Every Best Picture nominee at this year's Oscars, ranked from worst to best

Here's where our chief film critic stands on Dune, Don't Look Up, and the rest

By A.A. Dowd | February 9, 2022 | 12:03pm

Film Features Oscars

Every Best Picture nominee at this year's Oscars, ranked from worst to best

Clockwise from left: Nightmare Alley (Photo: Searchlight Pictures), Dune (Photo: Warner Bros.), Don’t Look Up (Photo: Netflix), Drive My Car (Photo: Sideshow/Janus Films) Graphic: Rebecca Fassola

When nominations for the 94th annual Academy Awards were announced this year, 10 movies made the Best Picture lineup for the first time in 11 years. Many words could be expended here on the fluctuating number of available slots in that top category, which over the last decade has allowed for as few as five or as many as 10, depending on the amount of consensus support the films got during voting. This year, though, the Academy changed its rules and explicitly set the lineup at an even 10 movies, which the organization hasn’t done since the dawn of the 2010s. Perhaps they were hoping a guaranteed full double-digit slate would nudge that gigantic Spider-hit into contention, the better to boost sliding ceremony ratings. They’ll have to make due with Dune, and also maybe the streaming smash Don’t Look Up.

Best Picture is a full spectrum of budgets and subject matter this year, ranging from that aforementioned sci-fi monolith to what has to count as one of the artiest and least likeliest of nominees in this category ever. (Hint: It’s the one all the Oscar bloggers were up in arms about critics’ groups honoring in the early days of our endless awards season.) The actual quality of the movies up for the big prize ranges, too—though, of course, that’s always true and always a matter of opinion. Consider the full ranking of the Best Picture nominees that follows simply one man’s opinion, formed after another year on the review beat, watching spectacles he loved, coming-of-age dramas he didn’t, and everything in between. Fair warning: The list starts with a blast crater of disapproval, and takes a few clicks to get much more forgiving.

10. Don’t Look Up

When this year, 10 movies made the Best Picture lineup for the first time in 11 years. Many words could be expended here on the fluctuating number of available slots in that top category, which over the last decade has allowed for as few as five or as many as 10, depending on the amount of consensus support the films got during voting. This year, though, the Academy changed its rules and explicitly set the lineup at an even 10 movies, which the organization hasn’t done since the dawn of the 2010s. Perhaps they were hoping a guaranteed full double-digit slate would nudge that into contention, the better to boost sliding ceremony ratings. They’ll have to make due with Dune, and also maybe the streaming smash Don’t Look Up.Best Picture is a full spectrum of budgets and subject matter this year, ranging from that aforementioned sci-fi monolith to what has to count as one of the artiest and least likeliest of nominees in this category ever. (Hint: It’s the one all the Oscar bloggers were up in arms about critics’ groups honoring in the early days of our endless awards season.) The actual quality of the movies up for the big prize ranges, too—though, of course, that’s always true and always a matter of opinion. Consider the full ranking of the Best Picture nominees that follows simply one man’s opinion, formed after another year on the review beat, watching spectacles he loved, coming-of-age dramas he didn’t, and everything in between. Fair warning: The list starts with a blast crater of disapproval, and takes a few clicks to get much more forgiving.

10.

It would be strange if Don’t Look Up wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. We’re talking, after all, about a star-studded satire that scored big with audiences during the pandemic, provoking the kind of buzz and conversation so few blockbusters this past year could muster, and speaking—at least abstractly—to the very topical concern that millions of people are ignoring scientists and going about their lives as normal during a global emergency. Now just imagine if the movie were any good. Though billed as Adam McKay’s big return to broad comedy, Don’t Look Up is more like a self-righteous two-and-a-half-hour screed, peppered with some punishingly unfunny jokes to provide the unconvincing illusion that you’re being entertained and not just scolded. Here’s hoping this meteor-sized hunk of sanctimony really does change some minds on the very real crisis of climate change. That wouldn’t make the movie any less tedious to sit through, but it would help assuage our fear that McKay is preaching, loudly and ineloquently, to the choir.

