Every Movie Nominated for a 2026 Oscar, Ranked

Call this Oscars lineup a classic Sally O’Malley, because the voters nominated FIFTY, yes, 50, combined features and short films across its 24 categories. Six films landed eight or more nominations, by far the most that have reached that milestone in a single year, with One Battle After Another scoring a massive 13, which would lead the pack in almost any other year that didn’t include Sinners — that one smashed the record for most nominations with 16.

That kind of accolade hoarding doesn’t lend itself to a wide array of nominated movies, but the voters squeezed in some unexpected choices here and there. The breadth of quality across the films is wide. Laudable visual effects or an original song that caught the voters’ fancy do not necessarily make for a great — or even good — film. Ranking all 50 films is a challenge. Luckily, I landed on the exact correct order.

Directed by: Gareth Edwards
Nominations: (1) Best Visual Effects

Rebirth’s VFX nomination is the first Oscar recognition for the franchise since 1997’s The Lost World, and that’s due to director Edwards bringing some degree of visual grandeur to his film with his use of 35-mm. and Thai locations. Unfortunately, that visual sensibility is still tied to some rather cheap-looking CGI, and that’s not even getting into the god-awful script and characterizations. There’s next to zero authentic human behavior in this movie, squandering name talent like Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and Jonathan Bailey and bringing an insufferable stranded family along for the ride.

Directed by: Nathan Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short

This is the treacliest of the animated short nominees (there’s always one). It’s The Giving Tree meets Charlotte’s Web meets woodcutting class, with a Bible verse tacked on at the end. The stop-motion short tells the simplistic tale of a bear who comes under the care of a maternal (paternal? This faith-based movie sure plays it awfully lackadaisical when it comes to defining gender) pine tree out in the mountains somewhere. No matter how much warmth, shelter, and food the tree provides, the bear is still tempted to shun the tree in order to pursue the empty temptations of potato chips and other treats from a nearby abandoned campground. But who’s going to be there when the forest fires come a-calling? (Where’s a Lost Bus when you really need it?) Good intentions — and handsome animation — aside, Forevergreen is ultimately too maudlin and moralistic to rank it much higher than this.

Directed by: Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi and Adrian Molina
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Feature

It feels strange to call a movie where a young child gets abducted onto a spaceship and meets several races of extraterrestrials “low concept,” but Pixar has conditioned me to to expect movies where vast abstract concepts are anthropomorphized and explained with deep psychological parallels. In Elio, Elio goes to space and learns about friendship. It’s nice! I forgot about it five minutes later.

Directed by: Meyer Levinson-Blount
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short

An Arab Israeli butcher is accused by his Jewish co-workers of tearing down a poster of Israeli hostages in the break room. As serious as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to be, Butcher’s Stain doesn’t offer much more than a superficial lesson in judging books by covers. The reveal in the final minutes of just how the posters have been torn down is groan-inducingly cutesy.

Directed by: Bess Kargman
Nominations: (1) Best Original Song

As a work of documentary, Diane Warren: Relentless is as rudimentary as it gets. If you’ve seen any artist-produced documentary in the last ten years that splits time between biography and an exaltation/fascination with their creative process, you’ve seen them all (Lady Gaga’s Five Foot Two, I’m looking at you). The thing is, I’m a sucker for the creative process of complete kooks (still looking at you, Gaga), and when it comes to Warren and her decades of hit songs and office full of tchotchkes about how she’s an unrepentant bitch (her words!), I’m not going to not enjoy myself. But yeah, not much of a film, and the song it’s nominated for is sadly of a piece with her last ten middling empowerment ballads.

Directed by: Benny Safdie
Nominations: (1) Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Flopping hard at the box office pretty much guaranteed that Safdie’s solo directing debut would fare far worse than his brother Josh’s Marty Supreme, but I’m here to assure you it’s okay because The Smashing Machine is also a far worse movie. Safdie’s decision to lean away from sports-movie tropes ends up putting the onus on Dwayne Johnson to deliver a character study of MMA fighter Mark Kerr, something I don’t think works in the film’s favor. Also not working in the film’s favor is its depiction of Kerr’s wife (Emily Blunt) as the most horrid woman in human history.

Directed by: Sam A. Davis
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short

A smoky dive near clanging train tracks at what feels like the edge of town — the edge of something, at least — becomes the setting for an impromptu singing contest among the sad-sack regulars. The dark, moody atmosphere and soulful crooning has an air of the purgatorial to it. This tracks with the film’s origin, a 19th-century Russian short story. But while that mood is intriguing, the film stops short of ever really transcending, and we’re left to do our own rendition of “Is That All There Is?”

