Ranked: 2024 Oscar Best Picture Nominees

The 2024 Academy Awards are here, which means the 2023 movie year is almost officially over. This year’s Oscars finds Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer leading the way in nominations with thirteen, followed by Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things with eleven nominations, and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon with ten nominations, respectively. 

This year’s group of Best Picture nominees is one of the best we have seen in quite some time. Six of the ten films nominated landed in my personal top twenty movies of 2023, with five of them landing in my top ten, and there is no movie nominated for Best Picture that I would consider a bad or unworthy movie, something seems to happen almost every year it seems. Would I have nominated some other films in their place? Sure. But I respect them on a cinematic level to understand why they are nominated.

Here is my ranking of the Best Picture nominees from the 2024 Academy Awards.

1. Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer is a towering achievement. Christopher Nolan’s biopic about scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, his creation of the atom bomb, and the events that followed is as big and epic as films get. The ensemble, led by an outstanding Cillian Murphy and filled with a slew of excellent supporting turns, was 2023’s best and the film is a technical marvel, with sublime cinematography, music, and editing. Oppenheimer was my favorite film of 2023. It’s my favorite movie of the decade so far and a masterpiece on every level.

2. Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese simply does not miss. His current run over the last decade has been nothing but great film after great film and Killers of the Flower Moon is the latest in this run. Scorsese looks at how the foundations of America were built on blood and greed by showing us the mass murders of the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma and does so with expert craftsmanship and a perfect cast, anchored by the Oscar-nominated Lily Gladstone.

3. Past Lives

Celine Song made the best directorial debut of 2023 with Past Lives. This is a decades-spanning story about what was, what is, and what could be as Song shows the relationship between two people who had a strong connection when they were kids, only for them to reunite after not seeing each other for over a decade. This is a tender, beautiful film that is equally heart-wrenching as it is heart-warming.

4. The Holdovers

Director Alexander Payne delivered his best film in nearly twenty years with The Holdovers, a hilarious and deeply moving portrait of a group of lost souls who come together under unexpected circumstances. Paul Giamatti gives the best performance of his career as a curmudgeonly teacher left to look over one student (Dominic Sessa in a revelatory performance) with the help of a depressed cafeteria supervisor (Oscar-bound Da’Vine Joy Randolph). The three have impeccable chemistry together and the look and feel of the movie is reminiscent of a film from the 1970s.

5. Anatomy of a Fall

Justine Triet rightfully earned a Best Director nomination for her engrossing legal thriller. Sandra Hüller gave the performance of the year in 2023 as a woman standing trial for the death of her husband with only their vision-impaired son (Milo Machado-Graner, criminally ignored this awards season). Anatomy of a Fall is as gripping as movies get and one of the best courtroom dramas of the 21^st century.

6. The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is a hard film to watch despite not seeing the horrors that take place. Glazer’s film looks at a Nazi (Christian Fridel) and his family as he oversees an Auschwitz concentration camp. The film in front of us plays like a workplace drama, but what takes place off-screen is a whole other movie itself, as we hear the violence and screams from the concentration camp, and the more you envision what is happening off-screen, the more haunting the film. Glazer’s direction is spectacular, and the film is a masterclass in sound construction.

7. American Fiction

American Fiction is an impressive debut film from director Cord Jefferson. Jefferson adapted from the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, which looks at a writer (Oscar-nominated Jeffrey Wright) who is frustrated with an industry that profits from Black entertainment and decides to use a pen name to write a book with all the stereotypes and tropes he despises only for him to see success despite the hypocrisy he claims he hates. Wright and the talented supporting cast bring Jefferson’s biting and often funny script to life.

8. Maestro

Maestro was only Bradley Cooper’s second directorial effort, but he is off to an impressive start. Maestro tells the story of the multihyphenate composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, also played by Cooper. Maestro is impressively made with some jaw-dropping shots and features two great performances from Cooper and Carey Mulligan, who plays Bernstein’s wife. Despite the impressive filmmaking and acting, Maestro didn’t resonate with me on an emotional level, which kept it from reaching the heights of other Best Picture nominees.

9. Barbie

Barbie has grown on me since I first saw it. The issues I have with the screenplay are still very evident and I still have a million questions about how this world works and about the events that took place. But the things director Greta Gerwig and her team did get right are amazing. The production design was the best of 2023. The costumes were immaculate. Margot Robbie was the heart and soul of the film and gave a sensational performance and Ryan Gosling’s turn as Ken only gets funnier with repeated viewings.

10. Poor Things

You might be surprised that Poor Things is last on this ranking, seeing as it was the second most nominated film at this year’s Oscars and a critical darling, but I found the film to be exhausting to get through. I applaud the film on a technical level. It has gorgeous costumes, detailed production design, and unique cinematography with a lot of colors and bizarre camera choices (most of which worked). Emma Stone gives a gutsy leading performance and Mark Ruffalo is hilarious as a smarmy, stupid businessman. But I found the film to be overlong, and its themes redundant that by the last forty-five minutes of the film, I couldn’t help but think, “ALRIGHT, WE GET IT!”

The 2024 Academy Awards air on Sunday, March 10th, at 7:00 PM ET.

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