Ranking the Best Picture nominees

What deserves to win on Sunday night?

It’s Oscar week, everyone!

I’m going to admit I’m not as invested in this year’s festivities as I have been in years past. Part of it is just that life is so busy that the Academy Awards just sit at the back of my mind and occasionally I’ll think “oh yeah, that’s coming up.” And part of it is that I just can’t get too excited about this year’s crop of nominees.

Don’t get me wrong: I like almost all of the nominated films to some degree. But only two of the Best Picture nominees ended up on my top 10 list (and my #1 pick isn’t even among the nominees). Several of the movies were in my runners up list but…who wants to cheer for the runners up? When I think about what I’m most excited to see happen in Sunday night’s show, I’m most anticipating Conan O’ Brien’s hosting duties. It will be fun but this year feels particularly obligatory.

But obligatory is the name of the game when it comes to critics and the Oscars, and I’m sure I’d be considered neglecting my duties if I didn’t write a bit about them. But first, I wanted to just focus on the Best Picture race. I’ve seen all 10 of the nominees. I’ll get into my thoughts on who I think will win and should win on Friday. But I thought it might be fun just to rank them – I’ve reviewed several of them, but some are movies I got around to but was never able to write about.

So, in ascending order, here is my rank of this year’s Best Picture Oscar nominees.

10. Emilia Pérez

I don’t understand the love for this one, nor do I quite get the hate. It’s a perfectly mediocre movie that swings for something big and never quite connects. But I appreciate the attempt. Jacques Audiard’s film is many things, but boring isn’t one of them. It’s interesting and well intentioned. Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón are both really good, and Selena Gomez does what she can with an anemic role. It has some compelling things to say about identity and whether a person can truly change. But narratively, it’s a mess, a tangle of plots that crash into each other, tones that never cohere and musical sequences that are never organically integrated or especially memorable. For all its bigness, it should be more fun. For all its compelling ideas, it should end with more than a telenovela climax.

9. Wicked

I like Wicked. It is well acted and supremely entertaining, with a final moment that propels audiences out on a high. I’m looking forward to seeing Wicked: For Good next Thanksgiving. But is Wicked a great movie? We’ve had several better musicals released in the last 10 years, from Tick, Tick…Boom and Spielberg’s West Side Story to In the Heights (from Wicked director Jon Chu). I’m glad Wicked is good and I hope it means we get more musicals. I’m glad it found an audience. But in terms of recognition, to quote Don Draper: That’s what the money's for.

8. Dune: Part II

I have a weird experience with the Dune movies. When I see them, I’m a fan. I think Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Dune: Part II are amazing bits of spectacle, and have more on their mind than the usual studio blockbusters. But honestly? They evaporate from my brain shortly after I see them. I don’t spend a ton of time mulling them over, and I’m not especially compelled to revisit them. I don’t know if it’s my fault or the movies’. Had I seen it in, say, December, maybe I’d be more passionate. But I saw Dune: Part II in bone-rattling IMAX over a year ago and it blew away like sand in the wind within a week.

7. A Complete Unknown

James Mangold’s musical biopic about the early days of Bob Dylan’s career is one of the better examples of the genre post Walk Hard (a movie that parodied Mangold’s own Walk the Line). Chalamet is really good as Dylan, his enigmatic take helping bolster the movie’s portrait of Dylan’s mystique. A Complete Unknown is a well-made movie, but there are numerous better and more interesting films about Dylan. And as a Dylan agnostic, I don’t know that this really grabbed me the way it might long-time fans.

6. Nickel Boys

I wish I loved Nickel Boys as much as many other critics do. It’s an important story, and a powerful one. In a culture struggling and failing to understand the harm of systematic racism and entrenched prejudice, this is a movie that asks us to live behind the eyes of people suffering abuse. But the first-person aspect – the element that makes it so unique and powerful for many – kept me at arm’s length just as often as it drew me in. It was a distraction when it should have been most immersive, and I spent much of the film analyzing the technique instead of living in the story. Of all the best picture nominees, this is the one I most feel like I need to see again to see if I can better fall under its spell when I’m not being taken out by its form.

5. The Substance

I may not love The Substance, but I love that it’s nominated for Best Picture. Imagining old fuddy-duddy Oscar voters sitting through this movie’s Troma-adjacent final moments fills me with glee. And for about two hours of its run time, I was completely onboard with this deranged, provocative work. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are wonderful, and this modern, ultra-icky update of The Picture of Dorian Gray is a lot of gross fun. Fargeat’s style is on point and the movie constantly surprised me. While I applaud how gnarly and unhinged it becomes in its final act, however, I think going big is a misstep for a film that needs a more intimate, character-based ending. And I understand that Dennis Quaid’s character is supposed to be a depiction of sleazy, gross masculinity, but every one of his scenes took me out of the movie. This one’s probably a case of being a film that I admire but is not probably just not to my taste.

4. Conclave

I’m really glad audiences found Conclave, which is one of last year’s most exciting and watchable thrillers – not bad for a PG-rated film set in the Vatican. It’s a tremendously acted, well-written film, with themes that highlight the need for change and potential for corruption in both religious and secular institutions. I wouldn’t be upset if this won; it’s a really good movie. But my line on Conclave has always been that it’s so memorable because it’s not a great or Important movie. It’s an airplane read of a film and that’s a feature, not a bug.

3. I’m Still Here

This is why Oscars are so important. I hadn’t heard hardly anything about Walter Salles’ drama – also nominated for Best International Feature – until it began collecting nominations. I’m glad I was alerted to it because it’s one of last year’s best films, an emotional epic about the defiant act of living a normal life in a state of oppression. The film might take place largely in 1970s Brazil, but it feels eerily similar to our environment of rapidly encroaching fascism. Fernanda Torres gives one of the best performances of last year as a wife and mother driven to advocacy while still trying to give her kids a normal life. I saw this film well after I filed my Top 10 list; otherwise, it would have been on there.

2. Anora

Few people humanize the people who fall through society’s cracks like Sean Baker does. His films are empathetic and harrowing, pulsating with life and joy while also remaining clear-eyed about how the world works and how rare it is for the disenfranchised to move forward. Anora might be his masterpiece. Mikey Madison buys herself a career blank check as the titular girl, a young sex worker who finds a ticket to a better life when she befriends the son of a Russian oligarch. For much of Anora’s run time, it’s an entertaining, very funny romp. But Baker remains aware of how many strings the wealthy can pull and just how much they hate it when someone on a lower tier tries to break free of the status quo. Hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure. I understand its graphic sexual content is not going to make it a sell for many, but I appreciate that Baker is telling these stories.

1. The Brutalist

Brady Corbet’s epic immigrant story is a colossal achievement, told with staggering scale. It is big, and yet it’s intimate — the story of a man trying to make a name for himself, yet being squeezed by the forces of American capitalism. Adam Brody and Guy Pearce give career-best performances, and I still cannot believe the detail and scope of this film, nor how its three-and-a-half-hour run time flies by. And as we watch the forces of America’s wealthy exploit and demean immigrants on the news, this story feels increasingly vital and resonant day by day.