Directed by: Guillermo del Toro
Nominations: (9) Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Sound

In the years since his Best Picture/Best Director triumphs for 2017’s The Shape of Water, del Toro has been a reliable shoo-in for Oscar nominations. Both Nightmare Alley and now Frankenstein have scored Best Picture nominations, and he won another Oscar for the animated feature Pinocchio. It brings me no joy to say I think this is his worst of the bunch. There’s no one thing that makes this Frankenstein so disappointing: casting an ill-fitting Oscar Isaac in the title role; production design and costumes (both somehow nominated) that feel cheap and showy; a screenplay adaptation (also somehow nominated!) that packs in some incredibly cheesy dialogue. Somehow, Jacob Elordi was able to pull a genuinely affecting performance out of this mess, which makes his nomination the only justifiable one of this movie’s bloated haul.

Directed by: Yvonne Russo
Nominations: (1) Best Original Song

This year’s requisite out-of-left-field Best Original Song nominee comes from an Italian documentary about elderly opera singers who live in a retirement home in Milan that was founded by the actual Giuseppe Verdi. It’s a fascinating place, and it’s lovely to watch these people continue to sing and mentor young performers. But the film doesn’t really have anywhere to go beyond this premise, and even at 77 minutes, it feels more like a double-length short film than a feature.

Directed by: Joshua Seftel
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Short

Devastating in its subject matter — the empty rooms of the title belong to children murdered in school shootings — Seftel’s film isn’t as impactful on a filmmaking level. The 35-minute film is something of a nesting doll, a nonfiction short about a CBS news project by human-interest reporter Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp, who set out to photograph these rooms in order to find a more effective way of communicating the tragedy of these shootings to an increasingly desensitized public. That extra layer of remove doesn’t serve the film particularly well, and Seftel doesn’t care to probe too deeply into either Hartman or the victims’ families. It’s a respectful and sorrowful film, but a frustrating one too.

Directed by: Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short

In this winner for Best Canadian Short at the 2025 Toronto Film Festival, an old man tells his grandchild a fantastical story from his youth, when he fell in love with a girl whose tears turned to pearls. The story takes the form of a fable, rendered in stop-motion animation of impressionistically painted figurines. As is the case with so many Oscar-nominated animated shorts, it’s worth it just to revel in an animation style that feels so different from what we get in feature animation. The story itself is a pretty standard magical-realist memory tale, though the English-language voice-over by Colm Feore lends it an air of wonder and regret.

Directed by: Lee Knight
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short

Loveable old Miriam Margolyes plays the titular Dorothy, an elderly London woman ignored by her family who befriends the young man (Alistair Nwachukwu) who kicked his football into her yard. The young man is intrigued by Dorothy’s library full of plays and homoerotic art. A cross-generational bond forms. Most nominated shorts hinge on the punchiness of their brief running time; this is the rare short that suffers for not being longer. As a feature, the friendship  between these characters could have deepened organically. For as good as the performances here are, it ultimately feels like you’re being rushed into an emotional response.

Directed by: Paul Greengrass
Nominations: (1) Best Visual Effects

There’s a “Who is the audience for this?” quality to The Lost Bus. I can’t imagine anybody who lived through the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California — nor any of the recent horrifically destructive California wildfires — would want to reexperience that horror, particularly via Greengrass’s immersive, claustrophobic filming style. I also can’t imagine anyone else wanting to volunteer themselves for that kind of vicarious trauma. All of this is to say that the fire effects for which this movie is nominated are intense, and Greengrass uses them to disorienting effect, but the human story featuring Matthew McConaughey as a bus driver trying to get back to his son and elderly mother and America Ferrera as a schoolteacher trying to manage a bus full of scared kids feels far too simple to match up to the visuals.

Directed by: Julia Aks and Steve Pinder
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short

We rarely get Oscar-nominated shorts that feel this broadly comedic. The premise is right there in the title: What if a Lizzy Bennet type and a Mr. Darcy type were waylaid by the unfortunate arrival of her menses? A less charitable evaluation wouldn’t be entirely unfair in calling it a costumed-up Funny or Die sketch. But while writer-directors Aks (who also stars) and Steve Pinder never quite find a second level to the film’s central joke, the snappy execution makes up for what might otherwise feel tossed off. Two great jokes stand out: the late reveal of Aks’s character’s name and the end credit for executive producer Emma Thompson.

