This is the fifth installment of our reality series about Nathanael and Christina Matanick, young filmmakers who won Best Film at the 168 Film Festival, earning a prize of up to $1 million to make a feature-length film through EchoLight Studios. We’re following the filmmakers month-by-month as they try to create in a way that glorifies our Creator.

In a world where Woody Allen can get a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes at the same time his adopted daughter accuses him of sexually abusing her when she was a child (Allen has repeatedly denied it), and where a film The Wolf of Wall Street sets a record for use of the F-word, it is a wonderment that an obscure, low-budget film called Alone Yet Not Alone has had its Best Original Song Oscar nomination withdrawn for allegedly violating ethical rules.

I was a little embarrassed when my daughter phoned in the middle of the afternoon the other day and asked, “What are you doing?” and I had to say, “Watching the Miley Cyrus video.” But I didn’t see the stunt when everyone else was talking about it right after the 2013 Video Music Awards, and I wondered if there was something I needed to learn about the State of the Union. Which it turned out there was: Miley Cyrus has two nubby horns on her head and the longest tongue I have ever seen, and did inscrutable things with it. And that’s how I will always remember her.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has rescinded its Oscar nomination of “Alone Yet Not Alone” for best original song, saying the composer inappropriately promoted it among voting academy members. Performed by quadriplegic author and speaker Joni Eareckson Tada, the song from the independent Christian film of the same name gained overnight fame when it received the surprise nomination two weeks ago.

In the car last week, I heard a song I hadn’t heard or thought about for years: “With a Song in My Heart.” It’s a beautiful melody, I told my husband. But even as I was saying it, something was bothering me. The heart has a memory that the mind knows nothing of, and it was my heart that was disturbed, even as my musical sensibility was pleased.

NEW YORK—In the film Gimme Shelter, which hits theaters today, a homeless, pregnant teenager named Apple goes to an appointment for an abortion, which her uninvolved Wall Street father arranged. Apple (Vanessa Hudgens) looks at an ultrasound photo of her baby and decides she can't do it.