Ranking 2025's Best Picture Nominees
It is my sworn duty to prepare you for the Oscars.
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The other day I was guesting on a podcast, and one of the first questions the hosts asked me was “if I haven’t seen any of this year’s best picture nominees, where should I start?”
These are the kinds of questions people ask you when you write about movies. They’re also low-key stumpers, the kind of basic, obvious questions that we culture writers tend to gloss over in favor of, say, analyzing the symbology of Umbrellas of Cherbourg from a fourth-wave feminist perspective or whatever. We love trying to be smarter than the room, but that’s probably not the right answer. Lately I’ve been trying to live my life according to the famous acronym “KIBS,” which of course stands for “Keep It Basic, Shitnose.”
To that end, I thought we’d try the obvious thing and rank this year’s Best Picture nominees. The Oscars are only a few weeks away (March 2nd!), and in case you were thinking of trying to watch all this year’s nominees, I thought I’d help with some guidance about where to start. For the record, I already listed my favorite movies of the year (which hasn’t changed, but I’ll let you know), so there might be a little overlap (but not too much!).
The Nominees
Here are the nominees and current odds — first number DraftKings, second number Bet365, per Covers.com:
Anora: -200; -188
The Brutalist: +200; +187
Conclave: +1400; +1600
A Complete Unknown: +1800; +2200
Emilia Perez: +2000; +2200
Wicked: +5000; +5000
The Substance: +5000; +6600
I'm Still Here: +8000; +10000
Nickel Boys: +10000; +10000
Dune: Part Two: +10000; +10000
No chance I’m giving you betting advice. Conclave feels like a good-value dark horse, but the simple fact of me typing that ensures that it won’t happen. Did I reverse jinx myself by typing that second sentence? Maybe! Go sacrifice a goat and see what its guts tell you!
10. Wicked
Ranking Wicked last isn’t really even a comment on its quality. Some movies are just for people who are not me and this happens to be one of them. That’s fine! I don’t understand Ariana Grande’s entire deal and it will be fine for both of us if I never do! She seems like she’s trying to win a contest for the fewest identifiable facial features! Okay I’ll shut up about her now!
I did at least attempt to watch Wicked. I got through about 70 minutes and by that point the themes still weren’t even really in sight. Maybe it gets really good after that, I don’t know.
That being said, the production design was eye catching and the songs and dance numbers were above average for a musical (I think I had just seen Moana 2, which does not have a single banger in it). All in all, Wicked seemed like a reasonably solid version of whatever kind of movie this is. If you were at all interested in it you’ve no doubt already seen it and probably have opinions about it. Whatever those are are more valid than mine, a guy who didn’t really have any interest in seeing this one in the first place and quickly realized I was only watching out of obligation.
9. I’m Still Here
This was the last nominee I hadn’t seen up until this past week. It’s one of the two non-English-language movies to be nominated for Best Picture this year, and it has one of those titles that’s easy to mix up for other movies (I’m Still Here? I’m Not There? Wish I Was Here?). Directed by Walter Salles, it tells the story of Eunice Paiva, the wife of a left-leaning ex-Brazilian politician who gets disappeared by the authoritarian regime in 1971.
I hate putting this one so low on the list, because the performances and cinematography are outstanding, but if I’m being entirely honest here I’m Still Here was kind of a slog. It does a wonderful job driving home the reality of what it’s like living under authoritarian rule — especially the arbitrariness and ambiguity of it, where no one really tells you what’s happening or why — but it felt like it was perhaps made for a Brazilian audience who are already somewhat familiar with this story. And so it glosses over parts of it that would’ve been maybe new and interesting to me (like 30 years of Eunice becoming a humanitarian lawyer or her son becoming a famous disabled author, say) in favor of more shots of Eunice taking a shower or staring morosely in the mirror (played by Fernanda Torres, who is great). They’re sad, but they carry on. I get it!
I would file I’m Still Here under “glad I saw it, didn’t enjoy the experience that much.”
8. Emilia Pérez
Damn, I’m going to get angry letters for ranking Emilia Pérez above I’m Still Here, aren’t I. Certinly this is my guilt talking. It’s true, one is mostly smart and tasteful, and the other is mostly dumb and tasteless. But film as a medium is still more closely related to vaudeville and porn than it is to academic lectures, so there are times when playing it loud and stupid works better than subtlety and restraint. I don’t make the rules, I’m just drawn to watching a car crash.
As Drew Magary put it recently, “you can’t read about ‘Emilia Pérez’ right now without seeing the word ‘controversy’ alongside it in every headline.”
Suffice it to say, it’s a Spanish-language musical set in Mexico starring mostly non-Mexican actors and directed by a Frenchman, featuring a plot about a drug lord getting a sex change, and then redeeming herself by helping cartel victims’ families find their loved ones’ bodies. Oh, and then the “lead actress” (not really, but she was nominated that way) was discovered to have said some nice things about Hitler. And then compared herself to Jesus and Civil Rights martyrs in the apology tour. So, yeah. “Controversy.”
But this isn’t a list about controversies, it’s about movies. Emilia Pérez, the movie, doesn’t feel like an accurate portrayal of Mexico, Mexicans, trans people, drug lords, singing, working, or hospitals, but I’m not sure it was intended to be. Mostly it’s just… French. Very, very French. It’s less an awards movie than an awards-movie-themed entry into the Eurovision song contest.
Whatever the case, it was pretty entertaining. Not good, per se, but certainly the kind of movie I spent most of being excited to text my friends about afterwards. There’s a musical number called “La Vaginoplastia.” I didn’t leave thinking it deserved Oscar nominations, let alone 13, but I wasn’t bored.
