It’s Oscar season again, and once again I’ve watched and ranked all the Best Picture nominees (so you don’t have to). Here are my previous rankings from 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

Each year I choose one non-nominee I particularly recommend, and this year I’m not choosing a film (of which I’ve seen quite few over the past year). Instead I’m recommending Severance, Apple TV+’s brilliant (and wildly popular) streaming series. I won’t pretend I entirely understand what the creators are trying to say about work and corporate life, much less that I agree with it. (Hollywood is notoriously terrible at representing any industry beyond entertainment.) The series is, however, the most thought-provoking piece of media I’ve encountered in years, and although it’s really the first season from 2022 that deserves most of the credit, the 2025 follow-on continues to engage.

I wouldn’t say that I found any of this year’s Best Picture nominees outright terrible, but I’d call three of the films at least kinda bad, three mid, three genuinely good, and one outstanding. Here is my ranking, from worst to best:

10. Emilia Pérez

Apparently Emilia Pérez was at one point the frontrunner for Best Picture, and their campaign was completely derailed when the woke brigade discovered some Bad Social Media Posts by the lead. To me this is a damning indictment of wokism, because this should never have been considered a good film in the first place.

The plot outline is genuinely interesting. I’d offer this an Oscar nod based on the one-page synopsis alone. And yet every aspect of that outline’s implementation is utterly terrible. I found myself wishing a competent team would take a stab at making a real version of this story instead of the ridiculous student-film experiment we get here.

It’s a musical, for some reason. I don’t get it, but fine. I’ll run with it. Yet I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out how the musical numbers connected to the main film. The characters are so underdrawn every song seemed to be “here’s a possible way a person in this situation might feel…” even though the actual on-screen events didn’t justify that (always trite) feeling.

Beyond that, apparently the performers were coached to sing terribly? I initially thought that the whisper-talking vocals were merely to cover for actors with no voice training…and then realized I was watching Selena f*cking Gomez not-sing. It just makes me angry.

9. The Substance

Let’s talk about the British television anthology series Black Mirror.

This is squarely in my wheelhouse: speculative fiction; tech (and tech culture); even British. I can’t not watch this show. There have been occasional episodes that I find entertaining or thoughtful (San Junipero was good), but for me it’s a hate watch. I loathe the program and want them to stop making them so I no longer feel obliged to stay up to date.

The problem with Black Mirror is that every episode has one idea. Exactly one idea. Black Mirror worries that the audience will not grasp The Idea, so they make sure to explain The Idea, over and over again, in hopes that the dumbest people they could possibly imagine might catch up. Black Mirror does not introduce The Idea into our world and see how this world is distorted by it; instead it builds an entirely new world around The Idea, to the extent that The World is almost metaphor. A mere scaffold or plinth upon which to display The Idea. To me, this denudes The Idea of any interest whatsoever. It is the antithesis of everything that I find engaging in speculative fiction.

Suffice it to say that The Substance has all the depth and nuance of a (bad) episode of Black Mirror. And without exaggeration, its Idea merited the runtime of one television episode. The indulgent lengths of Oscar nominees is one of my longstanding complaints, but I have never before encountered a nominee that I thought was literally three times too long. Forty-five minutes in I started looking at my watch, and every ten minutes after that I looked down in shock at just how much more I still had to go. Even I eventually get tired of gawking at Margaret Qualley’s ass.

8. The Brutalist

I don’t get it. I don’t understand what the filmmakers thought they were saying. I don’t understand what they expected us to make of the protagonist. Or any of the characters, in fact. I don’t understand why they showed us these parts of the story and not others; I don’t understand why they introduced and abandoned the characters they did at different points; I don’t understand why they chose architecture, or Brutalism, or Philadelphia. I don’t understand anything about what they expected this film to be. The whole thing just struck me as aping the style of old-school great-man (and immigration) sagas without any original substance of its own.

