The Oscars -- Solutions

• ANT
• COURT
• DAMN
• ERR
• LINENS
• OUTRE
• PASS AWAY
• STONED
• STORM
• WIRED

Like Robert De Niro in The Irishman, these answers have undergone de-aging technology--in each, the substring AGE has been replaced with a single letter. In order of the given blanks:

STONED	STONE AGE	D
OUTRE	OUTRAGE	E
PASS AWAY	PASSAGEWAY	A
DAMN	DAMAGE	N
STORM	STORAGE	M
ANT	AGENT	A
ERR	EAGER	R
COURT	COURAGE	T
WIRED	WAGERED	I
LINENS	LINEAGES	N

The answer is DEAN MARTIN.

• BENNIFER
• CENTAUR
• CONGRESS
• CRYPTIC CLUE
• CZECHOSLOVAKIA
• GRINDHOUSE
• SCREWDRIVER
• SEMICOLON
• SLOWBRO
• TABLE SALT
• TEST SOLUTION BEES IGNORE

Each of these answers is something that's made of two pieces or parts joined together or mixed in some way. Enter their component parts in the blanks and read the highlighted letters.

SEMICOLON	COMMA	PERIOD	M	I
CONGRESS	SENATE	HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES	S	T
CRYPTIC CLUE	DEFINITION	WORDPLAY	E	R
SLOWBRO	SHELLDER	SLOWPOKE	D	E
CZECHOSLOVAKIA	CZECH REPUBLIC	SLOVAKIA	B	O
GRINDHOUSE	PLANET TERROR	DEATH PROOF	R	A
CENTAUR	HORSE	MAN	H	N
SCREWDRIVER	ORANGE JUICE	VODKA	A	D
TEST SOLUTION BEES IGNORE	AVIATION LAWS	TEST SOLUTION PLEASE IGNORE	O	O
TABLE SALT	CHLORINE	SODIUM	L	M
BENNIFER	BEN AFFLECK	JENNIFER LOPEZ	A	N

The indicated letters, reading across in order, spell MISTER DEBORAH NADOOLMAN. Deborah Nadoolman is a costume designer married to director JOHN LANDIS.

This meta was a lot of fun to brainstorm, and I think I captured a wide array of different "types" of combinations or partnerships. Test Solution Bees Ignore is a puzzle solving teams that's well represented on the puzzle Discord I mostly wrote this set for; including them was incredibly indulgent on my part.

• BITTERN
• CHER
• GAUNT
• MARION
• NEEDLER
• OUT
• PAL

This meta is all about false feminines and false diminutives--that is, words that transform into other real words when you incorrectly apply a grammatical transformation. The transformations used are:

• Little: Append -LET (as in BOOK/BOOKLET)
• Women: Transform -ER to -ESS (as in SORCERER/SORCERESS) or append -ESS (as in COUNT/COUNTESS)
• Both: Append -ETTE (as in BACHLOR/BACHLORETTE or KITCHEN/KITCHENETTE)

OUT	OUTLET
GAUNT	GAUNTLET
CHER	CHESS
NEEDLER	NEEDLESS
BITTERN	BITTERNESS
PAL	PALETTE
MARION	MARIONETTE

Reading the indicated letters, acrostic-style, gives MILTON BERLE.

I had a hard time brainstorming answers for this meta, especially after I decided I wanted to make the lengths within each category unique; ideally, each answer would have contributed a single letter to the final answer. I didn't make any effort into making meta answers thematic, instead just assigning answers based on what letters I could extract, but as a coincidence, Milton Berle was known for performing in a dress, making him somewhat apt for the false feminines meta.

• BILLY GOAT
• BON MOT
• CLOTHESPEG
• HENRI BECQUEREL
• MUGGLE
• SLIP OF PAPER
• SNEAKIER

Quentin Tarantino is a (widely-rumored) foot fetishist, so this meta's all about removing shoes. Index by the number of pictures into each unshod answer.

BON MOT	BOOT	2	M
SLIP OF PAPER	SLIPPER	4	A
MUGGLE	MULE	1	G
BILLY GOAT	BOAT	5	G
SNEAKIER	SNEAKER	1	I
CLOTHESPEG	CLOG	3	E
HENRI BECQUEREL	HEEL	7	Q

MAGGIE Q is the answer.

I only know that mule is a type of shoe from other puzzles, but it was one of the first I thought of while writing this. It turns out that, as far as I could tell in my research, "mule" just means that it doesn't have a back, so many slippers and clogs are also mules, but I think the examples of those I found are unambiguous. I believe MUGGLE was still the hardest answer in this (otherwise pretty easy) meta to place, so my apologies to anyone who bashed their head against it.

• BARKIS IS WILLIN
• CHEESE SOUFFLE
• PAPAL LOOKS
• PAPARAZZI
• THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE
• THIS IS THE END

Much like Jojo Rabbit, these answers all feature a repeated bigram, two letters, than a double letter. (For the regex-inclined, they match the pattern /.*(..)\1..(.)\2.*/).

