A Definitive Ranking of Every 2026 Oscar Nominee (Includes Shorts)

By Jacob Barlow-Jones

​Hello all, and welcome back to The Friendly Film Fan! Back in January, just after the 2026 Oscar Nominations were announced, I published a piece detailing where you could watch every single one (or at least every single one we could personally find). Given that it’s now been just over a month and a half, that piece has now been updated to its latest iteration as some contenders moved from relative theatrical and VOD obscurity onto streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu, so if you’re still looking to catch up on as many nominees as possible before Sunday, now is a perfect time for an Oscars movie marathon. 

​Speaking of movie marathons, I’ve more or less been running my own for this year’s Academy Awards over the past few weeks, and for the first time since 2021, I have actually managed to see every single one of the nominees for this year’s Oscars, a grand total of 50 films. It was not an easy task to accomplish, as some of these nominees are still largely inaccessible to the general public, but for those of us obsessed with all cinema has to offer, it’s nice to know that it can in fact be done, even without a pandemic forcing studios to provide wider availability for more obscure titles. With all that in mind, I thought it would be a fun pre-ceremony exercise to rank all 50 of this year’s nominees, one by one, from worst to best, leaving a few brief thoughts on each. (These blurbs should not be considered official reviews of any film; if I have reviewed any nominees in an official capacity, I will link those reviews to the titles below.) There’s not really an easy way to segue into the rest of this piece, so without further ado, let’s get started!

50. Viva Verdi!
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Nominated For: Best Original Song (“Sweet Dreams of Joy”)
 
It always ends up that some of the least inspired nominations come Oscar time hail straight from the Best Original Song category, and this year, the bottom two slots are once more occupied by relatively obscure titles whose only purpose seems to be to garner said nominations. Viva Verdi! – which follows a group of senior musicians living at the historic Casa Verdi in Milan, built by the incomparable opera legend of the same name – wouldn’t be a bad film for a Sunday afternoon educational program, but as a film and especially as an Oscar nominee, it’s painfully, dreadfully boring. What makes its nomination worse is the fact that “Sweet Dreams of Joy,” the song for which the film is nominated, isn’t even an especially good song when compared to many of the other songs that were shortlisted for the category. Sure, some songs had no shot in hell of making the cut, but when the better of the two Wicked: For Good songs, as well as “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,” “Last Time (I Seen the Sun),” and “Highest 2 Lowest” are all passed over in favor of this, a film which was released back in 2024 but only had its original song released and attached to it this year, it’s hard not to be dismayed at the state of the category. Something had to occupy the bottom slot, and unfortunately, Viva Verdi! drew the short straw this time around.

49. Diane Warren: Relentless
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Nominated For: Best Original Song (“Dear Me”)
 
Ah, Diane Warren, the Best Original Song category mainstay that just won’t quit until she wins a competitive Oscar (the honorary ones don’t count). Every year, people make their predictions in the Original Song category too early, leaving Diane Warren out of their lineup, and every year, she managed to sneak right back in. Unfortunately, the film about her “relentless” pursuit (no pun intended) of Oscar glory can’t possibly live up to some of the genuinely impressive work she’s turned in over the years, thanks in no small part to the film’s very existence being an obvious play for an Oscar in itself. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting an Oscar – anyone who works in movies and says they don’t care about it is usually just being dishonest with either the audience or themselves – but to create an entire documentary with awful lighting setups (which Warren herself acknowledges), no true exploration of the artist’s psyche, and a Wikipedia surface-level skimming of her greatest hits just to garner a nomination is absurd (but not as absurd as Warren claiming the nominated song is the “best she’s ever written” when its lyrics as a self-help ballad feel shallow and ten years out of date). 

48. Jurassic World Rebirth
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Nominated For: Best Visual Effects
 
Credit where credit is due: Jurassic World Rebirth does contain some pretty great visual effects at a massive scale. It’s easily the best-looking of the Jurassic World films from a purely visual standpoint, thanks in no small part to a close collaboration with Gareth Edwards, whose directorial credits include such films as Rogue One and The Creator; whatever one thinks of those films narratively, there’s no denying their production quality, especially vis-à-vis their VFX. Where Rebirth falls short is…basically everywhere else. Apart from the Mosasaurus attack on the water and the river raft sequence (which was directly adapted from the original Jurassic Park book), there’s very little to glean from the film’s narrative and even less from its two-dimensional characters. The script even manages to take the much-hyped D-Rex – supposedly the ultimate threat – and do absolutely nothing interesting or even all that terrifying with it. This franchise has never lived up to the highs of its first entrant, but even after four failed Worlds in a row, its box office success seems to practically guarantee we’ll continue to see pale imitators like this for decades. 

47. The Three Sisters
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Nominated For: Best Animated Short
 
The first of the short films on this list across three categories, The Three Sisters seems at first blush like a cleverly animated story of sisterhood, but soon devolves into a tongue-in-cheek comedy about them all fighting over a man (of all things) who happens to show up on their island. To say that this was a disappointing watch undersells just how childishly it handles the material it’s working with, but as a nominee over other, more worthy contenders, it feels like an even larger mistake. I really don’t see what the point of this one was at all.

