Oscars 2024: Ranking every ‘Best Picture’ nominee from worst to best
One of multiple industries to be severely damaged by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, cinema has only recently begun to pick itself up and dust itself off debris. Even to this day, movies are being released that were made amidst the worst of Covid-19 lockdowns, including many of the ‘Best Picture’ nominees for the 2024 Oscars, like Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
Cinema in 2023 certainly showed progress from the catastrophic setback, with the ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon drawing in the most money and punters since before the pandemic. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer brought so much joy to the industry that they have both been awarded a ‘Best Picture’ nomination, whether they necessarily deserved it or not.
Elsewhere, the nominees are made up of the familiar awards darlings, including the Cannes Palme d’Or recipient Anatomy of a Fall by Justine Triet and Jonathan Glazer’s holocaust drama Zone of Interest, adapted from the novel by the late Martin Amis. Typically, a biopic also makes the cut, with Bradley Cooper’s Netflix drama Maestro, which tells the life story of Leonard Bernstein, being thrown into the eclectic mixer.
Where the Academy Awards rarely feels to have its finger on the pulse, this year’s batch of ‘Best Picture’ nominees is almost note-perfect. Still, there’s always room for improvement.
Ranking every ‘Best Picture’ nominee:
10. Barbie (Greta Gerwig)
Arguably, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is one of the most essential Hollywood movies to have been released since 2020, with the fantastic plastic world of bamboozling pink spellbinding young and old alike. For this reason, in and of itself, it might be worthy of a ‘Best Picture’ nomination, but this doesn’t save it from being the worst of a good bunch, failing to maintain its quality throughout its near two-hour runtime.
Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling make a magnificent double-act as Barbie and Ken, and the rest of the cast do a magnificent job of elevating the material, but the main issue with Gerwig’s film is the degree to which it sags in the second act. Barbie World is gorgeous, but the majority of the scenes captured in the real world feel stilted, awkward and poorly shot, exposing the film’s superficiality.
9. Maestro (Bradley Cooper)
Bradley Cooper’s sophomore outing as a director may look like a terrific slice of Oscar bait, but there’s much joy to be had watching Maestro, a Netflix biopic based on the life of Leonard Bernstein. A little like Gerwig’s aforementioned film, the strength of Maestro lies in the connection between Cooper’s Bernstein and Carey Mulligan’s Felicia Montealegre, the musician’s lover.
A richly packed love story. While the director likes to indulge in Bernstein’s idiosyncrasies, it is when Cooper and Mulligan share the screen that the film truly thrives. Offering far more than past ‘Best Picture’ nominated biopics, Maestro isn’t deserving of the Academy’s highest honour, but it does merit plaudits.
8. Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)
If you didn’t see Barbie on the opening night, it’s likely that you went to watch Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer instead, an explosive biopic about the creator of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. A moody, well-constructed piece of cinema from Nolan, who so often prefers to delve into the more bombastic offerings of cinema, Oppenheimer shines so brightly thanks to the quality of its cast.
Cillian Murphy, as the title character, is the one most obviously deserving of praise, but special mention should also go to the consistently dazzling Emily Blunt, who plays his wife, as well as Matt Damon’s rugged engineer Leslie Groves. This is Nolan at his most mature, and while he creates a fabulous film, one can’t help but think he’s better suited to cinema’s more spectacular roller coasters.
7. American Fiction (Cord Jefferson)
Perhaps the one film that has gone under the radar most in this year’s selection of ‘Best Picture’ nominees is Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, a sobering comedy which tells the story of a novelist who pens a tale that plays into stereotypes of blackness as a protest against the establishment. Yet, his efforts create the opposite effect, with his name becoming as popular as ever.
Clearly taking notes from Spike Lee’s magnificent 2000 film Bamboozled, Jefferson’s film is a sharp satire that dives headfirst into its concept with a playful charm that truly shakes up the sometimes stuffy ‘Best Picture’ category. Reflecting this tonal balance is the brilliant Jeffrey Wright in the lead role, who commands the film from the front and is well deserving of his corresponding ‘Best Actor’ nomination.
6. Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)
Back in May 2023, French filmmaker Justine Triet surprised the Cannes Film Festival after taking home the prized Palme d’Or for her magnificent courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, beating out the likes of Jonathan Glazer, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Wes Anderson in the process. But, her win was well deserved, turning what could have been a dry two-and-a-half-hour film about a murder trial into one of the year’s most gripping dramas.
Specifically following the trial of a woman put on trial for her husband’s murder, with only her blind son as the witness, Triet’s film is a stunning examination of morality in relation to the justice system. With a stellar performance from this year’s true Oscar winner, Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall is one of this year’s strongest ‘Best Picture’ nominees, thanks to the sheer potency of its storytelling.
5. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon demonstrated a return to the great American filmmaker’s roots, telling an epic tale that spoke to the inherent capitalism of the 20th-century West. Adapted from the non-fiction book by David Grann, Flower Moon tells the story of the brutal, systematic murders of the Osage tribe in 1920s Oklahoma and the efforts of the FBI to bring the perpetrators to justice.
A spectacular epic that uses its lengthy runtime wisely, Scorsese’s film looks gorgeous and feels as momentously heartbreaking as it should, largely thanks to the stunning central performance of Lily Gladstone. Thankfully, despite Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro being longtime collaborators with Scorsese, the director recognises where the heart of the story lies and gives it the appropriate attention.
4. Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos)
The Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has quickly risen to become one of the most celebrated minds in the contemporary industry thanks to his idiosyncratic style and sharp sense of humour. Poor Things, an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s cheeky 1992 book of the same name, feels like the kind of source material that he was born to adapt, instilling the tale of a young woman reanimated with the mind of a child, with surreal imagery and wondrous cinematic magic.
Yet, this film is not Lanthimos’. Arguably, it is the property of lead actor Emma Stone, who chews on the reins of the story and refuses to let go. Totally commanding the screen and material, she elevates the performances of her supporting cast members, Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe, making one of contemporary cinema’s most unique offerings in the process.
3. The Holdovers (Alexander Payne)
There’s something so utterly magical about Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers that it so nearly soars above its ‘Best Picture’ Oscar competitors, telling the story of a disgruntled history teacher at a prep school who is forced to look after a student on campus over the holidays. Shot digitally but altered to look like film stock capturing 1970s New England, Payne’s film is a technical and storytelling masterclass.
Much like the aforementioned Poor Things, while Payne directs the film and David Hemingson pens the script, this is Paul Giamatti’s movie, effortlessly slipping into the lead role of Paul Hunham, a strict teacher whose heart is slowly teased out. What results is a film that oozes style and sheer love for not only the medium of filmmaking but for the unpredictability of life itself?
2. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)
From the outside looking in, it may be tricky to understand what more can exactly be said about the Holocaust of World War II that hasn’t already been covered by such films as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List or Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Yet, it’s only until you’ve seen Jonathan Glazer’s remarkable film that you can understand his profound and sobering point of view.
Loosely adapted from the book of the same name by the late British author Martin Amis, Glazer’s film tells the story of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife, who build their dream home just next door to the horrors of the concentration camp. A bleak, existential study, Glazer does what he does best, utilising cinematic techniques never seen before to convey the gravity of his message.
1. Past Lives (Celine Song)
This year’s Academy Award nominees are no joke, boasting some of the very best movies since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, but Celine Song’s magnificent Past Lives is the pick of the bunch. Tapping into the contemporary zeitgeist, Past Lives shares the world’s seemingly communal nostalgia, telling the story of two childhood friends whose past love is brought back to the surface during a reunion 20 years after they last met.
Quiet, calculated and painfully heartbreaking without screaming its anguish from the rooftops, Past Lives is a masterpiece of emotion, exploring how our decisions earlier in life ripple to form new identities further down the line. Song’s screenplay is pitch-perfect, but this is met with equally touching performances from Greta Lee and Teo Yoo. Indeed, the biggest crime of the 2024 Academy Awards is that neither of them was nominated in their respective acting categories.
