Another year; another list of Best Picture nominees. Here are my rankings from previous years: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

Each year I choose one film I particularly enjoyed that doesn’t quite fit the mold of Best Picture. This year I was considering Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man, which I thought held together better than the prior Benoit Blanc outing, but honestly I can’t quite call it a great film, and if it had fully delivered on what it was trying to accomplish I expect it would have been nominated.

Instead let me praise James Gunn’s Superman. People often talk about superhero fatigue, but mostly I feel like I suffer from MCU fatigue: the canon is now so extensive and the movie-to-movie tie-ins so complex that the weight is oppressive. In only a few seconds of on-screen text Superman assures us we can leave all that behind: no origin story; no elaborate references required; we’re joining a quirky and lighthearted romp with a refreshingly simple (not anti-)hero. Gunn also manages to defuse the fundamental problem with the Superman story in general: in this telling, Superman’s desperate wish not to empower authoritarians is right up front, and that opening text makes it clear that he’s not all-powerful.

I must also say that Rachel Brosnahan offers the first portrayal of Lois Lane who actually appeals to me.

Gunn’s Superman, in production for years before Trump was even elected for a second term, also gets credit for pissing off the MAGA die-hards. Listen, dudes: condemnation of secret prison camps where immigrants are tortured with no due process isn’t new. You’re the ones who decided to cheer on comic-book-villain-level evil.

The Nominees

Unlike most years, I don’t think any of the nominated films this year are truly bad. Fully half of them, however, I consider catastrophically flawed: enjoyable in their way, but so obviously broken that it’s a bit of an embarrassment any were nominated for Best Picture. Two more nominees were well-executed, but not particularly ambitious. The final three were all clever, well-made, and each novel in its way. Within each of these three bands my rankings are somewhat arbitrary; tastes differ. (If you disagree with my three bands, your tastes are incorrect.)

As always, a few words about each film from worst to best, starting with:

The Fatally Flawed

10. The Secret Agent

Let’s offer the worst nominee of the year a compliment sandwich.

The production design was immaculate. I’m sure there are wonks who could find a few details that weren’t accurate to 1970s Brazil, but I found the setting (both time and place) totally immersive. And this isn’t incidental to the film’s themes: you can feel what it must have been like to live in a “time of mischief”, with all the paranoia and confusion and squalor that entails.

That said, it seems like a lot of work to go through just to tell such a dull and meandering story. It’s not just that the pace was slow; there was no real momentum, with the general menace offered by cuts to the hitmen falling entirely flat with not even an attempt at urgency, and the “find my mother’s id record!” quest entirely superfluous to the story.

This was last year’s I’m Still Here with better production values but a much worse script.

The acting performances were excellent. (I assume. I wouldn’t know if they were saying the wrong words.)

9. Sentimental Value

I loved the opening sequence following our lead’s battle with stage fright. I was sure we’d be in good hands for the rest of the film. Unfortunately, that was the highlight. It was all very competently made and performed, but it was both tedious and obvious. The easy dismissal would be that I have a bias against films about filmmaking, but I don’t accept this as mere personal preference: Sentimental Value is just more evidence that filmmakers lose all empathy for their audience when they’re telling stories about their own obsession. Again, there will never be a movie about the importance and drama of software engineering anything like as self-indulgent as all these movies about movies, and that’s not an argument for engineering movies…

8. Frankenstein

This was my biggest disappointment among the nominees. Frankenstein was the project Guillermo del Toro was born to make. Decades of mulling over what he’d do with one of the most remade tales in the western canon seems to have paralyzed him. I think my frustration is that del Toro doesn’t actually pick a story to tell or a theme to explore, but instead merely references all the plotpoints and themes of every incarnation.

Obviously the production design is the best version of Frankenstein that’s ever been on screen. It’s a beautiful film. But it just doesn’t make any sense. To pick a few examples:

  • Victor’s character. He’s cold, calculating, and focused…but also flies into an impotent rage at his monster. Just because. He’s dedicated his entire life to the single-minded pursuit of science…until he just shrugs his shoulders and gives it up. If you want an explanation for why you have to go to one of the other adaptations; del Toro will reference them but won’t offer a justification of his own. Victor’s aspiration and frustration with his creation is that it’s a brute creature lacking human intelligence, who he swears to save if it could utter a single coherent thought…and when his monster re-emerges speaking fluent English he is neither surprised nor interested.

  • The monster is attacked, multiple times. Hunters shoot the man-shaped figure in a cloak on sight for some reason. They outright murder the curious creature from afar and then just leave him lying in the snow to recover. And Victor “hunts” the monster to the literal ends of the earth despite the decisive conclusion that he’s no match for it. These are all just things that happen for the sake of setting up the next scene; none of them are part of any coherent premise.