	PAPA	RA	ZZ	I
	PAPA	LL	OO	KS
TH	ISIS	TH	EE	ND
CHE	ESES	OU	FF	LE
BARK	ISIS	WI	LL	IN
THESORC	ERER	SA	PP	RENTICE

The numbers given an ordering for the letters in the central, non-repeated bigram; in order, those give RAOUL WALSH.

Hoo boy--this meta turned out much more constrained than I expected. Ideally I would have used both letters from every answer, but it just wasn't possible. PAPAL LOOKS isn't a real phrase, like, at all, but I really, really needed the two Ls. I believe some solvers got stuck because they noticed the repeated bigrams but not the double letters; in retrospect, just focusing on those probably would have been better.

• BASEBALL SCORE
• BE BRAVE
• BLUE BOOK
• BRING CONFLICT
• BURN RATE
• DANCE FLOOR
• FIGHT BACK
• FOOT RACE
• SAM MCGEE
• SPRING BREAK
• STRIP MINE
• ZEN GARDEN

Each two-word answer represents a playing card: One word in every answer can form a two-word phrase with one of the suits ("heart", "club", "diamond", or "spade"), and the other word rhymes with a rank.

BASEBALL SCORE	baseball diamond	score/four	Four of Diamonds
BE BRAVE	Braveheart	be/three	Three of Hearts
BLUE BOOK	book club	blue/two	Two of Clubs
BRING CONFLICT	conflict diamond	bring/king	King of Diamonds
BURN RATE	heartburn	rate/eight	Eight of Hearts
DANCE FLOOR	dance club	floor/four	Four of Clubs
FIGHT BACK	Fight Club	back/jack	Jack of Clubs
FOOT RACE	clubfoot	race/ace	Ace of Clubs
SAM MCGEE	Sam Spade	McGee/three	Three of Spades
SPRING BREAK	heartbreak	spring/king	King of Hearts
STRIP MINE	strip club	mine/nine	Nine of Clubs
ZEN GARDEN	garden spade	zen/ten	Ten of Spades

One path through the logic is as follows:

• From rule 1, row 1 must be all clubs.
• For rule 5, the only 2 that's available is the 2 of clubs. The king and ten of clubs aren't available, so this 2 must be adjacent to two non-clubs, which means it must be in row 2, directly beneath the 4 of clubs.
• Per rule 3, the column that starts 4C, 2C, ??? can't be C or D, as there's no third card that could cause it to bust, and per rule 4 it can't be B. Therefore A1 is the 4 of clubs and A2 is the 2 of clubs.
• From that, B2 and A3 must be a king and 10, in some order.
• Column B must include a ten-point card, so the only way it can total 14 is if B1 is the ace of clubs and B3 is one of the 3s.
• C3 must be the other 3.
• For column C to bust, C1 and C2 must sum to 19 or 20. Given the cards available, C2 must be the ten of spades, the king of diamonds, or the king of hearts.
• A3, B2, and C2 are 10S, KD, and KH in some order; in order to not violate rule 2, B2 must be 10S.
• By process of elimination, D2 and D3 must be the 4 of diamonds and the 8 of hearts, in some order. By rule 6, D3 must be the 8.
• In order for column D to bust with the 8 and the 4, D1 must be a ten-point card, which can only be the jack of clubs. C1 is thus the 9 of clubs.
• Rule 1 forces the rest of the suits.

The final arrangement is thus:

Four of clubs/DANCE FLOOR	Ace of clubs/FOOT RACE	Nine of clubs/STRIP MINE	Jack of clubs/FIGHT BACK
Two of clubs/BLUE BOOK	Ten of spades/ZEN GARDEN	King of hearts/SPRING BREAK	Four of diamonds/BASEBALL SCORE
King of diamonds/BRING CONFLICT	Three of hearts/BE BRAVE	Three of spades/SAM MCGEE	Eight of hearts/BURN RATE

Indexing into the answers by the given numbers gives the answer DONALD GLOVER.

This was probably my favorite meta to write; brainstorming possible answers was a lot of fun, and I was surprised by how many reasonable phrases came out given that when I started it felt so constrained. Unfortunately, one of those fantastic answers, ZEN GARDEN, proved ambiguous--I've never heard of a "garden club", but they apparently exist. I also apologize that for BURN RATE and STRIP MINE, both halves can combine with a suit to make a phrase; in both cases only one half rhymes with a card rank, so it's technically unambiguous, but still more of a red herring than I would have liked.

