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In many ways, the worst thing about the Academy Awards is that there has to be a winner. Not to be all what-the-world-needs-now-is-love about it, but looking at the Oscars the way most people do — as if it’s cinematic Thunderdome, where nine Best Picture nominees enter and only one of them (if we’re lucky this time) gets its name called to come pick up the big trophy and emerge victorious — is probably the least beneficial way of looking at them, particularly if you want the Oscars to be a force for good in your life.
The Oscars can be a lot of things: a glitzy pageant of the genetically gifted and (therefore) wealthy; the crisis point where art and competition meet; a battle arena where avatars of some people’s vision of the world face off against avatars of other people’s vision of the world, where only one group of constituents will be validated. That’s what seems to be happening more and more lately. It happened last year with Moonlight versus La La Land, which had a kind of “black opportunity versus white mediocrity” narrative grafted upon it. It’s happened again this year as so many of these films get reduced to some incredibly flattening quality — Three Billboards is racist! Lady Bird is feminist! — in order to better package it for Trump’s America, where we fight about everything all day forever.
What gets lost in all that, among other things, is that the Oscars can be a cinematic yearbook, and it can go well beyond the Best Picture category. 59 films — 44 features and 15 shorts — were nominated at least once, in categories from acting to writing to sound mixing. See all of them and you won’t have a fully comprehensive sense of where cinema is at in 2018, but it’s at least a good start. Going beyond Best Picture and traversing the ballot’s more remote corners is where you’ll find foreign-language films, documentaries, animated films; there are the blockbusters in Visual Effects and the small-scale human stories in Documentary Short.
Watching every nominated film is an undertaking — for one thing, not all of these films are easy to track down at the moment — but it’s a massively rewarding one as well. We’re ranking these 59 films, yes, but nearly every one of them is worth watching for some reason or another. It’s a strong Oscar ballot this year. The competition is tough. But the honor of being nominated is what we’re celebrating right here.
'Dear Basketball'
Director: Glen Keane and Kobe Bryant
This is not just haterism for co-director and subject Kobe Bryant, who partnered with famed animator Glen Keane for an admittedly well-animated short film celebrating Kobe’s relationship with the sport that made him a superstar. The problem is … there’s not much in the way of a movie. It’s an ego boost you’d expect to play on the scoreboard before his last home game. An Oscar nomination is a real stretch.
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short Film
'Beauty and the Beast'
Director: Bill Condon
Starring: Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Kevin Kline, Josh Gad, Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci, Audra McDonald, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson
This cash cow of a live-action/CGI remake has raked in over $1.2 billion worldwide for Disney, and hopefully they end up using all that money to make better movies. It’s not just that the film is completely unnecessary. We didn’t need another Cinderella or The Jungle Book either. But those movies managed to avoid fully recreating the animated version — same costumes, same character beats — only with worse acting (sorry, Emma Watson) and uglier animation on the CGI. If you’ve somehow been able to avoid this one so far, keep it that way.
Nominations: (2) Best Costume Design, Best Production Design
'Marshall'
Director: Reginald Hudlin
Starring: Chadwick Boseman, Josh Gad, Kate Hudson, Dan Stevens, Sterling K. Brown, James Cromwell
There is absolutely a story to be told of the life of Thurgood Marshall, but this particular one, which follows the specific time in Marshall’s life when he was a lawyer arguing cases on behalf of the NAACP, is alternately misguided (why is this a two-hander with Josh Gad?) and histrionic. Chadwick Boseman does a good job in the title role, but he can’t elevate it all that high.
Nominations: (1) Best Original Song
'Victoria & Abdul'
Director: Stephen Frears
Starring: Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Eddie Izzard, Adeel Akhtar, Paul Higgins, Michael Gambon
An unofficial sequel to Mrs. Brown, with Judi Dench reprising the role of Queen Victoria that earned her her first Oscar nomination in 1997. There’s nothing terrible about the film, even in its touchy depiction of an Indian man who the Queen takes into her confidence in her waning years. There just isn’t a whole lot to recommend it either.
Nominations: (2) Best Costume Design, Best Make-up and Hairstyling
'The Boss Baby'
Director: Tom McGrath
There’s a temptation to throw this onto the bottom of the list because it’s a movie called The Boss Baby and Alec Baldwin voices the title character, and we’re all really weary of things like Alec Baldwin and babies who are the boss. It’s not the worst movie of the year, but only because there are 2-3 moments in the first half that are clever and bright and funny. The momentum can’t sustain, though.