Directed by: Alison McAlpine
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Short

I spent a decent bit of Perfectly a Strangeness arguing with myself over whether this is really a documentary (when you’re directing the donkeys up to the observatory and anthropomorphizing them into interested observers, at what point are we entering Milo and Otis territory?). But once I was able to set that aside and just lie back and watch the wonder of the cosmos from this rare perch in Chile, I was vibing. Not sure how much more this movie offers beyond vibing, but when you’re mainlining the ultragrim doc shorts, vibing helps.

Directed by: Lee Sang-il
Nominations: (1) Best Makeup and Hairstyling

After premiering at Cannes in May, Kokuho went on to become the all-time highest-grossing live-action Japanese film. You might, then, expect this to be an action thriller of some kind, but instead it’s a story of rival Kabuki actors through the latter half of the 20th century. Ryo Yoshizawa and Ryusei Yokohama give compelling performances as the leads, raised as brothers under the exacting tutelage of their father (Ken Watanabe), and the Kabuki makeup is indeed extensive (though I suspect that the use of old-age makeup in the final act is what secured that Oscar nod). Still, the film drags over the course of its three-plus-hour running time, as the fortunes of the brothers fluctuate back and forth as the years go by.

Directed by: Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Feature

The film follows Sara Shahverdi, the first woman to be elected as councilwoman of her Iranian village. While facing opposition from conservative men trying to preserve the current patriarchal system, Shahverdi pushes for women to own property and stands in the way of child marriages. In their best moments, the filmmakers frame Shahverdi as an icon, sitting astride her motorcycle on a hilltop, silhouetted by the setting sun. And while the filmmaking throughout isn’t always quite so striking, the main character is compelling enough to hold our interest.

Directed by: Ugo Bienvenu
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Feature

Yet another 2026 Oscar nominee to emerge from the Cannes Film Festival, Arco comes from French director Bienvenu, who is 38 but looks like he could be a stand-in for Anora’s Mark Eydelshteyn, and Felix de Givry, who played a house-music DJ in Mia Hansen-Love’s excellent and underseen Eden. I mention all this because from the sounds of it, Arco should be a lot more exciting and narratively vibrant than it is. It’s certainly colorful — the characters in a future utopia can time-travel wearing rainbow-colored ponchos — but once the title character arrives in the not-quite-present and is discovered by a young girl and a trio of quirky science guys, the story unfolds like a textbook E.T. tale. A movie like this is always going to have its charms, but for a story involving time travel, magic gems, and climate-avoidant bubbles, it never really feels as transportive as it should.

Directed by: Konstantin Bronzit
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short

This is the quintessential Oscar-nominated animated short: brief, no dialogue, foreign (in this case, from Russian director Bronzit, who’s been nominated twice before in this category), hornier than you’d expect from animation. Three women live in three adjacent sheds on a bump in the ocean we’ll call an island, and they end up having to rent one of the sheds to a burly sea captain. Shenanigans ensue. It’s all very light and bouncy, and the score hits, and it’s over before you start to get tired of it.

Directed by: Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Feature

The year’s most inscrutable title belongs to this French Belgain production about, among other things, a baby who thinks she’s a god, the ecstatic properties of white chocolate, and just a ton of water symbolism. The animation is really impressive here, especially when it comes to the title character. The filmmakers avoid the trappings of hyperrealism while still rendering coherent feelings and emotions, often without external dialogue. It’s not a particularly ambitious story in any way, but it’s good enough for the middle of the rankings.

Directed by: Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh
Nominations: (1) Best Live Action Short

Five years after Chris Rock messed with the wrong alopecia sufferer, the Oscars are ready to handle slapping again. In Musteata and Singh’s imagined dystopian world, kissing is illegal and slapping is currency, so much so that rich women — who do be shoppin’! — carry bruises on their faces as status symbols. Luàna Bajrami plays Malaise (lol), a salesgirl who forms an attraction to the wealthy Angine (Holy Spider’s Zar Amir Ebrahimi), and what unfolds from there is Yorgos Lanthimos by way of Céline Sciamma (Bajrami played the housemaid in Portrait of a Lady on Fire) and Ana Lily Amirpour (it’s in black-and-white). The 35-minute short is by turns fussily absurdist and darkly resonant, with the former sometimes robbing the latter of its potency.