46. Butcher’s Stain
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Nominated For: Best Live-Action Short
 
The first of two short films from Israel to acknowledge Palestinian personhood, Butcher’s Stain gets so close to actually saying something meaningful about how Israelis post-October 7 have come to see Palestinians as lesser than them, but stops just short offering any genuine critique of the specific kinds of racism Palestinians face day to day. The film instead puts the burden on its lead character to “remain dignified” and just walk away from the coworker that slanders him to his superiors, rather than fight for actual justice for himself or in any way demonstrate how such slander has real-world consequences; it walks right up the point, and then walks away.

45. Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud
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Nominated For: Best Documentary Short
 
For all the good Brent Renaud did the world with his commitment to journalism in the world’s most dangerous spaces, Armed Only with a Camera seems more interested in playing back his greatest hits than it does actually letting us get to know Renaud as a person. As impressive as those hits are, we don’t really get to know who Renaud was outside of his work, except through the words of those who attended his funeral. The film does attempt to gets its arms around the impact Renaud has left on the world both as journalist and filmmaker, and features some harrowing footage as he is on the ground gathering stories, but try as he might, Craig Renaud – who had to finish the film following his brother’s death – just doesn’t quite have the filmmaking instinct his brother did; at least, not yet.

44. Elio
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Nominated For: Best Animated Feature
 
There’s a distinct feeling that Elio could have been one of Pixar’s great underrated gems were it to follow through on its familial themes and not devolve into a fairly wrote alien adventure film. It’s hardly a dud, and is certainly more entertaining than some other B-tier Pixar films, but its unfulfilled potential weighs it down in such a way that it only reminds me of how Disney Animation has either stolen or driven off a lot of the company’s great storytellers, and how it’s now the Pixar name, not the quality of their films, which feels like a staple of the Best Animated Feature category. At least Hoppers, for the faults it has, maintained its thematic structure throughout.

43. The Lost Bus
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Nominated For: Best Visual Effects
 
There’s no one like Paul Greengrass to direct an on-the-ground thriller about real-life heroes facing impossible – and occasionally insurmountable – odds. Even with some thinly-written characters at its center, The Lost Bus manages to recreate the tragic circumstances of the 2018 Paradise fires with harrowing intensity, making the rescue of 22 people from Ponderosa elementary feel like a genuine life-or-death race as one watches the story play out. The visual effects for which the film garnered its nomination blend in seamlessly, and every minute in the heart of the fires showcases that even when Greengrass is working with lesser material, he’s still the best there is at exactly this sort of film.

42. Song Sung Blue
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Nominated For: Best Actress (Kate Hudson)
 
The SAG slingshot heard around the world, Kate Hudson’s nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role was more or less a sixth-or-seventh place longshot right up until the Screen Actors Guild unveiled their nominations and left every international contender off the list. To be fair, Hudson is very good in Song Sung Blue, as is co-lead Hugh Jackman, but the film itself is largely so-so compared to many of the other nominees included here. Even with the mistake of spoiling the twist in the film’s marketing, it had so many opportunities to be more than just a run-of-the-mill musician biopic, and instead settled for the safest route at (almost) every turn. 

41. The Smashing Machine
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Nominated For: Best Makeup and Hairstyling
 
I feel like we’ve all done a disservice to Benny Safdie’s UFC drama about one of the sport’s ultimate icons by simply dismissing it as not very good narratively. Of course, the film doesn’t do much to make Mark Kerr’s life more interesting than it would already be to those familiar with his story, but the Dwayne Johnson performance at its center, as well as the naturalistic makeup he has to wear over the course of the film, offer a lot for viewers who are looking for something interesting to hold onto. Johnson plays Kerr as this giant, hulking mass whose softness juxtaposes brilliantly with Johnson’s insane physique; it’s the type of part I’ve missed seeing the actor play, and I hope – somewhat against hope – that Johnson continues on this kind of trajectory, challenging himself to non-typecast roles in the future.

40. Jane Austen’s Period Drama

Nominated For: Best Live-Action Short
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As funny as Jane Austen’s Period Drama is, it never really goes for anything other than being an easy-to-swallow farce; it’s absolutely entertaining, and there’s lots of clever wordplay amongst a range of different comic styles in each performance, but what holds it back is the lack of a larger point, a theme to tie the whole thing together beyond being what amounts to a 12-minute Funny or Die sketch. Truthfully, there’s nothing especially wrong with it as a concept, but just because one could do significantly worse in terms of live-action nominees doesn’t mean asking for better should be out of the question. As it stands, this one is just…fine.

39. Forevergreen
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Nominated For: Best Animated Short
 
If I had a nickel for every time there was a cute animated short centered on a bear experiencing personal growth and loss that was shortlisted for this year’s Oscars, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice, right? All joking aside, while I do ultimately prefer Snow Bear as the hand-drawn counterpart to this film, Forevergreen is nothing to sneeze at, and would’ve fit right at home amongst the old shorts that Pixar used to put in front of its theatrically-released movies (an unfortunate casualty of the Disney+ era). Much like the previous nominee, however, it doesn’t quite go beyond being a well-made version of something we’ve all seen before.

