Category fraud is nothing new at the Oscars, but this year there were more examples of it than usual with three performances that were clearly leads pushed by their studios for consideration in support, two of which made the cut and one which didn’t.

Rooney Mara in Carol, out on home video March 15th, and Alicia Vikander in the recently released The Danish Girl were lucky to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress with Vikander winning. The unlucky one was nine-year-old Jacob Tremblay who melted hearts with his many year-end awards appearances in support of his co-star Brie Larson who won most of the year’s Best Actress awards including the Oscar.

One of last year’s most riveting emotional dramas, Lenny Abrahamson’s Room from Emma Donoghue’s novel of the same name is essentially two films in one. The first half is about Ma, a young woman kidnapped seven years earlier, and Jack, her five-year-old son born in captivity, and their life in a shed they call “room”. The second half, after Jack’s miraculous escape and Ma’s equally miraculous rescue, is about their uneasy adjustment to normal life.

The film’s greatest strength is in the interaction of the film’s two stars, with Tremblay, who was seven at the time of filming, actually having the larger role. He started out awards season with numerous awards for breakthrough performance of the year, several critics’ awards nominations for Best Actor and a SAG nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but Oscar eluded him. That was most likely because voters couldn’t decide whether to slot him as lead or supporting.

Room is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Based on the lives of early 20th Century artists Einar Wegener AKA Lili Elbe, and Gerda Wegener, The Danish Girl fudges the facts about Einer/Lili’s pioneering sex reassignment surgery. The Einers were married in 1904 when he was 22 and she was 18. Throughout the marriage he had a dual personality, often appearing in women’s clothes in public. He didn’t have the first of four surgeries until 1930 when he was 47, dying from complications of the fourth a year later. Their marriage was annulled after the first operation and they went their separate ways. She did not visit him in the hospital as he lay dying as the film would have it.

In the film, Einar and Gerda are forever young and attractive. He is first attracted to women’s clothes when Gerda asks him to pose in her absent model’s stockings and shoes. From there it seems like a hop, skip and jump to the surgery.

Oscar-nominated Eddie Redmayne plays Einer as a deer caught in the headlights, seemingly more comfortable as Lili, which I suppose is the point. Vikander, however, in a somewhat larger role, is moving throughout as the supportive Gerda. It’s a performance that is very much the equal of her previously acclaimed performances in Testament of Youth and Ex Machina. Standing out in the supporting cast are Matthias Schoenaerts and Ben Wishaw as Einar/Lili’s friends, and Sebastian Koch as the doctor who performs the surgery.

The Danish Girl is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Sylvester Stallone shares star billing with Michael B. Jordan in Ryan Coogler’s Creed, but in this sixth sequel to the 1977 Oscar-winning Rocky, he is not the actual lead. That distinction belongs to Jordan who plays the illegitimate son of Rocky’s opponent-turned-friend Apollo Creed, born after his father’s death in 1985’s Rocky IV. Jordan was born two years later, but this is the movies, not real life.

Jordan is excellent as the young fighter, as is Tessa Thompson as his girlfriend, a struggling singer. Stallone is fine in his Oscar-nominated performance as the now-aged Rocky who acts as Jordan’s trainer despite dire health problems. Stallone was considered a frontrunner for Best Supporting Actor but lost to Mark Rylance in Bridge of Spies. It’s pure speculation, but I have a feeling that had Rocky died at the end of the film, he might have actually won for his farewell portrayal of the character he created for himself nearly forty years ago, but his living for another day suggests that there is still life in the character for Stallone to go on playing him for several more sequels.

Creed is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Tom Hardy, another Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actor this year for The Revenant, actually gives a stronger performance in lead in a dual role as the gangster twins Reggie and Ron Kray in Brian Helgeland’s Legend. This is a slightly different version of the tale of the British gangsters who terrorized London in the 1960s than Peter Medak’s The Krays. That 1990 film with Gary and Martin Kemp was much admired in its day, so much so that a remake seems hardly worth doing except as a showcase for Hardy.

Emily Browning as Reggie’s tragic wife Frances, Colin Morgan as her brother, Taron Egerton as a laughing hyena of a Kray underling, and Christopher Eccleston as a fearless detective stand out in the huge supporting cast. Morgan and Egerton co-starred with Alicia Vikander and Kit Harrington in Testament of Youth.

Legend is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Prolific Italian director Paulo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty won the 2013 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. There was early speculation that his English-language Youth would do well at the 2015 Oscars, but the only thing it could muster was a nomination for Best Original Song (“Simple Song No.3”). Set mostly in a Swiss resort where retired composer Michael Caine and his director friend of sixty years, Harvey Keitel, are vacationing, the film is certainly appealing to the eye with its marvelous production design, but its esthetic appeal is contingent upon your empathy with the characters. Caine and Keitel are exemplary and Rachel Weitz is very strong as Caine’s daughter whose husband, Ed Stoppard, Keitel’s son, suddenly leaves her for a pop star played by an actual pop star (Paloma Faith) as herself. Less interesting is Paul Dano as an actor whose most famous role was playing a robot. Jane Fonda’s cameo as Keitel’s muse is interesting but isn’t fleshed out enough to make the character truly memorable.

Youth is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

TV’s Fargo: Season 2 is good, but not quite as good as either the legendary 1996 film or the unforgettable first-year run of the series. Presented as a prequel to the first year, it takes place in 1979 with the intrepid sheriff played by Keith Carradine in the 2014 miniseries now played by Patrick Wilson as a younger man and his daughter, who would be a huge part of the initial miniseries, now seen as a precocious six-year-old. Wilson, Cristin Milioti as his ill wife, Ted Danson as his father-in-law, Kirsten Dunst as a nutcase accidental killer, Jesse Plemons as her put-upon husband, Jean Smart as the leader of a gang of killers, and killers Jeffrey Donovan, Bokeem Woodbine and Zahn McClamon all turn in outstanding performances.

Fargo: Season 2 is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

This week’s new releases include In the Heart of the Sea and Macbeth.