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Feature
'Loving Vincent'
Director: Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman
For years, the Academy voters in the Best Animated Feature category were virulently resistant to nominating any kind of live-action rotoscoping, even when a movie like Richard Linklater’s Waking Life was so creative and captivating. So it’s kind of irritating that they finally capitulated for this pretty but dreadfully dull Citizen Kane-ing of Vincent Van Gogh.
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Feature
'Kong: Skull Island'
Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts
Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Jing Tian, Toby Kebbell
Evaluating this movie means figuring out how much you value bad-but-interesting versus decent-but-dull. Kong is the former. It’s over-the-top, it doesn’t take any time to develop its characters, it seems to take place completely removed from any sense of time and place, and the action is saturated with so much everything that the first reaction is to laugh rather than to thrill. But … you kind of want to watch it now, don’t you?
Nominations: (1) Best Visual Effects
'Revolting Rhymes'
Director: Jakob Schuh and Jan Lachauer
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short Film
'All the Money in the World'
Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Michelle Williams, Christopher Plummer, Mark Wahlberg, Romain Duris
All due props to Ridley Scott for getting this movie re-shot with Christopher Plummer in the role of J. Paul Getty, though I am not at all sure I’d have thrown him this Supporting Actor nomination for his glowering Mr. Burns turn. It’s not quite the albatross around the film’s neck that Mark Wahlberg is (he takes you out of every single scene he’s in), but it’s also not on the level of Michelle Williams’s high-wire act of accent work and melodrama.
Nominations: (1) Best Supporting Actor
'War For Planet of the Apes'
Director: Matt Reeves
Starring: Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn
The first two movies in the re-booted Apes series were well-received and made a lot of money and were roundly praised, but damned if you could remember much about them even months after you’d seen them. The difference with War is that this one feels a little tedious even as you’re watching it. By film #3, these human/ape conflicts have pretty much played themselves out, even if the CGI on Andy Serkis as Caesar remains incredibly impressive.
Nominations: (1) Best Visual Effects
'On Body and Soul"
Director: Ildikó Enyedi
Starring: Géza Morcsányi, Alexandra Borbély
The concept of this Hungarian nominee for Best Foreign Language Film — that a mismatched pair of co-workers at a bleak Eastern European slaughterhouse are having shared dreams in which they’re both deer — kept me hooked for a while, in anticipation of some kind on wondrous moment of sad magic, but the film is decidedly resistant to anything that might raise the pulse that way. Ultimately, I fell out of its spell.
Nominations: (1) Best Foreign Language Film
'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2'
Director: James Gunn
Starring: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff
As aggressively irreverent as the first one, and your mileage will vary as to how well you click to that. It’s a bit unfortunate that it opened in the same year as Thor: Ragnarok, a movie which did the Marvel-for-people-who-hate-Marvel thing even more spectacularly. Guardians 2 feels mostly like wheel spinning, not really advancing any of the relationships very far (except for my precious Nebula), so you’re really have to be in love with its comedic and action sensibility, and … I’m not.
Nominations: (1) Best Visual Effects
'Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405'
Director: Frank Stiefel
This short film about visual artist Mindy Alper, who suffers from mental illness and whose experiences with electro-shock therapy have informed her life, is a fine overview of her art and her relationship with her mother, but if sometimes feels as thin and fragile as Alper’s papier-mache creations.
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Short Subject
'The Insult'
Director: Ziad Doueiri
Starring: Adel Karam, Kamel El Basha
Having absolutely no subtlety definitely helps when trying to sell English-speaking audiences on a Foreign Language Film nominee in Arabic, which is why I think Lebanon stands a not-crazy shot at taking home their very first trophy in this category. The themes of sectarian hatred and long-held grudges in this movie about a Lebanese Christian and a Palestinian refugee to come to odds over a trivial infraction, are painted in big, broad strokes, making it very watchable, if not quite satisfyingly so.
Nominations: (1) Best Foreign Language Film
'Garden Party'
Director: Victor Caire and Gabriel Grapperon
It takes a minute or two to acclimate to this French story about frogs who encroach upon a country home, and for an animated short film, that’s more of an obstacle than it seems. It’s also one of those student-film thesis projects that ends up as an Oscar nominee, which induces wild jealousy in even the most reasonable of people. But this is a cute film if ultimately there isn’t much in the way of narrative thrust.