  • An admittedly minor nitpick, but the moment I fully gave up on the film: the blind man asks the monster to pass him a bottle of brandy, and the creature drops it. It smashes on the floor. Why? “You’re nervous, aren’t you?” That’s it. The creature isn’t clumsy. The poor blind man doesn’t care that his (only?) bottle is gone, and the creature expresses no guilt. It’s just one more tiny event that works only as symbol and metaphor without have any literal consequences at all.

It’s a real shame that del Toro couldn’t choose an angle on Frankenstein, because as 2023’s Poor Things showed us it’s a framework for a skilled filmmaker to tell any number of new stories.

7. Hamnet

Q: The written pitch I got just says the film will be about “the most emotionally devastating thing ever…” What is that?

A: Isn’t it obvious? It’s about a child dying. From the parents’ perspective.

Q: Right. Okay. So this is the culmination of some complex plot during which we learn about the parents and the death offers insight into their characters?

A: Not really. The kid just gets sick and dies.

Q: The pitch also says “…in the most dramatic setting…”?

A: Elizabethan England. And listen: we’re going to need a budget on this one, because I want this to be the definitive take on the squalor of the era. Incredibly historically accurate.

Q: It kind of seems like what makes losing a child so affecting to modern audiences is how rare it is. The sense that you’ve failed as a parent; the judgement, whether real or perceived; the isolation…isn’t that whole experience undermined by setting the story in a time period when fully half of all children didn’t make it to adulthood?

A: We won’t mention that. It’ll be a movie about the modern notion of losing a child as a life-defining event.

Q: I thought historical accuracy was your thing?

A: Not for the theme of the movie. I meant that, like, everybody’s fingernails are going to be really, really filthy. Dirty faces. Freckles.

Q: Isn’t this going to come across as emotionally manipulative and low-brow?

A: Aw hell no, dawg. Because here’s the best part: these aren’t just any parents. The father is William M-Fing Shakespeare. Nobody’s been allowed to call Shakespeare emotionally manipulative and low-brow for centuries.

Q: Brilliant. And we get to learn about Shakespeare’s genius, how he learned his craft, how success and fame changed him?

A: No. I guess we’ll have to mention some of that but we’ll put it off screen. This is really just about how his kid got sick and died. We’ll focus mostly on the mom.

Q: So she has a kid, the kid dies, she has deeply anachronistic emotional reactions, and that’s it?

A: Oh no. The last half hour is excerpts from Hamlet. Which is Shakespeare’s play about death.

Q: They’re all about death.

A: But this is the one everybody’s heard of. Plus Hamlet was the kid’s name. More or less.

Q: Is a play about an indecisive adult vowing revenge for his father’s murder the best metaphor for losing a child?

A: During the play we’ll cut to the parents crying. And if the parents get the parallel, no audience is going to admit they don’t. Seriously, bro: everybody knows Hamlet is the deepest shit ever. It’s got to be at least a little about losing a child.

Q: And you promise the fingernails will be dirty?

A: So dirty.

Q: Sold.

6. Bugonia

I really liked this movie. For a while. It’s not particularly artfully shot, but it’s a fun little romp with crisp writing and great performances. It has a sense of humor. It started developing nuanced takes on class in America, on conspiracy and loyalty and madness, on the price corporate leaders pay for their positions, and maybe even on the ambiguity of “justice” as a concept. For a while.

Less than halfway through, however, a fear emerged from deep within me. They weren’t going to do the obvious thing, were they? The trite, painful copout to undermine everything else? Maybe if they threw in that twist now they’d still have time to atone for it. But they weren’t throwing it in now, so surely that meant they wouldn’t do something so discrediting at all. They’d play it straight. They’d follow through.

And for the rest of the film the themes didn’t really develop. The characters didn’t deepen. The details that could have provided insight didn’t just fail to appear; it felt like they were dodged at every opportunity.

There were a few strange lines that didn’t make sense. I literally groaned when it became clear they were actually going to do it.

Yet they made it to the finish line! They wrapped up the plot without totally ruining the setup! You could squint your eyes a little and still write that think piece about the commentary the movie hinted at without ever quite pinning down.

Then they tacked on the coda. One somehow both crushingly prosaic and utterly incompatible with the plot as we’ve seen it. One just explicitly undercutting any possible depth.

Sigh.

Let’s move on to the films without such glaring problems:

The Well-Executed

5. Train Dreams

What’s to say beyond that I liked it? A simple story, beautifully shot, that successfully makes the constant current of loss feel sweet. I don’t think this is sufficiently ambitious to be Best Picture, at least not in a year with three films that took bigger swings and connected on them, but a very solid entry.

4. F1

I feel like we went through this with Ted Lasso. “An American college football coach goes to England to coach a Premier League team” is a banal premise with niche appeal, but (for one season, at least) the execution was extraordinary and we ended up with a series that pretty much everyone enjoyed. It wasn’t deep like Breaking Bad nor innovative like Seinfeld nor heart-wrenching like Fleabag, but it was a fun story that made a legitimate effort to say something meaningful.