I could dwell on the many specific choices leading to the above-mentioned confusion, but The Brutalist has already stolen too much of my life. Let me make a point that is perhaps more fundamental:

This is a film about architecture, even more so than Citizen Kane is about journalism or Amadeus is about music. And the architecture totally sucks. I don’t just mean “Brutalism is ugly architecture”, although I believe that. I mean we never see any building actually used for anything. We see a beautiful space turned into the most uninviting reading room I’ve ever seen, which gets photographed for a lifestyle magazine but in which nobody ever reads. We get hours and hours of obsession with a theater and a gymnasium and a chapel but not even a hint of how the spaces will be laid out, let alone the suggestion of a human occupying any such space for any reason. We get a brief defense of Brutalism: that concrete is a cheap, versatile, practical material that democratizes large-scale construction…that stands in stark contrast to an entire film about an expensive and elitist project with constant delays and cost over-runs. And a trip halfway around the world for expensive, special-purpose, finicky marble. Which is never connected back to the building they’re constructing? In short, this film does nothing to dispel the strawman of Brutalist architecture as the creation of props for heavily-cropped black-and-white photography.

And that’s without even mentioning the utterly absurd speech about our protagonist’s work that ends the film, again just thoroughly contradicting every single moment we’ve seen.

7. Nickel Boys

An entirely forgettable story made by people who aren’t even sufficiently committed to their gimmicky camera angle to use it consistently.

6. Wicked

I was expecting to love Wicked. I’m no student of Broadway musicals, but I pretty consistently enjoy them, Wicked has a cult following, and “let’s look at this from the perspective of the villain” is pretty central to my worldview.

Wicked is…fine. Plotwise, it’s a huge disappointment because it trailed off almost as badly as 2021’s Dune (Part 1) did. You don’t get a pass for failing to deliver on the story I paid to see. But the part of that story that is delivered is the deeply corrosive fantasy that some people are simply born with great power, and this has nothing to do with any work they invest in earning it.

The biggest surprise is that I thought the music was not good. With few exceptions the entire film was a long recitative: not an actual song with melodies and verses but merely rhythmically-delivered dialog. And what melody was applied to this dialog seemed to apply the same “never repeat yourself” philosophy of recitatives to the music itself. Every time we get close enough to a real tune that I was tempted to (at least metaphorically) hum along the composer switches out the “obvious” note for something more surprising. When there is repetition it is less chorus than callback. In short, it seems like music expressly designed for people who watch/listen to the show over and over again, not to be enjoyed the first time through.

The performances are only okay. The singing is impressive (excepting poor Michelle Yeoh, who apparently can’t do everything), but I can’t see it as a replacement for acting and these are characters so devoid of nuance I’m not sure any actor would have been able to sink their teeth into the role.

Despite these complaints, the production design is magical, and the film achieves the immersive spectacle you get from attending a musical in person. On a very specific note: what a weirdly-shaped book! Good job!

5. Dune: Part Two

I’ve watched both “parts” of this film twice: when they were released and then a couple of weeks ago in preparation for writing this. And it’s the only film I’ve been tempted to rewatch yet again in order to better pin down my reactions.

But it’s just not good enough to be worth another rewatch.

I think the core of the problem with Dune is common to many book adaptations: books are just much, much longer than films, and even almost five and a half hours of runtime is nowhere near enough to give the material in the book its due. It’s not that there is that much plot—the outline is pretty easy to summarize—but the whole point of an “epic” is that each plot point is not an event but an accumulation that builds to the inevitable. The film doesn’t show us Lady Jessica’s growing legitimacy as a Fremen, or Paul’s gradual immersion in and acceptance of his destiny, or the emergence of the love between him and Chani. Instead we are merely told that these things happen, and it’s the viewer’s job to accept them to keep up with the story.

I find this particularly frustrating because to me the most compelling aspect of Dune as a story is the way it plays with doubt about every one of these threads. To what extent are people play-acting their roles, and how much play-acting does it take to break any barrier you’ve constructed between the role and yourself? The film just doesn’t offer me the space I need to consider any of this.

