It is that time of year again: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has unveiled its nominations for the 98th Academy Awards, ushering in with them the annual ritual of online grievance and bickering about what the Academy has gotten right or wrong.
This year’s Best Picture slate, however, is unusually impregnable. The 10 nominees are coherent, varied, and well-deserved. There are no glaring acts of political box-checking masquerading as taste and no gratuitous “important” film nominated out of partisan proclivities. And while a few respectable contenders fell just short (Eddington had its moments and Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag was a creative and clever twist on the traditional espionage thriller), it’s difficult to argue that some unseen titan was left out in lieu of a lesser work.
Here are the Best Picture nominees:
- Bugonia
- F1
- Frankenstein
- Hamnet
- Marty Supreme
- One Battle after Another
- The Secret Agent
- Sentimental Value
- Sinners
- Train Dreams
The loudest argument online involves Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which, along with Best Picture, racked up 15 additional nominations, surpassing the long-standing record of 14 held by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997), and La La Land (2016).
The internet’s instant reaction was to dismiss the film as derivative of From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), or worse, to insist it is being hoisted up by the Academy’s “woke” contingent as the culture-war cudgel du jour, tantamount to Black Panther (a laughably indefensible nomination in 2018).
But such dismissals are misguided. Sinners is a confident, sharply made genre film that celebrates the unique cultural and musical contributions of African Americans wrapped in vintage horror packaging. If viewers feel compelled to staple a victimhood narrative onto that, it says more about them than the movie’s merits.
More importantly, Oscar tallies are always relative to whatever else is released in a given year. The films Sinners surpassed in raw nomination count, such as Titanic, are perfectly fine, but they are not generational masterpieces on the order of Casablanca, which earned only eight nominations in 1940 and continues to tower over most of the Academy’s supposed giants.
The expanded Best Picture lineup continues to yield the salutary effect of affording the Academy room to honor movies that are actually fun. And in that respect, it’s encouraging to see a film such as Joseph Kosinski’s F1 in the conversation at all.
It is about as likely to win Best Picture as del Toro’s Frankenstein, which, despite being a formidable adaptation of Mary Shelley’s gothic novel, is a Netflix movie and unlikely to stir the hearts of the voting committee amid trepidation over the future of cinema following the tech company’s absorption of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Of everything I saw in 2025, F1 was the purest theatrical pleasure. Essentially Top Gun with race cars, it follows Brad Pitt nonchalantly cheating, charming, and racing his way toward glory; it is precisely the sort of experience that justifies leaving the comforts of the couch for a movie theater — and if the Academy is serious about “saving cinemas,” this is the kind of film it ought to reward.
As for who should actually win Best Picture, the most deserving nominee is Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, in which Timothée Chalamet’s uncompromising aspirations for greatness and his natural knack for self-promotion make the performance feel borderline autobiographical. Interweaving humble beginnings, raw talent, entrepreneurship, and unnerving ambition, Safdie crafts a uniquely American story.
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However, the film most likely to take the top prize is Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another — his “love letter to radicals,” as I called it in my review. It is unquestionably well made and impeccably acted. But where Marty Supreme celebrates and uplifts the American story, Anderson’s opus subverts it, casting immigration enforcement officers as terrorists while romanticizing the actual terrorists, those who bomb courthouses and rob banks, as tantalizing revolutionaries. I would love nothing more than to be wrong, but recent history suggests the Academy rarely votes for America.
The 98th Oscars ceremony will take place on Sunday, March 15.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.