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short Film
'LOU'
Director: Dave Mullins and Dana Murray
If you didn’t see Pixar’s latest shot-film nominee, that’s probably because it played before Cars 3. It’s not the best of the Pixar shorts, but there’s also reliable level of quality to these things, so you can’t ever go too wrong. An anthropomorphized lost-and-found box at a kindergarten playground offers quite a few opportunities for creativity. It’s basically the definition of “cute.”
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short Film
'The Greatest Showman'
Director: Michael Gracey
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Michelle Williams, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya
It’s a bad movie, yes, but it’s a hugely watchable bad movie. At some point we’ll all be able to admit that, impending EGOT or no, Pasek & Paul’s songwriting varies wildly between great and terrible. Also, the romantic triangle at play here is a drag, and there’s a corniness at play that’s hard to overcome. But then again, there are musical numbers that work (strangely, though, not “This Is Me,” which plays much better in YouTube videos) and Jackman, Efron, and Zandaya (among others) go a long way to forcing you to like it.
Nominations: (1) Best Original Song
'Ferdinand'
Director: Carlos Saldanha
It was a weak year for animated features, which is reflected in the five nominees for Best Animated Feature. Ferdinand is the Blue Sky/20th Century Fox Animation entry, about a gentle bull who grows up isolated from his kind and then must encounter the bullfighting ring in order to save the day and stuff, and it’s decidedly fine. John Cena doesn’t work out as great as you’d hope as the title character; turns out we kind of have to see his body to get why he’s funny. But Kate McKinnon is aces as Ferdinand’s goat pal. In a stronger year for the category, this would be much more of an afterthought, but it’s not a terrible entry all.
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Feature
'Edith+Eddie'
Director: Laura Checkoway, Thomas Lee Wright
This documentary short about a pair of ninetysomethings who have married each other only to have their families (and the elder-care bureaucracy) try to tear them apart ends up being very sad. But the happy part is that it was executive produced by Cher! She won’t be the one accepting the Oscar if it wins, but if you were looking for a rooting interest, here it is.
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Short Subject
'The Eleven O'Clock'
Director: Derin Seale and Josh Lawson
This live-action short from Australia is the refreshingly comedic entry on the ballot. It’s about a psychiatrist who’s treating a patient who thinks he’s a psychiatrist, and the resulting misunderstandings and frustrations ride the line between sitcommy and just plain funny. It’s a real good time, though, and this year’s live-action shorts are especially heavy, so maybe it has an advantage with voters.
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short Film
'Logan'
Director: James Mangold
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Boyd Holbrook, Stephen Merchant, Richard E. Grant, Dafne Keen
The final (please?) Wolverine movie feature excesses of violence, Professor Xavier saying “fuck,” and a dusty aesthetic that had every critic in America screaming “WESTERN!” at the same time. It also features one of those homicidal pre-teen girls that pop culture is so fond of. It’s a good movie — and an ambitious movie, more importantly — which likely snagged the ultra-rare screenplay nomination for a superhero movie because of the chances it took in giving the Logan and Xavier characters stakes and (in one of their cases, anyway) finality.
Nominations: (1) Best Adapted Screenplay
'My Nephew Emmett'
Director: Kevin Wilson Jr.
A devastating, focused-timeline look at the night of Emmett Till’s 1955 lynching in Mississippi. The film narrows in on merely the time frame that the perpetrators stormed Till’s uncle’s home in the middle of the night and took young Emmett away for the offense of looking at a white woman wrong. The brevity of the film can feel frustrating, though I’m not sure following the events through the actual lynching would be satisfying either. Counterpoint: Jasmine Guy (!) is in it.
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short Film
'Icarus'
Director: Bryan Fogel
This Documentary Feature nominee might end up taking home the trophy if only for its ability to make headlines. What started out as a Super-Size Me-esque experiment in taking performance-enhancing substances to see how easy it would be to dope one’s way to cycling glory instead turned into the Citizenfour of the Russian state-sponsored doping scandal.
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Feature
'Abacus: Small Enough to Jail'
Director: Steve James
This feature doc takes a front-row view of the Manhattan district attorney’s prosecution of the small, family owned Abacus Federal Savings Back, which, in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, became the show-trial for banking-industry malfeasance and is to date the only prosecution of a bank in the wake of the crash. The close access to the Sung family from an early stage makes this as much a family drama as a legal one.