These complaints aside, it’s an immersive universe, an engaging story, and a brilliant spectacle. Dune is not a bad film, and there’s a strong argument that it has far more depth and nuance than Star Wars. But in that depth is an aspiration to greatness that it falls well short of, while Star Wars has more modest ambitions which it far exceeds.

4. I’m Still Here

This is the only film I saw in a theater, and that setting always engages me a lot more. It’s possible that if I’d watched this at home like The Brutalist I’d have been bored.

In the event, I’m not sure how objective I could be about a film like this in any case. I spent the entire runtime thinking about America’s current coup. Of course ours is different in detail than Brazil’s tragedy detailed here, but the echoes—in particular a hopeful faith in the remnants of a judicial system—can’t be ignored.

I think the film was well-made, but all I can really say is that I found it compelling and sad and it’s the film I’ve probably thought about most since I saw it.

3. A Complete Unknown

I’ve consistently hated recent Oscar-nominated biopics, and I’d argue that A Complete Unknown fails as a biopic for a lot of the same reasons as I’ve given before. We don’t really get to know Dylan at all: a couple of pithy quotes about others’ jealousy of his talent and the pressure to be who other people want him to be, along with a somewhat pat “he was a childish, selfish jerk to a woman who loved him” story don’t offer much insight into his genius, relationship with fame, or character. It’s a deeper study than 2022’s Elvis or 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, but this character is a lot less interesting than Bernstein in 2023’s Maestro.

While I’d argue this isn’t a great biopic, it is a very engaging film about a particular American moment and culture, with Dylan at its center. So much media and commentary tries to conflate (post-)60s politics and art and rebellion without acknowledging that in many ways all three are in conflict with each other.

Two additional brief points:

  • This Chalamet guy is actually a pretty good actor? With range? Who’da thunk?
  • While folk music has never been my thing, I enjoyed A Complete Unknown purely as a jukebox musical. Maybe a little frustrating that we got so much of the music as little snippets and not full songs, but still a nice range from the era.

2. Conclave

This is not a complex film, nor one with any terribly deep or innovative messages. But the performances are excellent, the characters all have depth, and somehow a “sit and think and talk” plot is consistently engaging, with a rising momentum driven by several different ticking clocks.

My biggest complaint is that the third-act twist struck me as unnecessary, and it cheapened the investment I already had in the story.

The inevitable comparison is to Twelve Angry Men, one of my favorite films.

1. Anora

I can’t recall a year when I’ve had a clearer favorite. I totally understand some people having trouble getting through the first half hour, which seems like it’s just trying to be salacious. But it eventually becomes clear that this was our only chance to see our main character—any character in the film, really—entirely in control and in her element. Which gives a lot of depth to how she handles situations in which she is less confident.

And that is what I adore so much about this film: it is stocked with archetypes we’ve seen and enjoyed dozens of times before, but it ditches the “they’ve done it all a hundred times off-screen” conceit and turns them into actual humans. They’re never comically inept or unsuited to their roles; we’re merely encountering them hitting the boundaries of their finite experience.

The real trick is that it’s a story about people making terrible choices, but every single mistake feels not just well-motivated but downright inevitable. Somehow I felt like I was on every character’s side. (Igor is hands-down my favorite character of the year.) And like so many truly great films, it made me fall a little bit in love with the heroine, with her trying to politely introduce herself to Ivan’s mother (good filmmaking is knowing we don’t need to see her practicing this little prepared speech) the moment we realize both how much she is and that it’s still not nearly enough. Her final pathetic acquiescence to her station in life in response to Ivan’s mother’s (empty) threats wasn’t just heartbreaking, but a commentary on childhood and class and identity more nuanced than anything I could find in any other film this year.

So yes: Anora for the win or the Academy are a bunch of ignorant jerks.