38. Avatar: Fire and Ash
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Nominated For: Best Visual Effects
 
For all the hate that the Avatar films get for having “no cultural impact” (which in itself is demonstrably not true being that it’s simply not the kind of cultural impact one associates with large-scale blockbusters of the modern era), their box office numbers would suggest people across the world still love spending time on Pandora, and Fire and Ash is no different. The third of James Cameron’s films centered on the adventures of Jake Sully and his family’s life amongst the Na’vi people, the thing that holds this entrant back from reaching greater heights – apart from an underuse of the Ash tribe led by a terrific Oona Chaplin – is its status as the originally-conceived second half of The Way of Water, which means it has to spend a lot more time wrapping up the second film’s loose threads than it’s able to telling its own story. That said, it still features what are somehow the best visual effects of any Avatar film, some of the best performances from its returning leads that the series has ever had, and action sequences with such clear geography and momentum that only a filmmaker of James Cameron’s skill could have ever pulled them off. Hopefully the imminent fourth film the director has now confirmed as “very likely to happen” is able to push the Sully family in a genuinely new direction, and perhaps we’ll even get to see more of Oona Chaplin’s Varang once it’s ready to be unveiled.

37. Children No More: “Were and Are Gone”
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Nominated For: Best Documentary Short
 
The most difficult of the documentary shorts to see if one wasn’t able to catch it in theaters, Children No More follows a group of Israeli citizens opposed to the genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli government and military that come together to protest their government’s actions by holding up photos in public spaces of children who have been killed by this ongoing conflict. This one has aged a bit given that it was all filmed prior to the Israeli hostages all being returned to their home country, so the segments of the film during which the former hostages are brought up feel like a moot point each time the group says they care about both the hostages and the loss of Palestinian life, but it can be nice to be reminded that there are a not insignificant number Israeli citizens who oppose their governments abhorrent actions and aren’t afraid to say so. Then again, much like the aforementioned Butcher’s Stain, the film doesn’t really go anywhere beyond showing the viewer that groups like this exist without actually examining the racism of its people or government at a larger scale, making it feel less like an acknowledgement of the very real harms Palestinians have endured for decades and more like a hand-washing or brand management exercise for Israel because “see? There are good people in here too,” especially since the short itself comes from that nation. Still, at least it is attempting to say something, even if its imperfections and the nature of where it comes from holds it back from being what could have been an extremely powerful examination of how the genocide came to be.

36. Perfectly a Strangeness
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Nominated For: Best Documentary Short
 
Do you ever want to just hang out with your donkey friends and explore an abandoned astronomical observatory in Chile together? If your answer was yes, you may be entitled to financial compensation…or you could just enjoy Perfectly a Strangeness, an indie documentary short that’s way more immersive (thanks to stunning cinematography) than it would otherwise have any right to be. How director Alison McAlpine managed to craft a beautiful, silent story of animal friendship and wonder at the cosmos in just 15 minutes, I’ll never know, but I felt enamored by it all the same. (That shot of the stars in one of the donkey’s eye? Goosebump-inducing.) The only thing that holds the film back from being higher on the list is that it, too, has very little to offer beyond its surface-level awe, but I’ll still take it over a short that only pretends to have a larger point. 

35. Cutting Through Rocks
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Nominated For: Best Documentary Feature
 
Out of the entire Documentary Feature category, Cutting Through Rocks is perhaps only the second-most conventional nominee, and yet, for me, it’s the least interesting. Granted, current socio-political development in Iran have shifted dramatically since this film was shot, but nonetheless, the film itself still feels as though it’s just scratching the surface of who its central subject is. As Sara (the Iranian woman at the center who seeks to challenge the patriarchal standards by which most of the country lives their lives) ascends, we’re invited to watch her struggle and triumph all the while, yet the story still feels a tad incomplete, likely due to the lack of anywhere else for it to go until perhaps a decade or so from now. As a documentary, the entertainment factor is there, and it’s mercifully on the shorter end, but overall, it’s a rather plain work when all is said and done.

34. A Friend of Dorothy
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Nominated For: Best Live-Action Short
 
This is the most easily palatable of the live-action shorts for general audiences, and it’s not hard to see why when one watches it, but part of me wishes it had been bold enough to dive deeper into the concept of what a “friend of Dorothy” actually represents, rather than simply telling the audience that the two leads have a specific connection point through theater that drives their friendship and then leaving it at that. The short is well-made, though, and I would have been perfectly fine with a feature-length version of it should the filmmakers elect to expand the story, which could fix the above issue. With such little time to say something deeper, this short is barely able to dig an inch before it ends.

33. All the Empty Rooms

Nominated For: Best Documentary Short
 
When I first saw All the Empty Rooms, I was floored. Of course, not knowing what it was about – even if I suspected which direction it would go – helped that feeling lift off. The second time I saw it, however, it didn’t hold the same emotional impact, though its mission is as admirable as ever: offer some form of closure to parents whose children were victims of the horrific school-based gun violence that permeates the United States, which has heartbreakingly become not just a staple of life in America, but one of its defining features. Each room visited yields new pain, and new catharsis as we see these families be given a chance to say something meaningful not about the violence itself but about who that person in their family outside of the scope of said violence. Yet, as great as the film’s mission is in practice, there exists yet again this nagging feeling in the back of one’s head that there’s so much more to this idea that hasn’t yet been examined with the patience and care it deserves, and this short only scratches the surface of a deeply-rooted problem which has gone continuously unaddressed.