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On paper, it sounds like the epitome of a heartstring tugger: Kenneth Branagh, veteran of stage and screen, dramatizes his own childhood in Northern Ireland, looking back with nostalgia and melancholy on the year his family had to decide whether to stay or go, given the troubles engulfing their hometown. Yet Branagh approaches this autobiographical material from a curious remove, which proves to be a double-edged sword: Belfast may be less treacly than a logline implies (though there is plenty of cute-kid stuff), but it also holds the audience at a distance from the time and place it’s recreating—sometimes a literal distance, given the distractingly voyeuristic vantages from which the filmmaker often films. The impression, only enhanced by the handsome black-and-white imagery, is of someone ghostwriting their own memoir. This critic has never bought the film’s reputation as a Best Picture frontrunner; its pleasures seem as half-recalled as the formative experiences depicted, as though Branagh were dispassionately attempting to pull some coming-of-age charmer he saw years earlier from his own hazy, imperfect memories.

Last year’s Grand Jury prize winner at Sundance buries a perceptive, singular teenage drama under a lot of bet-hedging Indiewood pap. The movie sings whenever it’s staying laser-focused on the home life of its heroine, Ruby (Emilia Jones), the lone hearing member of a family of eccentric fisherfolk, all wonderfully played by deaf actors (including the delightful, newly minted Oscar nominee Troy Kotsur). These scenes, performed largely in ASL, provide a fascinating window into a corner of American life that’s rarely dramatized. Sadly, so much of the rest of CODA feels rather prefab, running down a laundry list of indie clichés that includes an inspirational instructor (Eugenio Derbez), a puppy-love romance of long leaps off lakeside cliffs, and not one but two climactic assembly-hall songs from the heart. In a sense, CODA’s more specific elements betrays the hoariness of its more generic ones, throwing all that unnecessary Sundance boilerplate into sharper relief.

There’s a certain novelty to King Richard, which forgoes the usual beats of the usual sports biopic in favor of a fresher angle: the rise of tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams as told through the wheelings, dealings, and tough-love tutelage of their father/coach/manager, Richard Williams (Will Smith, who scored a Best Actor nomination for his performance). Yet for all the tired conventions director Reinaldo Marcus Green and screenwriter Zach Baylin admirably sidestep, they stumble right into a common pitfall of the officially authorized life story: Made with the Williams family’s stamp of approval, King Richard can only flirt with a remotely complicated perspective on its main character’s taskmaster tendencies. It’s a portrait of a controlling stage dad that concludes, in the faintly hagiographic trajectory of its arc, that the Wheaties–box ends justify the sometimes extreme means. Smith, of course, makes Richard pretty charismatic, which is part of the problem. A more dramatic film would keep us wondering if father does know best, rather than conspiring with sports almanac history to vindicate his every stubborn quirk.

For all his love of grotesque violence (sometimes committed against adorable kiddies and kitties, no less), Guillermo del Toro is a romantic at heart. His last film, the Best Picture winner , made that clear. Certainly, his blood runs too warm for noir, that most cynical of genres, which may explain why there’s something a little tonally off about his handsome, overlong adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel. Del Toro applies a thick coat of museum polish to the 1940s setting, his plain nostalgia for Old Hollywood extravagance undercutting the seediness of the material, which was better served by the starker black-and-white of the 1947 version. The acting, too, is uneven—Bradley Cooper uncharacteristically flat until the very end (which he then overplays), Cate Blanchett leaning too quickly and heavily into her vamping femme fatale routine to disguise the movie’s trajectory. All that said, the film is beautifully shot, the nastier twists of Gresham’s tale still sting, and del Toro has lots of fun with the swindling stuff, a.k.a. any scene where some carnival huckster is tearing back the curtain on a con.

As pure spectacle, Dune delivers. Denis Villeneuve lends his massive sci-fi opus an impressive sense of scale, reveling in the sheer grandeur of vast desert landscapes, the flying machines soaring above them, and the mighty sandworms tunneling beneath. (It’s a space opera much more David Lean than David Lynch.) What the director can’t do, however, is locate especially interesting characters or much psychological dimension in the dense, dry feudal intrigue of Frank Herbert’s cult classic. Much has been made of how this new adaptation has rendered the story coherent—something Lynch couldn’t or wouldn’t accomplish in his more hallucinatory, condensed take on the novel. But that’s mostly because Villeneuve has cleaved the thing in two, building to a glorified “To be continued…” rather than anything like a proper ending. It’s hard to feel truly satisfied by half a movie, even if the half we’ve got now contains so much awe-inspiring eye candy.