Directed by: Emilie Blichfeldt
Nominations: (1) Best Makeup and Hairstyling

I’m genuinely impressed that the Academy voters in the Makeup and Hairstyling branch went out of their way to recognize a movie as visually gnarly and horror-adjacent as The Ugly Stepsister. Especially since the most attention it got was as a Sundance midnight premiere before ultimately debuting on the Shudder streaming platform. More Shudder movies as Oscar bait, please! Norwegian director Blichfeldt tells her Cinderella story from the POV of Elvira (Lea Myren), Cinderella’s less winsome stepsister, who surely will be able to catch the eye of the prince if she undergoes a litany of primitive cosmetic procedures. The gruesomeness of pre-anesthesia nose jobs and other such horrors are shown in grim (Grimm?) detail, and that’s before the tapeworm shows up. Though Blichfeldt’s vision begins to lose its impact as the film wears on, her bold take, combined with Myren’s commitment to the bit and, again, that horrific tapeworm, really carry it across the finish line.

Directed by: Jared Bush and Byron Howard
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Feature

A decade after Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde took the animation world by storm — and picked up the Animated Feature Oscar for co-directors Byron Howard and Rich Moore — Disney is back in Zootopia. Once again, the world of animals has something to say about our own; this time, it’s the dynastic privilege of a wealthy lynx family (Andy Samberg voices their outcast failson) and the fear and prejudice that Zootopian society feels toward snakes (Ke Huy Quan plays Gary De’Snake). It’s … a Zootopia movie! It’s got some jokes, it’s got some lessons to teach, it’s got a bumpin’ Shakira song over the end credits. It made almost $2 billion worldwide; who cares if it’s a middle-of-the-pack Oscar nominee?

Directed by: David Borenstein, Pavel Talankin
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Feature

Pavel “Pasha” Talankin is both filmmaker and star of this film that gives the viewer uncommon access into the propaganda systems at work at the elementary-school level of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Talankin worked as an educator and videographer at a school in the industrial town of Karabash. The copper-mining industry has so polluted the town that its air stinks and its mountains are covered in black ash. It’s against this backdrop that we see the Putin regime push its children into a patriotic fervor in support of the war against Ukraine. Talankin, under the guise of his job, took hours upon hours of footage documenting this indoctrination, which the film presents as both illuminating and soul-crushing. Talankin himself makes for an intriguing character too, awkward and withdrawn yet dedicated to (and seemingly loved by) his students. While the film sometimes makes promises for a more thrilling tale of how Talankin was able to get his footage out of the country than it delivers, it still paints a damning portrait of Russia and is a dire warning to any other country headed down a similar path.

Directed by: James Cameron
Nominations: (2) Best Costume Design, Best Visual Effects

Even as someone who wasn’t wild about 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water, I had to give an appreciative nod to Cameron’s expansion of the world of Pandora to its new underwater depths. With Fire and Ash, Cameron retreads a lot of the same ground, from the fraught father-son relationship between Quaritch and Spider to the plight of poor Payakan, still the outcast space whale. Yes, there was the fire warrior Varang (Oona Chaplin), but even that character felt brushed aside by the end. For a director as inspired as Cameron so often is, Fire and Ash felt perfunctory.

Directed by: Hilla Medalia
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Short

Similar to Armed Only With a Camera (farther up the list), Children No More is about people trying to document atrocity in a way that honors the dead but also forces the living to pay attention. In Tel Aviv, a group of Israelis holds a series of silent vigils to protest their country’s murder of children in Gaza. Director Medalia, along with producers Yael Melamede and former head of HBO documentary films Sheila Nevins, observe the inner workings of the group as they strive to make their protests mournful but also impactful. The film presents a guarded hope among the protesters that they can find common ground with their fellow Israelis, a hope that is punctured as hecklers upon hecklers meet this silent vigil with vocal disdain.

Directed by: Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans
Nominations: (2) Best Animated Feature, Best Original Song

As a work of animated filmmaking, KPop Demon Hunters makes for an incredible soundtrack. But in a year where feature animation felt remarkably uninspired (with the exception of anime, which has yet to conquer Oscar voters as it has the box office), the film’s energy, storytelling, and pop sensibility tower over its competition. And to be clear: The songs are incredible, perfect little pop earworms that help achieve what every great musical must by advancing character and story detail through song. They created a second pop group and gave it a bunch of pop bangers just to have fun! Oscars have been won for far less.

Directed by: John Kelly
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short

Did I like this movie that is essentially a recitation of everything one man would like to do once he’s the beneficiary of the endless time and opportunity that is middle-class retirement because a movie about finding the time to finally read all those articles you’ve (I’ve) bookmarked and the novels that sit accusatorially on your (my) shelves is pitched directly to me? Did I like it because this person’s to-do list is by turns thoughtful and dryly amusing? Did I like it because the narrator’s voice turns out to be the dreamy Domhnall Gleeson? Probably! The animation’s modest, minimal quality feels well suited to the subject matter here — finding fulfillment in the little things we never have time for — and thankfully, the film manages to resist the temptation to get maudlin.