32. The Ugly Stepsister
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Nominated For: Best Makeup and Hairstyling
 
Kudos to writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt for managing to actually do something interesting with the Cinderella narrative beyond just making the villain a misunderstood protagonist we need to feel sympathy for. That’s not entirely off-base from what the film is on paper, but setting the tale of one of the princess’s step-sisters inside a body horror film focused the idea of a young girl changing and even mutilating her body in pursuit of what she believes are better circumstances for both herself and her family is an inspired stroke. I’m not personally sure the film’s makeup nomination is enough to make up for the fact that something like 28 Years Later was left off the shortlist for this category entirely, but it’s nice to see the branch taking major swings outside of putting an actor in a Churchill prosthetic and calling it a day. Also, not for nothing, this is the fourth 2025 film in which a character named Agnes encounters adversarial circumstances in a major way.

31. Kokuho
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Nominated For: Best Makeup and Hairstyling
 
For all the Tom Cruise hype behind Kokuho, the film gets off to a fairly slow start, but eventually morphs into a quiet tribute to the Japanese theater art of Kabuki. I found the film’s first act to be rather slow, but once the second act gets going and it becomes clear that the film is more or less a Japanese Amadeus, I was willing to go along for the ride. There is some truly beautiful makeup work here, as well as stellar wig work for the Kabuki actors, rendering the film’s nomination well-deserved, but I was surprised in watching it that it didn’t make the shortlist for Cinematography at all. All that to say, if you have the patience for a nearly 3-hour film about an ancient art form that only a few highly skilled people in the world still know how to do, Kokuho is worth at least a cursory glance.

30. Come See Me in the Good Light
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Nominated For: Best Documentary Feature
 
One of the buzziest debuts out of this past year’s Sundance Film Festival was Ryan White’s documentary chronicling non-binary poet Andrea Gibson’s emotionally fraught battle with cancer (Gibson passed away on July 14) and the ways in which it affected both their own life and their life in conjunction with their spouse, Megan Falley. Come See Me in the Good Light was was acquired by Apple and released over the summer, quietly gaining notoriety over a period of several months, though it was unclear whether it would make the cut for nominations once January came around. The film is a beautiful, even if rather plain, examination of what life with cancer can sometimes look like, buoyed by Gibson’s often stunning poetry as the viewer follows along their journey. Those who have had loved ones struggle with cancer may find it difficult to parse the film’s beauty with the realities of the disease itself, but if there were any film this year that managed to thread the ideas of finality and eternity together better than any other, it’s this one.

29. Retirement Plan
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Nominated For: Best Animated Short
 
The shortest of the animated short film nominees, Retirement Plan clocks in at just 7 minutes, and manages in that time to tell a complete story of a life lived and hope for the future. Narrated by Domhnall Gleeson, the film’s brevity makes it an ideal candidate for the “short” part of the category name, and would be a worthy winner given how it embodies that name fully, even if there are others I personally enjoyed just a bit more.

28. Two People Exchanging Saliva
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Nominated For: Best Live-Action Short
 
This was the first of the live-action short films I watched, as it was streaming on YouTube for free well before most others had been made available, and boy, did it leave a lasting impression. Two People Exchanging Saliva is a fascinating viewing experience, not at all what one might expect given its title, occupying something closer to a Yorgos Lanthimos-esque world than anything resembling our own reality. The performances are excellent, the writing is endlessly clever, and while some characters run an unfortunate risk of nearly turning into caricatures, the small interactions between others are some of my favorites in any film this year, short-form or otherwise. Plus, it helps that it’s easily the best-shot of the live-action shorts, with stunning black and white photography that immerses the viewer in its world without feeling like a gimmick. 

27. The Singers
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Nominated For: Best Live-Action Short
 
While the previous film on this ranking may be my favorite live-action short on a personal level, there’s no denying that – much like Retirement Plan does for its own category – The Singers embodies the very definition of “Best Live-Action Short” more than anything else in this category. Sure, the ending perhaps doesn’t leave things off as cathartically as I might have hoped, but it does make for a rather comedic touch to what is otherwise a fairly somber tale. As the group in the bar all tries to out-sing one another in pursuit of a miniscule amount of money, the ensemble graces us with a variety of different styles of music, vocal intonation, and performance, and the way it all caps off is sure to leave first-time watchers with fond memories of the experience.

26. Sirāt
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Nominated For: Best International Feature (Spain)
 
Is Sirāt good? Is it a film made purely for shock value tragedy or is there some deeper meaning behind its multiple upsetting turns and twists? I’m not sure I have a definitive answer to any of those questions, but I do know that once I saw it, I would never forget the experience of having watched it. The film’s presence on multiple Oscars shortlists briefly tricked some pundits (including myself for a short while) into thinking that Neon may actually be able to propel four of their international contenders to Best Picture nominations rather than three (of course, this was before It Was Just an Accident lost a lot of its momentum in the race, so the notion of only two Neon films getting in wasn’t yet likely). Following a father searching for his missing daughter by joining ravers in a journey across the desert, the film has become quite divisive over the past few months; those that like it seem to think it’s one of 2025’s absolute best, while those that don’t put it towards the bottom of their ratings pool. For myself, a rewatch is likely in order if I’m to determine exactly where on the in-between scale I fall. 

