Thursday brought us this year’s Oscar nominations, kicking off the second phase of a campaign season that has already been at a full simmer since – believe it or not – September. Yes, a single night of celebrity back-patting has evolved into a six-month industry in Hollywood – a wearisome process that at least seems more worthwhile when the presumed frontrunner is as marvellous as Boyhood (Universal, 15). Richard Linklater’s sprawling, sweet-and-sour chronicle of a life in progress has chugged along insouciantly since the summer, raking in prizes as sundry supposed awards magnets have fallen.

You know the trick by now. Working annually with the same quartet of actors over 12 years, Linklater’s film examines the shifting makeup and mood of an ordinary Texan family, concentrating its attention on youngest son Mason (Ellar Coltrane) – who enters the film a bright, unusual six-year-old, and exits a still-precocious college freshman. Boyhood’s (admittedly few) detractors have attributed its success thus far to stunt value, but the film is novel rather than a novelty. As in his Before Sunrise trilogy, Linklater creases his time-lapse gimmick with such loose, humane humour and recognisably specific surges of feeling that we barely notice the practical magic he’s pulling off before our eyes. Everything and nothing happens across nearly three hours of changing circumstances, relationships and hairdos; it’s the tension between such progress and the fundamental constant of a person’s character that makes Boyhood languidly riveting.

For those bowled over by Boyhood’s unassuming experiment, Michael Winterbottom’s undervalued Everyday is essential companion viewing, comparable if more compact in form – and happily available to stream on 4OD. Filmed over five years, with a peak-form Shirley Henderson and John Simm intricately tracking the psychological evolution of hard-bitten spouses separated by a prison sentence, it’s among the most conceptually and emotionally complete efforts in Winterbottom’s extensive oeuvre.

If the machinations of awards season have thus far done well in bringing Boyhood to the fore, they’ve been inexplicably remiss in other areas: I remain surprised that the seemingly irresistible combination of posthumous sentiment and extraordinary merit has reaped no recognition whatsoever for the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s wry, crackling, finally gut-twisting performance as a curdled German espionage agent in Anton Corbijn’s superb A Most Wanted Man (E1, 15) – a John Le Carré adaptation to stand proudly alongside the more celebrated Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in its crisp, gruff intelligence.

Meanwhile, in a best actress race declared the sparsest in years by many pundits, the invisibility of former Saturday Night Live star Jenny Slate – a fizzing, fiercely fast-witted revelation in Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child (Koch Media, 15) – shows up voters’ ongoing resistance to comedy. Or at least to romantic comedy as blithely progressive and freshly feminist as this one, in which a shambolic standup comedian’s life is brought into focus by an unwanted pregnancy – though not in the tidily conservative way you might expect. Wise and even-handed in parsing the choices of contemporary womanhood, it’s a milestone too full of raucous gags to ever announce itself as one.

The week’s other releases have been more justifiably ignored in the trophy run – though if anyone wants to hand a most well-sculpted ensemble prize to The Riot Club (Universal, 15), Lone Scherfig’s diverting but insight-challenged portrait of elite Oxford hedonism, I shan’t stand in their way. Liam Neeson is angling for some kind of consistent-performance certificate in A Walk Among the Tombstones (E1, 15), the umpteenth scowling, storm-hued revenge thriller of his later career; by degrees, it’s more tasteful and articulate than Non-Stop or Unknown, but rather less fun. Still, he’s giving it more gusto than two of his contemporaries this week, Academy Award winners both. In The Giver (Ev, 12), Phillip Noyce’s crushingly inert adaptation of Lois Lowry’s gleaming children’s sci-fi classic, Jeff Bridges plays his every scene as if recently roused from a nap; Jeremy Irons, on the other hand, appears on the brink of falling into one throughout Night Train to Lisbon (Bulldog, 12), a hilariously flaccid queen of Europuddings that traces a fusty classics professor’s journey of moderate self-discovery with all the conviction of cold caldo verde. Congratulations to this year’s Oscar class – but consider these films a cautionary tale.