Directed by: Joseph Kosinski
Nominations: (4) Best Picture, Best Film Editing, Best Sound, Best Visual Effects

Oscar voters do love it when the cars go vroom-vroom! After the Ford v. Ferrari Best Picture nomination a few years ago, we should have seen F1’s BP nod coming. It’s not a bad movie, even though enthusiasm for Formula One auto racing is probably required to be truly captivated by it. Brad Pitt is doing great movie-star acting as the aging driver, and the film benefits from a good, old-fashioned romantic subplot with a winning Kerry Condon. But for as much credit as Kosinski gets for communicating speed onscreen, he’s still awfully hokey. Another movie of his ending with the two male rivals nodding in respect at another from a moderate distance?

Directed by: Brent Renaud and Craig Renaud
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Short

After journalist and documentarian Brent Renaud was killed by Russian troops in Ukraine in March of 2022, his brother and fellow journalist Craig set out to memorialize his brother through his work. The grief on display in the 40-minute short is raw (we’re confronted with Renaud’s dead body more than once), while the tribute to Renauds efforts to document war and struggle in places like Somalia, Afghanistan, Central America, and ultimately Ukraine feels particularly urgent at this moment in history. That rawness and immediacy comes at the expense of a deeper probe into Renaud’s career or the increasing danger journalists face in places like Ukraine and Gaza. But in a short film, the narrow focus works.

Directed by: Craig Brewer
Nominations: (1) Best Actress

The expectation of cheese that comes bolted to a film starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as married Neil Diamond tribute performers called Lightning & Thunder proved hard for this movie to shake. TV spots featuring Jackman in sequined jackets and Hudson speaking in thick midwestern patois promised “Sweet Caroline” sing-alongs straight out of your worst sports-arena nightmares. A lot of people missed what was great about Song Sung Blue, if they deigned to see it at all. But some of us were just built different and found the improbably sturdy heart inside all the hyperearnest dialogue (mostly Jackman’s). Hudson’s justly Oscar-nominated performance is a treasure of can-do spirit besieged by faded dreams and random calamity. The supporting cast is stronger than it needs to be, and the improbably true story involves both Pearl Jam and two insane car crashes. Through it all, Neil Diamond’s music proves cynic-resistant; they even find a way to make the whole “Sweet Caroline” problem an essential part of the text.

Directed by: Geeta Gandbhir and Christalyn Hampton
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Short

While the documentary shorts can often present like a checklist of serious subjects of grave concern, Gandbhir and Hampton offer a framing on their film about abortion that takes it past the perfunctory. The filmmakers capture the Christian protesters shouting threats of eternal damnation and set them against the clinic’s head of security, Tracii, who calls upon her own faith to give her strength as she dutifully works to ensure the safety of their patients.

Directed by: Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Feature

Co-director Jarecki scored his second career Oscar nomination (after the 2003 doc Capturing the Friedmans) for this investigation of the state prison system in Alabama and in particular Easterling Correctional Facility, which has been the subject of claims of egregious prisoner abuse. The filmmakers and inmates carried out this investigation in secret, through anonymous phone calls and surreptitious recordings, ultimately revealing systemic rot inside a sadistic prison system. The film expands from the isolated case of one prison outward to the governor’s mansion, where the age-old conflict between states’ rights and federal intervention is in reality a political tactic to keep abuses like this covered up. It’s a film of diligent investigative work and an example of documentarians being essential to the greater project of human rights.

Directed by: Ryan White
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Feature

Poet and activist Andrea Gibson’s struggle with terminal cancer is the backdrop against which White’s film exists. Oftentimes, it’s also the foreground, as Gibson and their partner, Megan Falley, process the updates and blood-test results and treatment plans and prognoses that mark the final few years of Gibson’s life. But it’s when the film allows other subjects to assert themselves that it really springs to life. It expands to Gibson’s history with sexuality and gender, their support network that includes Falley as well as an assembly of Gibson’s ex-loves, their fierce dedication to their work. You don’t have to be particularly attuned to spoken-word poetry as an art form to find Gibson’s third-act stage performance to be a sequence of transcendent humanity. In a year where Hamnet became a nexus point for cathartic weeping, Come See Me in the Good Light can stand tear duct–to–tear duct with anything the Bard could serve up.

Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos
Nominations: (4) Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Original Score, Best Adapted Screenplay

Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s third Best Picture nominee in eight years proved to be fairly divisive. That’s to be expected when a movie features multiple moments of shocking violence and a final-act twist that is, depending on whom you talk to, a redeeming feature of an aggravating movie or an annoying stunt that mars an otherwise solid psychological thriller. I fall into the latter camp. It’s fun watching Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons play the parts of manipulative She-EO and belligerent conspiracy theorist. Will Tracy’s script pokes successfully at the essential frustration of this current era, where any productive interaction between opposing worldviews can at any time run into a brick wall of brainwashed misinformation or privileged self-interest. And then Tracy and Lanthimos seem to lose their nerve at the last minute for a gotcha ending that satisfies a nihilistic itch to say “fuck it” to everything and not much more. (Tracy did this in The Menu as well.) A good but often frustrating film, it’s hopefully a call for Lanthimos and Stone to find different muses for a while until a better movie comes along.

Directed by: Joachim Trier
Nominations: (9) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress x2, Best Original Screenplay, Best International Feature, Best Film Editing

A celebrated Norwegian filmmaker who enjoys an emotionally distant relationship with his two adult daughters wants to make a new movie with his eldest daughter as the star. With a setup like that, it’s no wonder that the Hollywood types finally let Trier into the Oscar fold with this one. But a cynical view like that shortchanges this film’s many fine qualities, not least of which are the performances of its four nominated actors. Stellan Skarsgård captures the passive-aggressive narcissism of the artist patriarch who has much to apologize for but mostly thinks his daughters are too mean to him. Renate Reinsve is already so good at playing this exact type of character: righteous but also maddeningly weak and second-guessing. Elle Fanning as the American actress who doesn’t get it (the movie she’s making) but also really gets it (why she’s wrong for the part) plays a tricky role quite smartly. And Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas plays the “good” daughter with such interesting and complicating detail. Yes, the film is an actors’ showcase, but it’s also full of well-realized sets (no Production Design nomination??) and bold direction. Just because it speaks to the boomer Hollywood types with resentful children doesn’t mean it speaks for them.

Directed by: Zach Cregger
Nominations: (1) Best Supporting Actress

The plight of the single-category Oscar nominee is that its legacy can get boiled down to that one element. And to be clear, Amy Madigan is incredible as Aunt Gladys. There’s a very good reason why audiences emerged from that movie ready to smear lipstick all over their faces for Halloween and then march in costume down to the Dolby Theater to demand an Oscar nomination. But Cregger’s movie has so much more going on, both aesthetically and thematically. Weapons manages to nod to so many things about the modern condition — school shootings, the surveillance state, the tyranny of activist PTAs — without falling on tired trauma tropes. In addition to Madigan, performers like Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, and Alden Ehrenreich knock their smaller parts out of the park. A casting nomination would have been incredibly well deserved.

Directed by: Florence Miailhe and Ron Dyens
Nominations: (1) Best Animated Short

It’s rare to pull off what is essentially a biopic this artistically, in a way that feels like it could only exist as an animated short. The film tells the story of Alfred Nakache, a French Algerian Jew and competition-level swimmer who was barred from swimming for France during World War II due to Vichy race laws. The animation — hand-painting on canvas and glass render the hypnotic water effects — feels impressionistic, like a work of fine art come to life. The effect is of a dreamy — and sometimes nightmarish — memory, as Nakache is at different times a child, an Olympian, a husband and father, a prisoner at Auschwitz, and an old man nearing the end of his life. The film is both gorgeously animated and deep with meaning.

Directed by: Kaouther Ben Hania
Nominations: (1) Best International Feature

It feels almost crass to include this movie in a subjective ranking. The film uses excerpts from the real emergency phone calls from 6-year-old Hind Rajab, a Palestinian girl trapped in a car while under fire from Israelis in Gaza. The characters in the film are the Red Crescent emergency workers who stay on the phone with the girl while at the same time raging about the hoops they have to go through to ensure that any aid workers they send to save her won’t themselves be fired upon. It’s an infuriating piece of work, blending re-creation and first-person sources. And if at times this blending of real audio and cinematic artifice only serves to prove the latter insufficient to memorialize the former, it’s not for lack of a sincere effort on the filmmakers’ part.