25. The Devil is Busy
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Nominated For: Best Documentary Short
 
I was surprised to see The Devil is Busy – easily the best of the documentary short films in my view – in first place for many Oscar predictions lists as what’s most likely to win the category. It’s not that it’s not worthy or even that it’s unlikely, but this category has burned me before, most recently when the Netflix doc The Only Girl in the Orchestra beat out Instruments of a Beating Heart for the gold last year. (Netflix is very good at campaigning in this particular category, so a win for All the Empty Rooms could very easily dash any chances this film has at a win. Then again, the issue-oriented short docs last year weren’t especially good, and this year has at least two excellent candidates.) The film follows the director of operations at an Atlanta-based abortion clinic as she deals with security, protestors, staffing, and challenges within the legal system, all to help her patients remain safe as they come in for their appointments. Of course, it helps that Geeta Gandbhir, one of the film’s co-directors, also has feature experience given that she directed The Perfect Neighbor, which leads the documentary feature category this year, so the edit for this film is as clean as they come, telling a complete story over the course of a single day. If this is to be the winner of this category, I’ll personally be very pleased.

24. The Girl Who Cried Pearls
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Nominated For: Best Animated Short
 
Stop-motion animation is so difficult to pull off that most studios outside of those working in short-form filmmaking don’t even attempt it anymore, but when it works, the results can be a real treat. The Girl Who Cried Pearls is stunning to look at, and while its narrative can sometimes feel a bit lackluster in terms of its supporting characters, the story itself is one that would fit right in with classic stop-motion fair like Coraline or Frankenweenie (though it may use a more optimistic lens). The narration can sometimes get in the way of what the film is attempting to accomplish, but if one can briefly brush past its constant presence, the results are well worth the time.

23. KPop Demon Hunters
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Nominated For: Best Animated Feature, Best Original Song (“Golden”)
 
With such a banger of a soundtrack and some beautiful animation, it can be difficult to remember that the story of KPop Demon Hunters leaves a lot of missed opportunities on the table with its story in favor of being more digestible kids fair (perhaps the inevitable sequel can answer a lot of those questions). Then again, those animation qualities – and especially that soundtrack – do a lot of heavy lifting most animated films this year just haven’t been able to come close to. Golden is such a mainstream pop hit from a soundtrack full of great songs, it’s an undeniable Best Original Song winner (even if another film to be mentioned later features the better song in the category), and the film’s status as Netflix’s most watched original film ever more or less guarantees that it takes the Animated Feature Oscar as well, making it the streamer’s second win in that category. There’s really not much else to say about this one that anyone with kids wouldn’t already know, so I’ll just leave it at that for now.

22. Mr. Nobody Against Putin
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Nominated For: Best Documentary Feature
 
While My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow occupies the documentary epic space, covering Russia’s systemic suppression of independent journalism at a macro scale, Mr. Nobody Against Putin instead takes a micro approach to the Putin regime’s attacks on education through the lens of one teacher who documents the slow descent of his school from a place which teaches the usual curriculums into a mouthpiece for Russian military propaganda. As a film, it’s an interesting document to see, but the ethical concerns around how it was made – the lack of blurred faces (both adults and children), the use of real names, etc – does keep it from being an essential piece of journalism regardless of the subject at hand. As necessary as it is to tell this story, the film’s approach feels a bit sloppy and a tad-self serving for its lead subject, who positions himself as a sacrificial hero by simply getting this documentary out into the world. Still, to have a more honed-in look at what the Russian government is doing at a personal scale is valuable; what viewers have to reckon with is whether that value is worth the cost of what said government could do in retaliation to those involved.

21. Blue Moon
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Nominated For: Best Actor (Ethan Hawke), Best Original Screenplay
 
Every year there’s at least one “bottle” movie that gets some Oscar love, even if it doesn’t ultimately make the nominations cut, but for this year, Blue Moon garnered not just a Best Actor nomination for Ethan Hawke, but also an Original Screenplay nod for writer Robert Kaplow. Of Richard Linklater’s two films released last year, this is easily the better one in my opinion. The film features Hawke as Lorenz Hart and the whole thing takes place over one night in a bar during the opening of the musical Oklahoma!, which followed the split between Hart and Richard Rogers as a musical writing duo. The script is extremely talky, so if you can’t vibe with films that are light on action and heavy on dialogue, it might not be something I could recommend, but every once in a while, a film comes along that could have been a play and demonstrates an actor’s skill in keeping us engaged with the film anyway. This really is the Ethan Hawke show, and it’s one of his absolute best performances since he last worked with Linklater on Boyhood back in 2014, and easily his best lead part since First Reformed in 2017. That said, if one isn’t already open to what is essentially a capital A acting showcase for Hawke, the experience is likely pretty draining.

20. Butterfly
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Nominated For: Best Animated Short
 
“Every frame a painting” has never been more applicable to a short film than it is to this year’s most powerful animated short, Butterfly, which sees a man swim in the sea, each surfacing resurrecting a memory from his life, all of them linked to water in some form or fashion. The film’s art style is stunning to look at, and pairing it with a touching story about past traumas and triumphs just adds a little extra weight to the whole thing that, while it didn’t actually need it, makes the film all the better. This one is also streaming on YouTube I believe, so check it out if you get the chance.

19. Frankenstein
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Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Jacob Elordi), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Original Score, Best Sound
 
I’m slightly on the lower end of Frankenstein than most of my peers are, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t aspects of the film I still thoroughly enjoyed. The film is a bit slow in its first half as Oscar Isaac recounts his story to the boat captain that opens the film, but once Jacob Elordi shows up as The Creature, it really starts to sing. It’s also beautifully-designed top to bottom, from costumes to makeup to set design, even if the photography makes a lot of it look more like a digital effect than it should given how practical all the sets actually are. All in all, the film is good if one sticks with it, but feels closer to a more formal exercise in adapting a classic work than a truly emotionally-grounded story.