Maybe F1 doesn’t have quite the same aspiration to “meaningful”, but it’s a similarly simple niche premise that derives wide appeal from exceptional execution. Pitt radiates charisma. He’s paired with a attractive but age-appropriate (by Hollywood standards) love interest. The side characters are even more one-dimensional, but they’re likable and the film respects them. The plot is well-paced, with a clear structure for the audience to follow and rising stakes. Finally, the “action” is immersive and exciting, with strategy and detail dumbed down just enough to cater to audiences who have no experience with motorsport without feeling patronising.

There are so many ways this movie could have been stupid, boring, or obnoxious, and somehow they managed to thread the needle between all of them. It’s great to know that big dumb movies can still be well-crafted and lovable.

Art

I usually end up writing more about the best nominees than the worse ones, but my overall thoughts on the three real contenders are similar. These are all beautifully-made films with rich characters and well-developed themes. They’re all novel (or at least quirky) in their own ways, but more than that they all have a sense of fun. Just watch them. They may not totally resonate with you, but it’s difficult to argue that any of them are anything less than great filmmaking.

With that out of the way, a few specific points about each, any of which I’d be happy to see win Best Picture:

3. Sinners

I have this ranked third mainly because despite a strong case that it’s the freshest and most innovative of the three, the themes didn’t quite grab me the way the others did. (I’m sure if I spent more of my life immersed in Black culture and history my perspective would be different—to refuse to acknowledge that is to also deny how many Oscar nominees underserve minority audiences.)

But what surprised me more is that this film is partly a celebration of music…and I didn’t really like the music. If you’d asked me if I was into twangy southern guitar I’d have said I was on board, but for whatever reason it left me cold and disappointed. Sometimes you can’t even predict your own tastes.

Of the many pluses to this film, it has to be mentioned that they nailed the effects. It’s all too common to think that good effects are flashy, but the harder trick is to make them inconspicuous. Jordan’s double act is seamless, and you don’t even realize that things like one character passing a cigarette to another are show-off-level effects work because they feel totally natural. I didn’t notice a single moment compromised to accomodate that you didn’t actually have two actors playing against each other—a tribute both to the overall filmmaking and to Jordan’s impressive (and realistically contrasting-but-similar) performances.

2. One Battle After Another

There is simply “more” in this film than any of the other nominees. Every character has depth and interest, and I think part of the fun is knowing that different audiences are going to have different favorites: the film doesn’t force you to choose. It’s well-written, well-acted, and beautifully shot.

But this nominee has one thing that completely shocked me. I’ve probably seen hundreds of car chases in movies. Some good, some bad. I didn’t think it was possible to do something genuinely new with a car chase any more. This was new. It was gripping. I loved it. All the characters aside, I’d be happy to see this win for that one sequence alone.

1. Marty Supreme

Oddly, my favorite of these last three is the easiest to hate. I can understand plenty of audiences respecting the craft but being left cold by a full complement of generally unlikeable characters. For whatever reason, I was into it. I’ll restrict my comments to two points:

First, the 2019 Adam Sandler drama Uncut Gems. I hated that film. It absolutely nailed its tone of constantly-accelerating catastrophe driven my a manic and deeply broken lead (with an excellent performance by Sandler), but I couldn’t find any redeemable attributes in any of the characters. I quickly found myself rooting for them to lose. And quickly.

Marty Supreme succeeds on all the terms Uncut Gems does, but Marty at least has one thing going for him: he has purpose. You can argue that he’s motivated purely by ego, but at least he’s channeled that ego into being the best at something. Accomplishing something. That may not redeem him as a character or a person, but his singular focus makes it easy to take his side even knowing it’s ridiculous and pointless. And that’s kind of the essence of the film: at the end of the day it’s all ridiculous and pointless, so you may as well make the best of it.

Second, while Marty is clearly our hero I’ve never seen a film that so effortlessly establishes every single side character as an obvious lead of their own movie. All movies I’d watch! And this theme comes to a head in the utterly unhinged “I’m a vampire!” monolog Marty gets from his erstwhile sponsor/enemy. Which Marty totally brushes off as just more nonsense from one more NPC who’s unworthy of serious attention. Marty is deeply unlikeable because he is a sociopath, but that sociopathy is played not as some Hollywood stereotype of sadism; he’s simply constantly surrounded by fascinating characters and never has any empathy for (or interest in) any of them.

(I learned only later that this vampire thing was originally meant to be a plot point and final twist, ala the coda to Sinners. Frankly, I think it works far better as an insane aside that the audience can do with as they like.)

Final verdict: Marty Supreme is the nominee I enjoyed the most, but I’d be perfectly happy if Sinners or One Battle took home the statue instead. Best of luck to all three.