Welcome back to The Big To-Do. Today is Friday the 13th — yes, again. The Academy Awards are Sunday, shortly after the release of the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournament brackets. Let the prognosticating begin!

This week’s installment of the Globe’s new series One Special Thing ventures into a film genre “not about heroics, but the stuff of real life.” Another special thing is a delightfully random look at a weird trend hiding in plain sight: Why are so many pop-culture characters named Kevin? The Globe’s Lisa Weidenfeld “investigates.” The week’s streaming picks by the Globe’s Matt Juul range from “Oscar-nominated fare to the return of an action-packed anime adaptation.” Harry Styles does double duty as host and musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.” And for St. Patrick’s Day (Tuesday), Globe restaurant critic Devra First turned to actual Irish people who work in the food and beverage industry to learn “where they like to go for a taste of home, and what they order once they get there.” Guinness, yes; corned beef and cabbage, not so much.

Movies

“Sinners” and “One Battle After Another” “are beloved by audiences and critics alike.” That makes Academy Award predictions tough, but Globe film critic Odie Henderson is up to the job. In addition to “will win” and “should win” picks in the major Oscar categories, he offers the full combo platter that includes “shouldn’t be here” and “was robbed.” Bonus: a 2026 release described as one nominee’s “personal ‘Norbit.’”

Best supporting actor nominee Benicio del Toro lands on another notable list this week. “In recent months, I’ve found myself yearning to be friends with characters I’ve just encountered on screen,” writes the Globe’s Mark Shanahan. “I don’t need saintly; decent will do.” Del Toro’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos makes the cut.

“Reminders of Him” is unlikely to be in the discussion when next year’s Oscars roll around. Colleen Hoover and Lauren Levine adapted Hoover’s 2022 novel, and her legion of fans make this one pretty much critic-proof, but ... “There isn’t a single original idea to be found here, nor a twist you can’t predict immediately,” Henderson writes in a 1-star review.

The Boston Underground Film Festival is an “annual celebration of all things gory, gruesome, and grotesque.” Henderson previews the event, which starts Wednesday and includes witches, psychics, body horror, and a pair of high-profile sequels. Also on the schedule: six slates of what one staffer calls “the weirdest, wildest, goriest, and darkest shorts our programming team could find.”

TV & Streaming

“Viral chef” Nick DiGiovanni has a new world record in his sights: largest “Ratatouille” memorabilia collection. “I truly feel it’s the perfect movie for everybody,” the repeat world record collector says of “Ratatouille.” The Boston resident sits for a Q&A with Globe correspondent Lauren Daley, chatting about being an early adopter of TikTok, how he cooked up his own Harvard major, and his possibly controversial taste in pizza.

“Saturday Night Live UK” premieres next week, and US fans can check it out the next day. “[R]umors are flying that former ‘SNL’ head writer Tina Fey will be one of the early hosts,” the Globe’s Lisa Weidenfeld reports. Whoever lands the gig, she foresees “a dose of jokes about British politicians you may or may not know.”

Music

New Kids on the Block have somehow never played Gillette Stadium — until now. The homegrown boy band performs tomorrow at halftime during Boston Legacy FC’s first National Women’s Soccer League game. “The league sounds incredibly exciting,” Joey McIntyre tells the Globe’s Matt Juul. “It’s a great name and very exciting, and we’re happy to be a part of it.”

Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, cultivates “this unique Celtic music that has really stood the test of time.” The island’s rich musical legacy extends to the Boston area, connected by what fiddler Katie McNally calls a “thriving, living highway of musicians.” Globe correspondent Victoria Wasylak, writing for Sound Check, offers a look at a deep-rooted community of “fiddlers, step dancers, singers, curious observers.”

Afghan traditional music “is filled with so much joy,” says pianist-composer Arson Fahim. “I don’t want that to die away.” The Taliban has banned music, but two pieces in tomorrow’s “Concert in Solidarity with Afghan Musicians” originated in the country. “This is music that they would potentially be killed for writing, and yet they still chose to do that,” he tells Globe correspondent Annie Sarlin. “That just goes to show that music can’t be silenced.”

Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess has a collaborator he compares to “a talented student.” jam_bot is “a machine learning model designed to emulate his playing style and improvise while performing alongside him,” Sarlin reports. Developed at MIT, where Rudess is a visiting artist, the tool “is a combination of the most exciting, thrilling technology space that we’ve ever been in, with the most possibilities that I’ve ever seen.”

A decade in the Boston area put Anjimile on the path to becoming “one of modern folk’s most unflinching storytellers.” Relocating to Durham, N.C., helped immensely. The move “made me realize how much undue pressure I was putting on myself,” he tells Wasylak. “Living in this community has really helped heal that perspective.” His new album, “You’re Free to Go,” drops today.

Museums & Visual Art

“New Acquisitions,” at Harvard’s Houghton Library, includes one “bewilderingly humble” element. A photograph of a Japanese-American couple destined for the Manzanar concentration camp makes the Globe’s Mark Feeney consider the “flesh-and-blood terribleness the US government inflicted on citizens and legal residents.” Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams figure into this story, a must read if ever there was one.

The 82nd Whitney Biennial, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, embraces “the philosophy of no philosophy of the show’s curatorial framework.” With some encouraging exceptions, “there’s less a feeling of caution here than just being stuck,” Globe art critic Murray Whyte writes from New York. He found “For a generation reared on the internet, maybe it just makes sense. But as a human being yearning for something shared and meaningful, no luck.”

Theater

David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic” is “consistently engrossing, often funny, often dead-serious, and loaded with moments that carry the force of emotional truth.” Centered on a Fleetwood Mac-style band recording an album, the play “runs two hours and 50 minutes, including an intermission, but you’re likely to lose yourself so completely that the time will fly by,” writes Globe theater critic Don Aucoin. Through Sunday.

The psychological thriller “Wait Until Dark” was a play before it was an Audrey Hepburn film. Eliza Barmakian, who is legally blind, stars in the Greater Boston Stage Company’s production as Susan, who recently lost her sight. “[I]t’s crucial that Barmakian quickly get the audience on Susan’s side, and she does,” Aucoin writes. She “communicates Susan’s humor, her vulnerability, and the depth of the inner resources she draws upon.”

Jordan Harrison is “smart about the small details.” In his time-hopping play “The Antiquities,” his “approach is to steadily examine and dramatize the implications of AI in an unblinking, here’s-the-road-we-might-be-on manner,” says Aucoin. The SpeakEasy Stage production has a cast of nine, and their “collective effort adds up to a textbook illustration of how to generate maximum impact from an ensemble piece.”

Keiko Green’s “You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World!” is “extremely attuned to the emotional subtleties faced by the dying and their immediate families.” The Company One production “works as both a drama about coming to terms with the end of one’s life and a high-spirited but deadly serious piece of climate-change agitprop,” writes Globe reviewer Ty Burr.

Dance

The Jar aims “to inspire individuals to connect to folks like them and not like them through the arts.” Founder and executive director Guy Ben-Aharon says the nonprofit’s programming “is like an adventure for people willing to go somewhere they’ve never been.” Starting at a samba event in Cambridge, Globe correspondent Karen Campbell looks at a phenomenon Ben-Aharon calls “intentionally joyful, a real moment of human connection at a time of real discord.”

Books