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Feature
'Negative Space'
Director: Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata
The most emotionally affecting of the animated short-film nominees is about a son and his father and the father’s peculiar affinity for a perfectly packed suitcase. It’s the perfect kind of niche subject for a short, and it packs a good-sized punch by the end.
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short Film
'Baby Driver'
Director: Edgar Wright
Starring: Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Eiza González, Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx, Jon Bernthal
Edgar Wright’s mixtape-turned-action-movie was pretty much catnip to Wright’s legion of fans, and as a car-chase movie with a dope soundtrack it’s pretty stellar. But between the story and the cast, there are major hits and misses. The biggest hit? Ansel Elgort, who manages to make aloofness quite compelling. The biggest miss? Try watching this movie again in the wake of the Kevin Spacey scandal.
Nominations: (3) Best Film Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing
'Knife Skills'
Director: Thomas Lennon
The opening of a Cleveland restaurant that employs largely recent parolees is a fascinating look at a bunch of things at once: restaurant/kitchen culture, the precariousness of post-prison life, and the individual starting-over stories of the owners and employees alike. It keeps a great balance of those subjects, as well as the balance between uplift and hopelessness, the two poles that documentary shorts most often vacillate between.
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Short Subject
'Loveless'
Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Starring: Maryana Spivak, Aleksey Rozin, Matvey Novikov, Marina Vasilyeva, Andris Keišs
The Russian nominee for Best Foreign Language Film is a stone-cold bummer about divorcing parents of a grade-schooler who hate each other (and neglect their kid) so much that they don’t notice when he goes missing. The search for the son, full of recriminations and fear, is filmed in excruciatingly long takes in a way that makes it truly trying to watch, but there are at least 2-3 moments that hit like a ton of bricks.
Nominations: (1) Best Foreign Language Film
'Wonder'
Director: Stephen Chbosky
Starring: Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson, Jacob Tremblay, Izabela Vidovic, Noah Jupe, Mandy Patinkin, Daveed Diggs
Such a delightful surprise that this Julia Roberts/Jacob Tremblay movie about a 10-year-old with facial deformities entering public school for the first time ended up being more than just a mugging for tears. Director Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) expands the film’s field of vision in surprising and satisfying ways.
Nominations: (1) Best Make-up and Hairstyling
'Watu Wote/All of Us'
Director: Katja Benrath and Tobias Rosen
Another student film that ended up being an Oscr nominee (grrr), this one comes across a bit like a parable of Christians and Muslims in Kenya, the tensions each group feels towards the other, and the small moments of grace and bravery that individuals in each groups can make towards each other. It’s not as broadly constructed as The Insult, but it still feels a bit under-investigated.
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short Film
'Blade Runner 2049'
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright
Denis Villeneuve, who directed the best film of last year in Arrival, took a big swing in taking on the highly anticipated Blade Runner sequel. It doesn’t all work, but it’s visually breathtaking, and for a Blade Runner movie, that goes a long way.
Nominations: (5) Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Mixing, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing
'Phantom Thread'
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lesley Manville, Vicky Krieps
There’s nothing wrong with Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest. Good performances by Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps as the world’s least-appealing romantic couple, a great performance by the always-brilliant Lesley Manville, and PTA seems to have re-discovered his gift for effortless humor (as opposed to all the effortful humor in Inherent Vice). But Anderson’s is a peculiar style that either wraps you up in the louche, acidic, damaged characters therein or it doesn’t. There are plenty of Oscar rankings that will place Phantom Thread at the tippy-top. This isn’t one of them.
Nominations: (6) Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Original Music Score, Best Costume Design
'Last Men in Aleppo'
Director: Firas Fayyad
This documentary feature about rescue workers in Syria who dig through rubble after constant bombings is exactly as devastating as you think it will be, though necessarily so. Last year’s The White Helmets won the Best Documentary Short Oscar, so clearly the subject matter resonates with Oscar voters.
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Feature
'The Disaster Artist'
Director: James Franco
Starring: Dave Franco, James Franco, Seth Rogen
James Franco’s late-breaking sexual-misconduct allegations may or may not have contributed to his not getting a Best Actor nomination, but they’ve also pretty much cut short on any further assessment of The Disaster Artist as a film. While some found Franco’s depiction of The Room director Tommy Wiseau condescending, there is a lot of heart and generous humor to the story. It’s also a hugely fun time at the movies.