Directed by: Geeta Gandbhir
Nominations: (1) Best Documentary Feature

What’s most impressive about Gandbhir’s documentary about a fatal shooting after a series of neighborhood disputes in 2023 is how willing Gandbhir is to keep her thumbs off the scales. There are so many elements to this story: a white woman who is both fearful and spiteful of the Black and brown kids running around her neighborhood; a community of people who know what is up with this woman but who can’t do anything about her unless they want to become the aggressor; the ways in which this lady tried to weaponize the police against her neighbors; the police (whose body cameras provide the bulk of the footage for the movie) who are by all accounts some of the good ones but who are still functionally tools of the state powerless to prevent what eventually happens. It’s heartbreaking and blood-boiling, but it’s also completely unflinching in its depiction of what a law like “Stand Your Ground” means when it’s put into practice.

Directed by: Óliver Laxe
Nominations: (2) Best International Feature, Best Sound

The massive speakers thumping out house music into the Moroccan desert that begin Sirât seem to offer the audience one of two interpretive choices: These are either the low tones of a foreboding mystery, as a father (Pan’s Labyrinth’s Sergi Lopez) searches among the grooving nomads for his missing daughter, or the hypnotic beats of something spiritually primal and transformative. Turns out Sirât is actually about a secret third thing: the great big awful 21st century coming to find you no matter how far off the map you’ve gone. I’m being vague because it’s worth experiencing this movie on its own terms, but suffice it to say that Laxe is able to use the full force of cinema to grip you and shake you to attention.

Directed by: Richard Linklater
Nominations: (2) Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay

It’s important to remember that this was Linklater’s other 2025 movie, the one where he didn’t go to Paris and shoot in black-and-white and re-create the French New Wave. Instead, he posted up in a bar, used camera and set trickery to make Ethan Hawke look like the five-foot-four Lorenz Hart, and then staged a 100-minute gossip sesh about the musical-theater scene and prominent bisexuals of the mid-20th century. The whole thing is a dream, owed in large part to Hawke’s bitchy, aggravating, terrifyingly vulnerable performance. Together with Linklater and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Robert Kaplow, they tell the story of an American art form on the brink of transformational evolution and an artist who knows himself enough to know he’ll be left behind.

Directed by: Mary Bronstein
Nominations: (1) Best Actress

Rose Byrne’s performance of a wife and mother left on her own to handle her chronically ill child and crumbling apartment is so grippingly intense that I had a hard time believing Oscar voters would be willing to stick with her long enough to finish the movie, much less vote her into Best Actress. Kudos to them, and kudos to writer-director Bronstein for bringing so much humor and righteous anger to this script while at the same time pushing her camera in so uncomfortably close. “A mother at the end of her rope” is a simple logline, but Bronstein and Byrne do so much work within those parameters to make Linda’s circumstances — her combative/protective/funny relationship with her daughter and her daughter’s eating disorder; her utter exasperation with therapy as both a patient and practitioner — feel complex and not cliché.

Directed by: Clint Bentley
Nominations: (4) Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Original Song

I was surprised this movie turned out to be as divisive as it was. I guess people who read the book felt some type of way. Not having to bear that burden, I was transported by Bentley and his co-writer Greg Kwedar to a Pacific Northwest of quiet beauty and matter-of-fact treachery. Yes, the photography (by justly nominated Adolpho Veloso) is lush, and the Will Patton voice-over is Malickian. But when William H. Macy starts talking about the pitiless eminence of the natural world — after the film has taken great pains to establish the pitiless eminence of the plundering industry — the movie achieves escape velocity.

Directed by: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Nominations: (4) Best Picture, Best Actor, Best International Feature, Best Casting

The year’s best bait and switch, at least when it comes to the title. Sure, if you showed up hoping for South American James Bond, you might have been disappointed. But that disappointment couldn’t have lasted long. In telling a story about the long tail of fascist repression, Filho and star Wagner Moura cover a lot of ground. Obviously, there’s trauma and loss, but there are also memorable characters at the margins (Dona Sebastiana, one of the great characters of 2025) and magical absurdity (that hairy leg) and a shift in perspective from past to present that pull it all together. This is an ambitious film that walks up to the edge of being unwieldy, but Mendonça holds it together and delivers something genuinely unique to the film landscape.

Directed by: Chloé Zhao
Nominations: (8) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Costume Design, Best Original Score, Best Production Design

There is a streak of resentment toward Hamnet out there among the cinephile crowd that I don’t entirely understand: a sense that Zhao is trying to get away with something false in her interpretation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel that tells a fictionalized story about the real-life William Shakespeare, his wife Agnes, and their young son who died of the plague. This is a movie that asks its audience to take seriously Agnes’s connection to the woods and the earth, to sit in the mystery as Zhao depicts a veil between the living and the dead, and to surrender to the final act of the movie, where the conception and production of Hamlet can bring art and grief together into something transcendent. “Does Agnes not know what a play is?” is a good burn, but it blows past any opportunity to accept the movie on its own terms. And as performed by one of the best casts of the year — Jessie Buckley’s gonna win the Oscar, but I linger on Emily Watson and the brothers Noah and Jacobi Jupe — there is great catharsis in this Oscar weepie.

