Mark Shanahan. Plenty of other people chime in ahead of a fundraiser Thursday, creating a sort of oral history of the man Mission of Burma bassist Clint Conley calls “the only person I’ve ever been in a band with that I wanted to strangle.”

When their band Squeeze took off, Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford shelved a concept album about a nightclub. More than 50 years later, they recorded “Trixies,” which drops today. “The record’s lyrics are like vintage Squeeze songs, though often darker than the band’s biggest hits,” writes Globe correspondent Stuart Miller. “It’s undoubtedly Squeeze,” says Tilbrook. “It sounds like us.”

Charley Crockett “has earned widespread praise for his old-fangled response to the modern Nashville formula for country music.” The former street musician, who plays Boston Sunday, is “still most at home in the alleyways off Broadway in Nashville or Sixth Street in Austin,” writes Globe correspondent James Sullivan. Says Crockett, “There’s a lot of songs waiting there for you if you can try and get comfortable sitting in that space, listening.”

Visa issues are taking a toll on the local world music scene. Presenter Global Arts Live “is accustomed to handling the occasional hiccup,” Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak writes for Sound Check. But now, travel bans and restrictions are leading to cancellations. “The breadth of it makes us worry about the future,” CEO Connie Chin says. “There’s a big economic ripple, as well as the loss of cultural exchange.”

Museums & Visual Art

Wen-ti Tsen's "Peaceable Kingdom," 1971, at "Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now," at the Institute of Contemporary Art. DARIO LASAGNI

“Say It Loud,” at the ICA, “overflows with compelling, captivating, overlooked cultural history.” The celebration of the African American Masters Artists in Residence Program “is a vivid frame for turbulent local civic and political history across at least a couple of generations,” writes Globe art critic ​Murray Whyte. “The city’s counter-cultural community found a home at the AAMARP where it could not anywhere else.”

The 250th anniversary of American independence — the semiquincentennial, if you’re fancy — is bringing out the best in local museums. “Imagined Nation,” at the Boston Athenaeum, “includes fewer than three dozen items ... but they are impressively varied,” writes the Globe’s Mark Feeney. “Perhaps the most notable item is George Washington’s copy of Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense.’”

Theater

Joshua Henry and the cast of "Ragtime." MATTHEW MURPHY

One clear-cut “must-see” is lighting up Broadway this season. As Coalhouse Walker Jr. in the musical “Ragtime,” Joshua Henry “is the single best reason for theater-loving Bostonians to journey a few hours south to Manhattan,” Globe theater critic Don Aucoin writes from New York, predicting at least a Tony nomination. And you have until March 29 to take in “Jonathan Groff’s electrifying turn as Bobby Darin in ‘Just in Time.’”

For “Stereophonic,” David Adjmi wrote the script and Will Butler wrote the songs, none of which is performed in full. “From the first conversation, it was pretty clear that this would be a fragmentary piece that would play with the text, that the words and music would form a cohesive whole,” Butler tells Globe correspondent Alyssa Vaughn. Fleetwood Mac inspired the Tony Award winner, which opens in Boston Tuesday.

For nearly four decades, director Scott Edmiston has created elaborate notebooks to “provide an essential pathway into the characters and the stories he’s bringing to life on stage.” He starts months before a production — currently, Umbrella Stage’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” — and crafts a concrete “response to the evanescence of a director’s contributions to a production,” in his words. Globe correspondent Terry Byrne takes a look.

Vichet Chum’s “Kween” is “a small play with a big heart.” Lowell’s Cambodian-American community is the backdrop for “a coming-of-age story embedded within the larger immigrant experience,” Aucoin writes. The Merrimack Rep production benefits from “a diverse group of talented actors who boost the energy level,” including Ray K. Soeun as Sophat, who “deserves a play of his own, and Soeun should play him.”

Books

“All the World Can Hold” by Jung Yun. A. SCOTT/S&S/37 INK

Jung Yun sets “All the World Can Hold” in the fall of 2001, on a cruise ship in the figurative shadow of the 9/11 attacks. The “witty, wrenching” novel is “both a rollicking yarn and a shrewd send-up of American culture,” writes Globe reviewer Hamilton Cain. Amid the cruise’s “mai tais and cooking workshops Yun has crafted allegories of race and class, dissonances that mark our nation and its moving pieces.”

Today’s newsletter was written by Marie Morris and produced by the Globe Living/Arts staff. Marie Morris can be reached at marie.morris@globe.com. Thanks for reading.

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