Nominations: (1) Best Adapted Screenplay
'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'
Director: Rian Johnson
Starring: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis
Rian Johnson’s bold and fully appropriate steering of the Star Wars universe may have pissed off a bunch of fans whose ownership of that universe isn’t completely based in reality, but from where we’re sitting, it works. Johnson confidently steps out of the shadow of all other Star Wars properties that provided thrills, tears, and even a hint of sex (sublimated light-saber sex but still), all while tidily dispensing with mythology garbage like Rey’s parentage and character albatrosses like Snoke. Keep on making the right people angry, Rian.
Nominations: (4) Best Original Score, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing
'Traffic Stop'
Director: Kate Davis and David Heilbroner
None of the documentary shorts will have the impact of Traffic Stop, I’m guessing. The seemingly-routine traffic stop of 26-year-old teacher Breaion King turned into a dramatic and physical arrest that was captured on a dashcam. That dashcam footage ranks among the most harrowing and affecting scenes in any nominated movie this year.
Nominations: (1)
'The Breadwinner'
Director: Nora Twomey
Director Nora Twomey was a surprise Oscar nominee for the 2009 film The Secret of Kells. She’s back this year with this film about a young girl in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan who must pose as a boy in order to make money for her family after her father is thrown into prison. What begins as a (sadly) familiar story opens up into something more particular (and at times magical).
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Feature
'The Silent Child'
Director: Chris Overton and Rachel Shenton
This live-action short from the UK is about a 4-year-old deaf girl whose parents have pushed her towards lip-reading but in general have neglected her due to various reasons. Enter a kind young speech therapist, who helps the girl learn sign language … while earning the mother’s suspicion. There’s nothing groundbreaking cinematically happening here, but it’s a strong story, well-told.
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short Film
'Roman J. Israel, Esq.'
Director: Dan Gilroy
Starring: Denzel Washington, Colin Farrell, Carmen Ejogo
Denzel Washington’s nominated performance as a civil-rights lawyer trying to keep his head above water after his law practice threatens to go under hasn’t been talked about much, which is crazy, because it’s among his best performances in recent memory. Director Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler) creates a world where the application of the law is as morally fraught as the people working within the system. How you you affect change from within the system? Denzel’s Roman really gets across that struggle.
Nominations: (1) Best Actor
'I, Tonya'
Director: Craig Gillespie
Starring: Margot Robbie, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Julianne Nicholson, Bobby Cannavale
The film about Tonya Harding and her life before, during, and immediately after the attack on Nancy Kerrigan leading up to the 1994 Winter Olympics has been pretty divisive throughout this awards season. The thing is … it’s both. It’s both a dynamic, boldly comedic take on one of the biggest media sensations of our lifetime, and it takes some shortcuts and indulges in cheap, tawdry treatment of the film’s white-trash characters. Still, the performances are great, Margot Robbie and Allison Janney especially. And it will almost certainly be remembered far more vibrantly than almost all the other nominees this year.
Nominations: (3) Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Film Editing
'Molly's Game'
Director: Aaron Sorkin
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera, Jeremy Strong, Chris O’Dowd, Bill Camp
Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut benefits greatly from lead actress Jessica Chastain, in whom he has found one of the all-time greats at reading his dense, mellifluous dialogue. Chastain plays an ex-Olympian turned high-stakes poker maven who gets busted by the Feds. Her fight to clear her name is the frame story as the film goes back through her exploits. The result is a flashily-written, powerfully acted piece of cinematic red meat. It’s so much fun.
Nominations: (1) Best Adapted Screenplay
'DeKalb Elementary'
Director: Reed Van Dyk
The timeliness of this live-action short — which depicts a school-shooter scenario — could make for a powerful acceptance speech if it wins. Which it very well might, considering it’s an incredibly tense, humane, and sharply-acted short. Full credit for the acting on display goes to actress Tarra Riggs, who may be familiar from the 2008 indie film Ballast or the HBO series Treme. Here, she plays a school administrator who finds herself in a two-person face-off with a shooter. Recent news could make this hard to watch, but it’s so worth it.
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short Film
'The Square'
Director: Ruben Östlund
Starring: Claes Bang, Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West, Terry Notary
Sweden’s entry in the Foreign Language Film race has the advantage of having already won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film festival, a seal of approval that doesn’t always guarantee Oscar glory, but it couldn’t hurt. Director Ruben Ostlund (Force Mejeure) once again finds himself fascinated by the fragility of men, and this time adds some fascination with the art world and provocateurs in general.