The best possible thing that could happen now is for it to actually win someo f those Oscars it was nominated for. “Thank you to the Academy, God, and my wonderful family, and also I just want to take some time to clarify some of my past comments about Hitler…”
7. A Complete Unknown (original review)
A Complete Unknown has the weird distinction of being a lot better than I thought it would be and not nearly good enough to be nominated for Best Picture. Biopics of musicians have just done so well at the Oscars in the past that they always command big For Your Consideration budgets, and so they keep winning awards, and then because they keep winning awards, all the biggest actors love making them and so then they keep getting made and it’s sort of a self-perpetuating cycle at this point.
But like I said, A Complete Unknown was much better than I imagined. James Mangold is the master of taking movies that should be total shit and making something halfway decent (his best is the one with arguably the least IP baggage, Ford Vs. Ferrari, the beau ideal of a Dad Movie).
That being said, even not being a Bob Dylan scholar, this felt like a fairly shallow take on Dylan. There was so much political baggage to Dylan going electric that the movie only barely bothers with. Is contending with all of that even possible in a commercial biopic with the rights to an entire song catalogue? It might not be.
It was about freedom from genre constraints, man! Okay, sure.
Or maybe part of Dylan’s enduring appeal is that he was sort of a shallow guy, and the movie is just honest about that? Maybe not shallow, just shrewd, in recognizing that we like our musical heroes less avowedly political, so that we can project whatever we want onto them. And probably he just didn’t need the weight of everyone’s dumb expectations, but here I go projecting. Forget those folkies and their solidarity blah blah blah, man, it’s time to do drugs and score chicks and ride motorcycles!
Certainly my ambivalent feelings toward the movie are wrapped up in my ambivalent feelings toward the entire 1960s and the tainted legacy of the counterculture. Hearing Dylan break into “The Times They Are A-Changing” gave me goosebumps — just to imagine a time when the words could ring broadly true, and not ironic in the face of a senile gerontocracy. The movie seems somewhat aware of this, and the fact that Pete Seeger ends up seeming sort of like the hero of the movie feels a little like the movie that they wanted to make. Only they knew they couldn’t, because of the way biopics have to be made, and so instead we get some coda about how Bob Dylan was important because he sold a lot of records. Meh.
Anyway, that Johnny Cash character seemed pretty cool. Maybe someone should make a movie about that guy? Dunno, just spitballin’ here.
6. The Substance
I appreciated The Substance, especially how much they went for it with the setpieces and the gross-out effects later in the movie. Those were truly fantastic. “Body horror” seems like the theme of the year. Are we not all collectively repulsed by these prisons of bile and mucus?
That being said, I appreciate The Substance more than I love it. I felt like I sensed where it was going about halfway through and then got kind of antsy waiting for the expected things to play out. The makeup and effects kept it worthwhile, but even if we’re speaking strictly of kinda gross body horror movies, I enjoyed The Apprentice and A Different Man a little more than this one. Solid flick, though.
It seems a little ironic, nominating Demi Moore for best actress this year, surely partly out of guilt for not recognizing her before, while snubbing Margaret Qualley, surely out of some of the same impulses that kept us from recognizing Demi Moore’s talent for all those years. She’s not acting, she’s just being sexy! Please. Margaret Qualley is a killer. One of our best nepo babies. (See also: Riley Keough, who should have been nominated at least twice already).
5. The Brutalist (original review)
I like to think of The Brutalist as a more house-trained Emilia Pérez. Certainly it’s a lot more successful at genuinely epic filmmaking (and would be worth it for that alone) but it’s also true that a lot of its appeal is making me wonder what the hell I just watched.
Best I can tell, The Brutalist is a sort of politics-flipped version of The Fountainhead, about a tortured architect struggling to build his masterpiece, only he’s a nice socialist instead of an asshole libertarian. Also some weird sex stuff. Actually the weird sex stuff is probably the best part, though that might’ve been true of The Fountainhead too, I don’t really remember.
The Brutalist is brilliant for the first two-thirds of its massive, 3:34 run time (it flew by, honestly) but it doesn’t really work for me after the dinner party confrontation scene. There’s a thing we love to do in movies where the heroes confront the antagonists and call them out for what they are and the music swells and it’s cathartic and everyone goes home feeling like the arc of history bends toward justice. But if the last ten years should have taught us anything, it’s the limits of exposing hypocrisy for its own sake. If you are truly bad, just hearing someone tell you that you are bad isn’t going to do shit! The “big confrontation grandstanding scene” just doesn’t do anything for me anymore. I don’t need every movie to be a huge downer in which the bad guy wins, maybe just be a little more honest or imaginative about the mechanisms required to defeat entrenched power.
Still, the good outweighed the bad in The Brutalist, and I’d be thrilled if we got a lot more movies like this one (or just more about Guy Pearce having a sweet mustache). Intermissions? Good, actually.
Best line: “I only left here once in 20 years, to beat on the corpse of Mussolini with my own hands.”
4. Dune Part Two (original review)
I liked what I saw, but Dune Two feels more like two-thirds of a movie than an entire movie to me. In terms of massive budget sci-fi epics that released new installments in 2024, I would give a slight edge to Furiosa. Still, everything I saw was mind-blowing and eye-popping and shit-button-puckering and all of the adjectives. It was good! And yet good in a way that a year later, I don’t have much to say about it.
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The top three is where things get tough. All three are great in different ways and the ranking changes based on which rubric I use to judge them. Is the “best movie” the most important? The most entertaining? The one that had the most emotional impact? The one that was the most enjoyable to watch, or the one I most want to see again? These are subject to change over the next few years due to fluctuations in timeliness and recency bias, but for now I’ve applied a proprietary, vibes-based ranking algorithm to average out the above considerations into a correct numerical ranking.