Directed by: Ryan Coogler
Nominations: (16) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Original Score, Best Original Song, Best Production Design, Best Sound, Best Visual Effects

You think you appreciate Sinners enough, and then it goes and smashes the Oscar record with 16 nominations and it’s like, Wait, do I not appreciate Sinners enough? The thing is, what’s great about Sinners is spectacularly, gloriously great. The “I Lied to You” performance, where Coogler lets a century or more of music and dance and race and sexuality and free expression bleed into each other on the same humid dance floor, is something so unique and impactful that it could stand alone as one of the great film accomplishments. Coogler fills the movie with well-drawn characters who have their own stories of grief and heartbreak and crime and ambition, and then layers that over a vampire story that is heavy with allusion to the co-opting of Black creativity. If I ended up somewhat disappointed in the truncated payoff to the vampire buildup, everything else about Sinners that is so transcendent does a pretty good job of making up for it.

Directed by: Josh Safdie
Nominations: (9) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design

In this age of imperiled media literacy, it’s been a bummer to see people come at Marty Supreme with complaints about its scumbaggy title character. Folks … yeah! You got it! Strap on in for the ride with this cocky little shit! Struggles with unlikable main characters aside, there’s so much to be amazed by in Marty: the frenzied pace, the motley crew of character actors and stunt casting (Drescher! Bernhard! Tyler! Ferrara!), the thin line between niche sport dominance and door-to-door salesman. They’re all the beneficiary of Timothée Chalamet’s locked-in lead performance, possessed of an outsize self-belief that ends up justifying every relationship he chooses to exploit for his own advancement. That the film doesn’t end on Marty’s comeuppance but something far more ambiguous feels correct. We’ll see if Chalamet’s quest for the Oscar has a happier ending.

Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Nominations: (13) Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor x2, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Sound

Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies have always felt like they were set in a universe of cinematic reality that isn’t quite our own. The porn kingdom of Boogie Nights, the raining frogs of Magnolia, the misadventures of Jon Peters in Licorice Pizza. It’s what makes him a good interpreter of Thomas Pynchon. What’s especially thrilling about One Battle After Another is that within this very cinematic reality, Anderson cuts directly to the emotional heart of what’s happening in America right now. The Christmas Adventurers are realer than we’d like to admit; the mutual aid and protection systems of Baktan Cross have been reflected in Minneapolis. Rather than preach, though, Anderson dives deeper into the absurdities, pushing his characters to extremity, incorporating humor and violence and the Sisters of the Brave Beaver. It’s Anderson’s most urgent film, and it’s one for which he showed his formidable formal chops. You think you’ve seen every iteration of a car chase, and suddenly PTA and cinematographer Michael Bauman have you at asphalt level. As unreal as this world is, it feels recognizable in so many ways. At last, Paul Thomas Anderson has made the American movie of the year.

Directed by: Jafar Panahi
Nominations: (2) Best Original Screenplay, Best International Feature

… And then Jafar Panahi made the global movie of the year. It’s not surprising that Panahi would make a film with such real-world urgency. But even under those expectations, it’s incredible what the Iranian director has done with this film. The setup promises a tale of simple vengeance: A man operating a car-repair shop (Vahid Mobasseri) recognizes the man who came in with his busted-up car as his former jailer and decides to take justice into his own hands. But it’s what Panahi does with this setup that makes it such a perfect film. Vahid reaches out to a friend for help, and that friend brings in someone else, and before long, a haphazardly assembled gang of people with an interest in seeing this sadist punished are bickering about how they should do it. I really was not expecting so much comedy, turning the tone of the film into something like Death and the Maiden meets Search Party, but that’s what elevates It Was Just an Accident to greatness. That a film with such mordant humor can still land with the dramatic weight of its final act puts the film over the top and cements Panahi as a filmmaker of unique skill and piercing insight. Too many people, I think, got scared off by the subject matter of another heavy film about the repressive Middle East and ended up not watching it. That’s a shame, not only for It Was Just an Accident but for the hope that the Oscars — that movies in general — can open us up to people and perspectives and parts of the world we’re hesitant to experience on our own.