Ten Contenders
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Irrepressible Village Voice columnist and cultural flaneur Michael Musto is back to riff on the nominees for this year’s Academy Awards and predict that Sunday night’s ceremony will be “MAGA’s worst nightmare.” Maybe. The New York Times’s Wesley Morris does find that the ten films up for Best Picture are “weird—every single one. They take weird forms. The people in them do weird stuff. They induce weirdness in you . . . Lots of us lament that the movies of yore would never be made now. They’re too dark, too original, too breezy yet brilliant to get a studio’s green light today. This 2025 class is the Movies They Would Never Make Now.”
“I’m choosing to focus on the positives,” writes Sean Burns at WBUR. “We serious cinephiles can hate on the Oscars all day, but three-and-a-half-hour historical dramas like The Brutalist don’t play in multiplexes without those nominations. Whatever brings more eyeballs to something as innovative and necessary as Nickel Boys is a force for good, overall.” As a refresher, here’s a modest roundup of some of the best writing on each of the ten Best Picture nominees:
- Aaron Schuster’s “The Ethical Dignity of Anora,” which e-flux ran last November, remains one of the strongest pieces yet published on Sean Baker’s eighth feature. For the New York Review of Books, Anna Shechtman and D. A. Miller write about Ani (Mikey Madison) and her relationship to her job, while at Slate, Risdon Roberts, an actual sex worker, talks with colleagues about how it feels “to have someone with power, like Baker, throw his weight behind us.” The verdict is mixed, but for Roberts, “what I appreciate most about Anora is that Ani is an authentic hustler, with all the moral gray area that comes with the job, and she still remains someone we root for.”
- “I hate to break it to my friends and colleagues in the very small world of architecture criticism, many of whom have spent the last month cataloguing the ways Brady Corbet’s film The Brutalist misrepresents the process of designing and constructing buildings, but this stem-winder of a Best Picture contender is not really about architecture,” writes Christopher Hawthorne for the Yale Review. “The real theme is America the Brutal. And this allows the film, despite its many flaws, to meet our moment, or at least come admirably close.”
- A Complete Unknown has sparked plenty of discussion among Dylanologists and other experts, reassessments of the night Bob Dylan went electric, and other movies with, about, or by Dylan as well as yet more movies he’s referenced in his work. The overall consensus: James Mangold’s movie is a lot better than most fans expected it would be. In the meantime, Timothée Chalamet’s uncommonly viral Oscar campaign has sparked assessments from both Steven Hyden and Esther Zuckerman in the New York Times.
- “The raw material of Conclave approaches the grandeur of the classic religious cinema, whether the spiritual severity of Dreyer or Rossellini or Bergman, or the anticlerical fury of Buñuel or Pasolini, but [Edward] Berger films like a tourist,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. As we saw last month, many of those who might agree will also eagerly admit that they’ve had a blast riding along with the pulpy plot’s twists and turns. The cast is, as Brody puts it, “splendid,” and the most fun interviewee among them has proven to be Isabella Rossellini.
- Steven Spielberg,James Cameron, and Christopher Nolan have all been publicly effusive in their praise for Dune: Part Two, which completes Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel (and it’s looking more and more likely that Villeneuve will tackle 1969’s Dune: Messiah next). Dune: Part Two is “an ambitious, intelligent, grand-scale masterpiece, an immaculately crafted crowd-pleaser that never backs down from making its audience squirm,” writes Los Angeles Times film critic Amy Nicholson. “I like most of this year’s nominees just fine—I even love a few—but I’m convinced that decades from now, we’ll consider Dune: Part Two the movie of the year.”
- Few early front-runners in any Oscar race have fallen as hard and fast as this year’s most nominated film: Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language musical—set in Mexico but shot in France—about a lawyer who facilitates a drug lord’s transition from male to female, killer to philanthropist. “Sure,” writes John Paul Brammer in an ode in the Los Angeles Times to Johanne Sacreblu, Mexican filmmaker Camila Aurora’s parody, “but whatever one feels about the ethics of Emilia Pérez, the bigger problem, for me, is that it quickly begins to take itself deathly seriously . . . Emilia Pérez’s lack of homework wasn’t a problem until it started applying to Ivy Leagues and getting in on a full ride. The film crumbles under the weight that it demanded we give it.”
- In the summer of 1971, Brazilian politician Rubens Paiva was taken from his family by agents of the military dictatorship. Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here tracks the path to activism taken by his wife, Eunice, played by Best Actress nominee Fernanda Torres. Reporting for the Guardian from Rio de Janeiro, Tom Phillips notes that “the film has struck a chord, in Brazil and around the world, as audiences grapple with a new authoritarian age, spearheaded by self-obsessed strongmen not unlike those who ruled Brazil during the 1964–1985 military regime.” Besides Brazilians, the film’s greatest champion might be Dana Stevens, who leads a discussion with Julia Turner and Isaac Butler on Slate’s Culture Gabfest.
- “By bending time and leaning on nonlinear storytelling, Nickel Boys joins a recent trend of contemporary Black filmmakers relinquishing the impulse to frame Black stories chronologically,” writes Robert Daniels in the New York Times. Cinematographer Jomo Fray shoots RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel from a first-person point of view, “but its daring gaze isn’t its only big swing. This is an inventive nonlinear work whose story intuitively employs archival stills and footage to leap from the 1960s Civil Rights movement to the 2000s.” Daniels draws comparisons to A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, and Garrett Bradley’s Time.
- Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is “the gnarliest, most revolting movie ever nominated for Best Picture,” writes A. A. Dowd at the Ringer. The Academy “has now ensured that a bunch of people who have never so much as flipped through an issue of Fangoria will spend an evening seeing (and never unseeing) a woman spit out her teeth, shed her fingernails, and yank an undigested drumstick out of her belly button.” But: “Look past the supreme yuck factor of this archly Gallic exploitation movie, and you’ll find a resonant lament for a town that chews stars up and spits them out.”
- An adaptation of Stephen Schwartz’s 2003 musical Wicked was first announced in 2012. Ten years passed before cameras rolled, with Jon M. Chu directing Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, and Ariana Grande as Glinda. Chu “understands the hows and whys of cutting together the images for both spatial sense and structural playfulness,” writes Jesse Hassenger at the A.V. Club. “Split-screens, match cuts, spectacle-courting wides; it may sound rudimentary, but Chu’s musical sequences have real flow . . . Is it enough for Wicked to be a better version of those live-action Disney remakes, one with more tactile sets, defter direction, and better leading performances? Maybe, but it’s hard not to think of how the whole thing might have taken full advantage of Chu’s stylistic agility.”
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