Oscars so gray

Arthouse hues. (“Women Talking” still.)

You could be forgiven for thinking some of this year’s Academy Award best picture nominees were shot in black and white. They were not.

But several of the entries, even the excellent ones, look drained.

There’s the sorrowful grayscale of both the engrossing “Women Talking” and the despairing “All Quiet on the Western Front” — palettes that might be called bloodless, except that, in these violent and at times grisly films, black blood pours liberally from grayish gashes in cadaverous flesh.

And the clouds don’t just hang heavy over the war-is-hell movie set in the corpse-choked German trenches (“All Quiet”) or the movie about the voluble Mennonite women trapped in a community of prolific rapists who use livestock tranquilizers on their victims (“Women Talking”).