After a , two , a , a , and a paean to Alana Haim’s wonderful (and sadly un-nominated) , yours truly has probably said his piece on the discursive new coming-of-age comedy from Paul Thomas Anderson. But, okay, one more time with feeling: If I’m not quite as high on the writer-director’s vibrant flashback to the San Fernando Valley of his youth as some of my colleagues and peers are, it probably has a lot to do with the loose hodgepodge structure of Anderson’s story, which warmly zigzags its way through the various shit-kicking misadventures of a teenage entrepreneur (Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour) and his slightly older but not much more emotionally mature crush (Haim). Licorice Pizza is largely just a daisy chain of moments plucked out of time, and while some of them hit, a few of them miss, too. Still, it’s mostly the hits that have stayed with me these past few months—especially that glorious farce of an incident with Bradley Cooper’s Jon Peters, a waterbed, and an out-of-gas delivery van (whose pleasures, come to think of it, I elucidated in on this movie I like but don’t love).

Let’s take a moment to just savor the unlikely news that this year’s Best Picture lineup includes a three-hour Japanese art drama about people putting on a multilingual production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. And hey, the movie’s pretty damn good, too! Writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who’s far from a household name in the States (another element that makes the multiple nominations for his film a surprise), takes an ambiguous short story by countryman Haruki Murakami and stretches it waaaaaay out into a quietly epic portrait of trauma and grief management. Far from spinning his wheels, Hamaguchi makes expert use of the long road of extra narrative his running time permits, establishing a pleasingly meditative pace and carefully filling in details of the before and the after of a bereaved stage actor’s life. Count this critic in the small minority that thinks Drive My Car swerves a little off course in its last hour, when all the fascinatingly indirect, unspoken coping mechanisms adopted by the characters give way to an unbroken jet stream of therapeutic unburdening. But that only modestly detracts from the beauty of the journey, including an extended prologue that makes a very strong case for taking the scenic route to your inciting incident.

Jane Campion’s hypnotic Western psychodrama about an embittered Montana rancher and the family he bullies and terrorizes hinges on a big character reveal that’s a little old (cowboy) hat. Of course, the twist wouldn’t have looked so obvious 55 years ago, when Thomas Savage’s source novel was first published. And considerably less predictable than the shopworn insights into the repressed desires of macho men is the winding narrative path Campion takes to them, establishing conflicts she then complicates, until a climactic scene that hinges on motives so ambiguously seeded you can blink and miss them. The Power Of The Dog, like Campion’s previous Best Picture nominee , filters big themes through a thick atmosphere of menacing dreaminess; it belongs to a rich tradition of movies about America from non-Americans, the vague unfamiliarity enhanced by the spectacle of a Kiwi frontier playing our own. Also productively cast against type: Benedict Cumberbatch, whose apparent unfitness for the role of a flinty John Wayne type is the whole point.

We didn’t need another West Side Story. The (honored 10 times over by the Academy, a feat now impossible for the new one to match) remains a compulsively rewatchable classic, albeit one for which a few apologies about the casting are required. But in returning to the music of Bernstein, the lyrics of Sondheim, and the book of Laurents, Steven Spielberg pulls off something rather miraculous: He makes this classic of Broadway and Hollywood feel new again, even as he preserves all its timeless joy and tragedy—the very things that have kept people coming back to West Side Story again and again for decades. Spielberg’s take, with its graceful tweaks and its imaginative reimaginings (dig that keep-away game of “Cool,” dance to that walk-and-talk “America”), isn’t necessarily better than its 50-year-old predecessor. But it could stake its own claim on the dreams of musical-theater aficionados and fans of thoughtfully, lavishly mounted studio spectaculars. There’s a place for it.