• BULLDOG
• EAGLE
• REBEL
• TIGER
• WOLF

Each answer refers to a team name used by multiple NCAA Division I schools, which can be entered in the rectangles so that the ellipses can be filled with the name of a rivalry or trophy contested between two schools with those team names; for example, the upper left rectangle is BULLDOG, and the lower left is TIGER, and they're connected by the Deep South's Oldest Rivalry between the Auburn Tigers and the Georgia Bulldogs. A full list of the teams and rivalries used:

Black and Blue Bowl	Memphis Tigers	Southern Miss Golden Eagles
Deep South's Oldest Rivalry	Auburn Tigers	Georgia Bulldogs
Egg Bowl	Mississippi State Bulldogs	Ole Miss Rebels
Fremont Cannon	Nevada Wolf Pack	UNLV Rebels
Magnolia Bowl	LSU Tigers	Ole Miss Rebels
Mid-South Rivalry	Memphis Tigers	Ole Miss Rebels
O'Rourke-McFadden Trophy	Boston College Eagles	Clemson Tigers
Paint Bucket Bowl	Arkansas State Red Wolves	Memphis Tigers
Rivalry in Dixie	Louisiana Tech Bulldogs	Southern Miss Golden Eagles
Textile Bowl	Clemson Tigers	NC State Wolfpack
Tiger Bowl	Auburn Tigers	LSU Tigers

The answers were the singular form to avoid distinguishing between the Wolf Pack/Wolfpack/Red Wolves. In addition, the Red Wolves and Golden Eagles are indicated by part of the respective box being the color. The final grid:

The extracted letters in order give MING-NA WEN.

Anecdotally, I think this might have been most solvers' last meta, due to a combination of requiring somewhat specific domain knowledge and fiddly research. My original idea was to use all sports, not just college football--my dream was a graph that connected LAKERS to CELTICS to RANGERS to ASTROS (that being NBA, Scottish football, and MLB), but it turns out most of the storied rivalries from American professional sports don't have names. Take a page from college football and give wacky names and trophies to your classic showdowns, sports leagues! I'm afraid that in an actual event, this would be highly, highly backsolvable, which thankfully wasn't a concern here.

Other ideas I had for this meta were about Supreme Court cases and more general rivalries, but the former was basically the Washington round from the 2006 MIT Mystery Hunt and the latter The Trainer from 2020.

• DR. BONHAM'S CASE
• FIRST VISION
• OBAMA INAUGURATION
• SOPHIA NATURALIZATION ACT
• THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC

Each answer is an event that took place in a specific year, each from a different century. Arrange chronologically and read the last two digits as A=1, B=2...

DR. BONHAM'S CASE	1610	J
SOPHIA NATURALIZATION ACT	1705	E
FIRST VISION	1820	T
THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC	1912	L
OBAMA INAUGURATION	2009	I

JET LI is the answer.

One of the solvers mentioned that he didn't remember seeing this meta idea before, which seems hard to believe given how straightforward it is. The only reason I can think of is that you're limited to five or six letters at most, given the paucity of recorded events that far back--SOPHIA NATURALIZATION ACT feels a little obscure to be an answer, but there's not much else for 1705.

• ARGUMENT
• BUDGIE
• CATCH-22
• DREAMLAND
• ESSAY SECTION
• FRIEND COMPUTER
• GUARD RAIL
• HARDENING AGENT
• IN OTHER WORDS
• JUMPER
• KEROSENE

Each answer clues a word that starts with PARA-. They also each start with a different letter A to K, which provides an ordering mechanism.

ARGUMENT	PARAMETER	T
BUDGIE	PARAKEET	E
CATCH-22	PARADOX	R
DREAMLAND	PARADISE	I
ESSAY SECTION	PARAGRAPH	H
FRIEND COMPUTER	PARANOIA	A
GUARD RAIL	PARAPET	T
HARDENING AGENT	PARALYTIC	C
IN OTHER WORDS	PARAPHRASE	H
JUMPER	PARACHUTE	E
KEROSENE	PARAFFIN	R

The indexed letters spell TERI HATCHER.

Each meta answer is an actor or director who made exactly one movie with a NATO phonetic letter (like Oscar) in the title.

The Irishman	DEAN MARTIN	Rio Bravo
Marriage Story	JOHN LANDIS	Oscar
Little Women	MILTON BERLE	The Oscar
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood	MAGGIE Q	New York I Love You
Jojo Rabbit	RAOUL WALSH	High Sierra
Joker	DONALD GLOVER	Magic Mike XXL
Ford V Ferrari	MING-NA WEN	Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
1917	JET LI	Romeo Must Die
Parasite	TERI HATCHER	Tango & Cash

The NATO letters in order give my favorite movie of the year, BOOKSMART.

Sorry about the Maggie Q and Ming-Na Wen answers; K specifically turned out very hard to indicate with this mechanic (but what was I going to, change my favorite movie?). I wanted to include The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as one of the movies, but it turns out Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, and John Huston all worked on other movies with phonetic alphabet letters in the title (Walter Huston in Yankee Doodle Dandy, the other two on High Sierra). I hope everyone had as much fun solving as I did writing these!