18. Zootopia 2
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Nominated For: Best Animated Feature
 
There are some detractors out there who don’t consider Zootopia 2 to be especially good – and it notably pales in comparison to its predecessor – but I had a lot of fun with it. The continuing adventures of Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde are a delight to watch, even when some of the jokes and many, many other film references don’t quite land as well, and the film’s ultimate twist manages to work extremely well without needing to drop a bunch of not-so-subtle hints along the way. Succession with a lynx family? Now that’s a genius-level idea.

17. Arco
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Nominated For: Best Animated Feature
 
For my money, Arco is easily the most unique of the animated features released this year, and that makes it one of the two films I personally think should be winning the Oscar over KPop Demon Hunters, but it’ll probably have to settle for a third or fourth place finish when all is said and done. Set in the year 2075, the film sees a boy from a time-traveling family accidentally launch himself and his rainbow flight suit into a wildly different past, eventually meeting up with a young girl who shelters him and vows to help him return to his time. The film more or less follows the trajectory one might expect for a story like it, but it’s all of the imaginative concepts within that trajectory that make it worth watching; it’s also not afraid to take some risks with its characters, which is refreshing to see given how most animated films refuse to do so for fear of alienating their core audiences. Of the films nominated in this category – even if there is at least one better one – this is my personal favorite.

16. The Voice of Hind Rajab
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Nominated For: Best International Feature (Tunisia)
 
Buckle up: this is a heavy one. The Voice of Hind Rajab follows a group of workers at the Red Crescent as they attempt to rescue the titular 6-year-old Palestinian girl from a car that’s under attack by the IOF by trying to keep her on the line until they can get to her. The film’s real world ties to the ongoing Palestinian genocide make it an urgent watch all on its own, but given that the film blends its semi-fictional emergency call center story with the real-life audio recordings from the day this all took place, including those of Hind Rajab herself, the docu-drama takes on an even more devastating double meaning as one watches it. If you already know the story of Hind Rajab and what happened to her, you’ll be familiar with the basic story of how everything went down, so there’s little included in the film that you wouldn’t already know, but if for whatever reason you haven’t heard her story before, this film is an excellent, respectfully-crafted recap of that tragic day’s horrible events.  

15. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
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Nominated For: Best Actress (Rose Byrne)
 
The screenplay categories this year are so stacked that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – Mary Bronstein’s tale of a mother in crisis – probably wasn’t even close to making the cut in Original Screenplay, but that doesn’t make the film any less worthy, especially given how it straddles the line between pseudo-horror and stress-inducing drama. Rose Byrne is excellent in this movie, which refuses to fall back on the old “isn’t motherhood still worth it” trope seen in so many of these types of films and instead focuses on all the ways the world at large makes it difficult to even be a mother or be understood as one in the first place. It’s a fairly thorny performance in a pretty thorny movie, and while I’m reticent to give anything else about it away, the way in which the ending plays out is one of the great film endings of 2025.

14. The Secret Agent
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Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Actor (Wagner Moura), Best International Feature (Brazil), Best Casting
 
I owe The Secret Agent another watch I’m sure, especially given how many pundits have described their experience with it as a multi-watch unraveling of all its many tendrils of meaning, but for the time being I’ll have to settle for loving the Wagner Moura performance at its center while feeling as though it never quite got me there emotionally speaking. Still, the aesthetics of it are gorgeous, and the supporting cast for the film all really bring their A game, especially Tânia Maria as Dona Sebastiana. 

13. The Alabama Solution
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Nominated For: Best Documentary Feature
 
Whatever Alabama governor Kay Ivey is up to, I hope she’s having a miserable time. The Alabama Solution – which follows the lives of inmates in Alabama’s royally messed up prison system as they experience awful conditions, brutal violence, and scorching heat – is perhaps the most traditionally-rendered documentary in its category, but that doesn’t make it any less impactful or important to watch. Much of the footage smuggled out of the prison system comes from the inmates themselves (one of whom dies during the film), and to watch the cover-up of these horrific abuses play out – knowing nothing will be done about it by the state government – is enraging, especially given the governor’s solution to the prison problem is just to build three brand new larger prisons without addressing any present issues in a meaningful way. This would be the lead contender for the category in any other year; for now, it just has to settle for being yet another great HBO documentary in a very long line of them.

12. Weapons
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Nominated For: Best Supporting Actress (Amy Madigan)
 
When Jordan Peele couldn’t acquire Zach Cregger’s follow-up to the bonkers horror of Barbarian, he fired his entire team, and having seen Weapons, it’s not hard to see why losing that acquisition would cause a director of his caliber to make that decision. As far as horror films go, Weapons has the most singular vision of any released this past year, and the Aunt Gladys character for which Amy Madigan received her Best Supporting Actress nomination – as well as a recent major win at the Actor Awards – is an instant icon, so much so that she was the subject of many Halloween costumes following the film’s release. The script is often quite funny, the performances are all top-notch, and while I do feel the film’s larger scale gets away from itself at times, it’s hard to complain when a film is this much fun to watch (especially with a crowd).