Nominations: (1) Best Foreign Language Film
'Herion(e)'
Director: Elaine McMillion Sheldon and Kerrin Sheldon
The strongest of the documentary shorts takes on the topic of the opiod epidemic in West Virginia, focusing on the paramedics, social workers, and judges who attempt to deal with the tragically high number of addicts in their districts in a way that is both humane and effective. There’s a kindness in the face of overwhelming factors stacked against these people that is intensely moving.
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Short Subject
'Strong Island'
Director: Yance Ford
As we wrote in our review back in September, “There is barely a moment in Strong Island that isn’t suffused with anger. Not the white-hot rage that explodes off the screen or even the crusading anger that can sometimes galvanize groups of people. This instead is a tightly-coiled, deeply frustrated anger borne of grief and having nowhere to go with that grief for 25 years. Yance Ford has directed a movie about the death of his brother that distills this kind of frustration into something heartbreaking, but that’s what makes it a vital and powerful film.”
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Feature
'Coco'
Director: Lee Unkrich
Beautiful, playful, and probably the most nakedly emotional Pixar movie since “Up.” Young Miguel dreams of being a musician, though his family forbids it, so Miguel ends up on a voyage through the land of the dead, uncovering family secrets along the way. It’s a near-perfect combination of Pixar creativity and humor with deeply heartfelt family pathos. A delight.
Nominations: (2) Best Animated Feature Film, Best Original Song
'Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri'
Director: Martin McDonagh
Starring: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Abbie Cornish, John Hawkes, Peter Dinklage
This one has gone up and down this list drastically in preparation. A second viewing served to sharpen some misgivings about the way the film deals with its characters, particularly the flimsy depiction of its black characters. But the film’s very divisiveness comes from what also makes it vital, that it challenges its audience to deal with characters who don’t deserve redemption even as we see again and again that escalating anger only burns down everything in sight. Does Martin McDonagh have all the answers for America’s ills? No. But his wrangling with issues of forgiveness and redemption has merit.
Nominations: (7) Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor (x2), Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Music Score, Best Film Editing
'The Big Sick'
Director: Michael Showalter
Starring: Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter, Ray Romano, Anupam Kher
Married screenwriters Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon put their unique meet-cute story to the screen, and the result is one of the year’s best romantic comedies, even if for the bulk of the movie it’s Kumail romancing Emily’s parents. It’s an intelligent and caring movie about all kinds of relationships. Holly Hunter’s performance shined brightest at first, though Ray Romano’s is the one that emerges on repeat viewings,. Keep an eye out for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend‘s Vella Lovell in the film’s best small role.
Nominations: (1) Best Original Screenplay
'The Shape of Water'
Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, Michael Stuhlbarg
Guillermo Del Toro’s Cold War fairy tale about a mute woman and the fish-man of her dreams is an absolute triumph of mood for director Guillermo Del Toro. It’s at different times dreamy, romantic, regretful, and hopeful, often many at once. Del Toro evokes an Old Hollywood vibe without becoming a genre pastiche, and he manages to deliver a romance that doesn’t even have to involve a human male. Well done, there.
Nominations: (13) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Film Editing, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Cinematography, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing
'Faces Places'
Director: Agnès Varda, JR
Directors Agnes Varda, the 89-year-old veteran of the French new wave, and JR, the hipster-ass visual artist, teamed up for the year’s most exciting buddy road movie. The documentary presents as a search for shared moments and indelible images on the French countryside, as Varda and JR photograph the faces of the people they meet and then create these large-scale art installations out of them. All of it together casts the most intoxicating spell.
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Feature
'A Fantastic Woman'
Director: Sebastián Lelio
Starring: Daniela Vega, Francisco Reyes
Chile’s entry in the Foreign Language Film race centers on a trans woman dealing with the aftermath of her lover’s death, the financial and personal insecurity that results, and the hostility coming from her lover’s family. Lead actress Daniela Vega’s furious performance is the biggest reason to check this out, but props to director Sebastian Lelio’s camera striking a curious/invasive/respectful balance.
Nominations: (1) Best Foreign Film
'Dunkirk'
Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, James D’Arcy, Kenneth Branaugh
Christopher Nolan’s large scale depiction of the Dunkirk rescue in World War II blends timelines and hopsotches from the beach to the air to the boats in a wildly impressive feat of directorial control. The final result is impressive more than lovable, sure, but SO impressive. That Nolan is able to tell a deeply emotional story while seeming to actively decline to create characters in any real way would seem like a weakness, but here it’s a strength.