11. Bugonia
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Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Actress (Emma Stone), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score
 
Whether you’re more of a Dogtooth and Killing of a Sacred Deer person or more of a The Favourite and Poor Things person will likely determine your enjoyment level when it comes to Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest release, as it steers well away from the period-centric aesthetics of the latter two in favor of the strangely disquieting nature of the former two (I find myself leaning more towards the period piece films, personally). That said, Bugonia is still an excellent watch, wrongfooting its audience to the very end while all the while engaging in a farce about the corporate world, conspiracy culture, and bees of all things. I haven’t seen the Korean film Save the Green Planet from which this film is adapted, so I can’t comment on its strength or lack thereof as a translation of the source material, but as its own film, it’s just the same level of weird and uncomfortably comic that I’ve come to expect from a Lanthimos movie. Emma Stone is so excellent in the film, per usual, one feels she could do a part like this in her sleep, but it’s Jesse Plemons who truly steals the spotlight here with what may be his best performance to date (personally I would’ve nominated him or another lead actor contender I’ll mention later over Ethan Hawke).

10. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
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Nominated For: Best Animated Feature
 
While Arco may be my personal favorite, there is simply no denying how Little Amélie or the Character of Rain outshines every other animated feature in its category by a longshot. The art style is stunning to look at, the storytelling is just unconventional enough to holds ones attention while being familiar enough that such attention doesn’t feel like a chore, and the emotional core of the film as the two-year-old titular character comes of age is as affecting as they come. There may be a few too many big ideas in the film for it to completely succeed in every way it wants to, but if the Oscars were going to pull one genuinely major upset this year, the animated feature category would be the place to do it, and this would be the film to choose.

9. Hamnet
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Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Director (Chloé Zhao), Best Actress (Jessie Buckley), Best Casting, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Original Score
 
Having read the book beforehand, I knew what was coming in Hamnet from a mile away, and was surprised when the film opened with a text card that reveals the central driving force of the film right away; and yet, even knowing all of that ahead of time, I was still so struck by the force in question, I couldn’t keep my eyes dry even if I wanted to. As an adaptation, the film is imperfect – there’s a great deal about Agnes’ step-family that’s left out which I think would have helped flesh out her story more fully – but it does pull off some brilliant ideas, especially where it concerns the ending and its expansion to include the whole Hamlet play, rather than stopping before it finishes in the way the book does. Even the use of Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” which has become somewhat of an annoyance to some viewers, seemed to fit for me, though I would have liked to hear a more original piece of music at the film’s climax. Chloé Zhao’s return to small-scale filmmaking after her Marvel excursion didn’t quite work out could not have vindicated her more as a director with unique skills in accessing the emotion and catharsis at the intersections of art and grief than it does here, and even with its imperfections, this remains one of my favorite films of 2025, top ten or not.

8. F1
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Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Film Editing, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound
 
Yeah, yeah, F1 is the one in Best Picture that doesn’t seem like it ultimately fits in there the same way Top Gun: Maverick did, and It Was Just an Accident should have been in that spot, but that doesn’t make it a less good movie when one looks at it on its own terms. As flat as some of the Brad Pitt performance at the center of the film feels, Joseph Kosinski is still one of the best directors in the business at capturing fast vehicles in extremely cool ways with large-scale filmmaking techniques and high budgets. This is a capital M sports movie through and through, and it’s hard not to get sucked into everything when watching it, especially in a theatrical setting where the cars are loud, the action is fast, and most of the needle-drops are so hype inducing one wants to jump out of their chair. Damson Idris is excellent in the film, as are Kerry Condon (who they wisely did not ask to switch accents for this one) and a perfectly-placed Javier Bardem, and the film’s rewatchability is up there with the likes of Creed and yes, Top Gun: Maverick. If Kosinski is going to keep making movies like this with all manner of different transportation vessels, I’ll take ten more.

7. The Perfect Neighbor
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Nominated For: Best Documentary Feature
 
While I still prefer My Undesirable Friends in terms of documentary features from last year overall, this film was so close to making the cut for my top ten that I almost put it back in at the last minute. The Perfect Neighbor is a devastating watch but a nonetheless essential document about the kinds of insidious, implicit racial biases that continues to exist all around the United States and the ways in which legislation like “stand your ground” laws can have very real, harmful effects on the communities in which they’re implemented. Told primarily through police bodycam footage, the film chronicles in just an hour and a half, beat for beat, how the specific type of “neighborly” racism Susan Lorincz engages in throughout slowly escalates until that implicit bias turns it into outright racially-motivated violence that infects everything around it. The fact that this is just one of many stories like this in the United States is infuriating and disheartening, made more so by the fact that the justice reached at the film’s end is almost forced to act as a catharsis for the victims, highlighting the ways in which these systems often continually perpetuate harm against those they’re meant to protect. 

6. Train Dreams
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Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Original Song (“Train Dreams”)
 
Although Frankenstein is the more lauded movie from a technical standpoint, Train Dreams is easily Netflix’s best movie released last year, and it’s not close. Though some take issue with specific changes made from the Dennis Johnson novella as it regards the lead character (personally I was fine with the change), there’s no denying the film’s innate beauty in how it captures the natural world, thanks in no small part to stunning digital cinematography by Adolpho Veloso. Joel Edgerton turns in what might be a career-best performance in the film, subtle and layered in such quietly devastating ways once could swear he’s played parts like this all his life (unfortunately I suppose it was too quiet for the Academy to give him the Best Actor nomination he deserves), and William H. Macy turns in some of the best work of his career as well. Director Clint Bentley, who co-wrote the adaptation with fellow director Greg Kwedar (Sing Sing) is quickly becoming a director I’ll always return to when he puts something new out, and I can’t wait to see what this writing duo gets up to next.

5. It Was Just an Accident
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Nominated For: Best International Feature (France), Best Original Screenplay
 
While It Was Just an Accident wasn’t my first Jafar Panahi film, it is the first one where I finally began to click with what it was he wanted to do. Filmed entirely in secret, the Palme d’Or winner deserved a lot better than the Oscar package it received in my opinion, especially with an ending shot as showstopping as this one. The script for this thing is razor sharp, every performance shines bright (especially that of Miriam Afshari), and the fact that, once again, this was all filmed in secret due to Panahi’s continuous struggles with the Iranian government – including serving a one-year jail sentence upon his return to the country for having made the film in the first place – makes the film’s excellence all the more stunning to experience. It’s also, not for nothing, quite funny at many of its most unexpected moments.

4. Sinners
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Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Director (Ryan Coogler), Best Actor (Michael B. Jordan), Best Supporting Actress (Wunmi Mosaku), Best Supporting Actor (Delroy Lindo), Best Casting, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Original Score, Best Original Song (“I Lied to You”), Best Visual Effects, Best Sound
 
The record-break heard round the world, Sinners’ status as the top dog of the Oscar nomination pool is a well-deserved title, as Ryan Coogler crafted not just one of the best vampire movies ever made, not just one of the best “all in one night” movies ever made, not just one of the best pseudo-musical movies ever made, but all three of them wrapped into one incredible package. Sure, scene geography is not exactly Coogler’s strong suit when action sequences involve more than two people in a boxing ring, but the film is so strong with everything else that the action feels incidental to the larger narrative and the film’s themes of cultural vampirism and Black self-determination and prosperity. There are so many layers to the film’s script that I uncover more on every subsequent rewatch, the performances and the filmmaking get deeper and deeper the more I learn about them, and the “I Lied to You” scene will go down as not just the defining movie scene of 2025, but one of the greatest set-pieces in Coogler’s entire filmography.

3. Marty Supreme
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Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Director (Josh Safdie), Best Actor (Timothée Chalamet), Best Casting, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design
 
Controversy on opera/ballet aside (not that it should be much of one given how those comments were resurfaced from a 2019 conversation and taken wildly out of context at large), Marty Supreme is a whirlwind of a film from director Josh Safdie (who has his own controversy to worry about) from director Josh Safdie (who has his own, far more concerning controversy) that rests almost entirely on the shoulders of its radically unconventional casting and its lead star, Timothée Chalamet, who turns in his best performance to date as Marty Mauser, a young hotshot ping pong player with ambitions to be known as the best player in the world. Not a single ounce of the film has any sympathy for Mauser, but just like the people in the film who continually get screwed over by him, it can’t help but be drawn in by his sheer charisma and blind self-belief, even when it’s clear that he’s operating more under self-delusion than anything else. The ending is also already incredible before Marty flies back home, but those final moments with the particular needle drop are as stunning an ending as many movie last year ever had.

2. One Battle After Another
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Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Director (Paul Thomas Anderson), Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), Best Supporting Actress (Teyana Taylor) Best Supporting Actor x2 (Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn), Best Casting, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Original Score, Best Sound
 
There were exactly two defining films of 2025, which subsequently became the two defining films of awards season; the first one was Sinners – this is the other one. One Battle After Another is a stunner from Paul Thomas Anderson, one of the director’s absolute best amongst a sea of great works, and easily his biggest from a budget and scale perspective. Partially adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, the film follows former French 75 revolutionary Bob Ferguson as he seeks out his missing daughter following an attack from a former adversary. If by some miracle you haven’t heard of the film yet, I’d be impressed, but not as impressed as I was during the film’s many stellar set-pieces, from the opening camp liberation to the forty-minute escape sequence following Lockjaw’s attack to the road chase that caps off the film’s third act to some of PTA’s best dialogue ever to some of the best performances of their careers from the entire cast. Though I can understand some of the recent criticisms levied against the film, for me, it’s pretty damn close to perfect, and if I had to pick a “best” movie of 2025, this would be it without question. For me, everything about it works.

1. Sentimental Value
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Nominated For: Best Picture, Best Director (Joachim Trier), Best Actress (Renate Reinsve), Best Supporting Actress x2 (Elle Fanning, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), Best Supporting Actor (Stellan Skarsgård), Best International Feature (Norway), Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing
 
If you read my Top 10 piece for this past year, you already know why this is ranked number 1 here, but suffice it to say, this is still my favorite movie from last year, not necessarily because I would consider it pound for pound the year’s best (though it’s nothing to sneeze at in that department either), but because of all the way in which I can personally relate to many of its specificities in the storytelling and the characters, and how I can see so many of the people around me in each of them. All this to say, I chose to (mostly) prioritize this list in terms of personal preference, rather than trying to parse out whether one film was “objectively” better as a nominee than another, and that means Sentimental Value sits atop them all. I won’t wax poetic about it here too much, but somehow Joachim Trier made a film that I can so specifically see the margins of all around my own life, and that is a rare skill indeed. I’ll be at least partially devastated if this goes home empty handed on Sunday night.

And that’s my ranking of every single 2026 Oscar nominee! How would you personally rank these nominees? Anything you’re surprised is ranked higher? Lower? Let me know in the comments section below, and thanks for reading. Next up: The Friendly Film Fan Award Winner and our FINAL 2026 Oscar Predictions!
 
- The Friendly Film Fan