Nominations: (8) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Music Score, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing
'The Florida Project'
Director: Sean Baker
Starring: Willem Dafoe, Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinaite, Valeria Cotto, Christopher Rivera, Caleb Landry Jones
From our review: “The latest film from director Sean Baker (Tangerine) follows the rambunctious little monsters running around an Orlando, Florida, motel community, in the persistent shadow of an un-seen and un-discussed Disney World. Baker fully immerses the viewer in this world, into its shadow economy of the working, non-working, and barely working poor, and time and again returns to these kids, whose energy is exhausting, whose dim prospects are heartbreaking, but whose natural kid-ness feels so incredibly real and un-bothered.”
Nominations: (1) Best Supporting Actor
'Darkest Hour'
Director: Joe Wright
Starring: Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Stephen Dillane, Ronald Pickup, Ben Mendelsohn
In many ways, this look at Winston Churchill trying to sell the British Parliament on taking the fight to Hitler’s Germany feels like director Joe Wright’s Lincoln in its depiction of thedeal-by-deal nature of democratic politics. But the truth is, I liked this so much better than Lincoln. Wartime politics as a battle of wills, of personalities, of sweat and ideas in equal measure. In every way that WWII movies can feel rote, this feels alive.
Nominations: (6) Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Makeup
'Mudbound'
Director: Dee Rees
Starring: Carey Mulligan, Jason Clarke, Jason Mitchell, Mary J. Blige, Rob Morgan
Dee Rees’s world-building is as satisfying as her dismantling of the white-savior trope, drawing a detailed, clear-eyed picture of two families stuck in the post-WWII Mississippi mud. Featuring one of the year’s best ensemble casts (Jason Mitchell and Carey Mulligan at least deserved attention in the acting races), this is the movie that deserved to finally break Netflix into the major Oscar categories.
Nominations: (4) Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Song, Best Writing Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography
'Get Out'
Director: Jordan Peele
Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Stephen Root
Leave it to a sketch-comedy genius like Jordan Peele to make a genre mash this audacious, intelligent, and urgent that feels simultaneously effortless in its execution. That a horror movie from February has stuck around to be a contender to win Best Picture only speaks to how loudly and satisfyingly the film spoke to the current moment.
Nominations: (4) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay
'The Post'
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Paulson, Bob Odenkirk, Tracy Letts, Bradley Whitford, Bruce Greenwood, Matthew Rhys, Carrie Coon
There’s a temptation to slot Steven Spielberg away so squarely into the Hollywood firmament that everything he does becomes, definitionally, establishment. His are the films that other, younger, more brash movies are defined against. But how fantastic is it that we have this filmmaker who can fire off a nimble and deeply relevant movie about the dangers of a complicit press and how hard the entire industry has to work, in ways big and small, to hold onto its independence. But beyond just being a whip-smart smack at the Trump administration, The Post is just a kicky good time, with great acting, perfectly composed ensemble moments, one perfect caftan, and the best Meryl Streep performance in years.
Nominations: (2) Best Picture, Best Actress
'Lady Bird'
Director: Greta Gerwig
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges, Timothée Chalamet, Beanie Feldstein
Greta Gerwig has been one of the great storytellers in movies for a while now, with her scripts for Frances Ha and Mistress America and even just the way her well-cultivated acting persona has seemed to tell a generational story all its own. Here she cements her status as a writer-director extraordinaire, assembling a senior-year collage of fights you’ve had, boys you knew, and moments you didn’t properly recognize for how much truth they told about you while they happened.
Nominations: (5) Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay
'Call Me By Your Name'
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Starring: Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar
A screen romance that translates the intoxicating, frustrating, head-swimming rush of a physical attraction that takes you fully by surprise. Director Luca Guadagnino and his utterly perfect cast — the nominated Timothee Chalamet, the unjustly robbed Michael Stuhlbarg, the aggravatingly perfect Armie Hammer, the unsung Amira Casar — built a world that exists very much of its time and place (the 1980s Italian countryside) while still seeming so deeply relatable on any number of emotional and memory levels. It’s a triumph of desire and fleeting moments that will rightly linger in cinematic history.
Nominations: (4) Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Writing Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Song
