2026 Best Picture Nominees Ranked

2026 Best Picture Nominees Ranked

Tonight is the 98th Oscars, we’re finally going to figure out who won in all 26 of the categories. But today we’re going to be ranking the 10 films that were nominated for best picture. Here we go! 

10. The Secret Agent: To be clear, I don’t think there’s a bad film in this mix. This is a pretty solid list of nominees. The Secret Agent is by no means a bad movie but it’s the movie on the list that I liked the least. What I appreciated the most about the film is that it does a really good job of putting you into a time and a place. This film takes place in Brazil in the 1970s and from beginning to end you feel like you’re in 1970s Brazil with these characters. Everything about it from the costume and production design to the politics being discussed in the film, it all feels like a film that was made in the 1970s dealing with real life issues. From there, the cast all around is pretty good. Wagner Moura is the main one to talk about as he got an Oscar nomination and has been getting all sorts of talk since the film premiered at Cannes in May. I don’t know if I would put him in my Oscar five, but it’s still a really good performance. He’s more subtle compared to his other nominees like Chalamet or DiCaprio, but sometimes the subtle performances are the best performances. The supporting actors are all great. There’s so many things about them that make them pop and stand out. None of them got Oscar consideration and I don’t know if I would’ve nominated them. But I like that the film got a best casting nomination to at least recognize that talent. With that said, this is a one time watch for me. It’s well made and well acted but I don’t know the context in which I’d rewatch this movie. It’s almost three hours long and it’s with subtitles. That creates a very difficult viewing experience because it demands a lot from you. That’s the main reason why it’s this low on the list. It’s not a film that’s designed for me. 

9. Train Dreams: This is an interesting one because this is one of the best looking films of the year and it’s surprising that it’s a Netflix release. There have been good Netflix movies to release, one is even much higher up on the list. But most of the time they’re not the best looking films and have a streaming digital look to them. You watch Train Dreams and that digital look is not present at all in this film. It uses shots from the characters point of view of looking up at the trees and it’s absolutely gorgeous imagery that’s so incredible. Netflix gets a lot of crap for making generic and bad movies, you watch Train Dreams and it’s the complete opposite of that. The film also does a great job of putting you into a time and a place. Where the film revolves around seeing a character’s life in a very specific point of time. Everything from the costume design to the production design does a great job of encapsulating the audience going to a different time and place. The performances all around are very good and captivating. I’ve heard some people say that Joel Edgerton was robbed of an Oscar nomination. He’s very good in the movie, I personally wouldn’t have nominated him at the Oscars. Felicity Jones and William H. Macy is in supporting roles, very solid actors that can play supporting roles nicely. What holds this movie back for me is that it’s just too one note. The film is about seeing this guy’s life and how it sucks. The film stays on that note for a large percentage of that runtime. I felt like they needed to do something in the middle to change things up a bit. You get a little bit of a tone shift in the final sequence of the film, that I wish was more present in the third act of the film. Overall, this is a very well made film but it’s also the type of movie that I’ll never want to watch again. 

8. Bugonia: The latest collaboration between Yorgot Lanthimos and Emma Stone. This is only the second Lanthimos movie I’ve seen behind Poor Things. I don’t know which one I like more. Both of them are very weird, I think I prefer Bugonia because it’s more straightforward. The best thing about this movie are our two lead performances with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. Both of them are great in this movie. Since a large portion of the film is just them talking and very dialogue driven, you need to buy into their performances in order for the film to work. You absolutely buy into these performances, they play off of each other really well. While I’m not a big Yorgos guy, I love his movies. They are very creative and cool to look at. There’s no director making a movie like he is and that makes him cool and fresh. In an era where so many directors feel so generic and lack style. You have Yorgos that are all style and that’s cool. I think that’s almost why I didn’t connect with this movie as much as other people. It’s a film that I can appreciate the technical craft that goes into it, but it’s not a film that’s designed for me. It is more watchable than The Secret Agent, largely because it’s in English and an hour shorter. But his movies are just a bit too weird and quirky for my taste. I also wasn’t a big fan of the ending. I get why other people might like it. I didn’t hate the ending, I do wish it was a bit more ambiguous as to what happened and not so straight forward. Overall, this movie kept my attention from beginning to end. It’s not a movie that connected with me on the level that the other films did. 

7. Sentimental Value: This is one that several friends of mine actually got to see at its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival back in May. They’ve been raving about it for months. I was very excited when I was able to see it and see if it lived up to the hype. It’s #7 on the list, I really dug the movie. I would give it a B+, but I don’t think it’s as good as they were saying it was. It’s kind of interesting that we got this movie and Jay Kelly in the same year because both of them are very similar in what they’re discussing while also being very different films. This film is the more emotional side of what Jay Kelly was about. This film is all about this father’s estranged relationship with his daughters and them reconnecting through the father wanting to make a movie about their family. There’s something so human and emotional about that, that provides this clear emotional journey for all of the characters in the film. Each of the main characters have this emotional journey as they’re processing the idea of this movie. The performances all around are pretty fantastic. Stellan Skarsgård is an actor who has been around forever and is doing great work. This might be the best performance that I’ve seen from him. It’s a subtle performance that has a lot of humanity and emotion in it. I do think it’s a bit weird he’s going to be a supporting actor, he should be the lead of the film. The other standout here is Renate Reinsive as the leading lady of the film. She’s really good in the film. She’s the one that’s sort of given the most emotional arc throughout the film. So many of the different scenes rely on her acting being great. I don’t really have a great reason as to why it’s not higher up on the list. It’s very well done and hits all of the right beats it needs too. 

6. Hamnet: Of all of the films that released in 2025 is the one that provided the most emotional gut punch. There’s a few sequences in here that pull at the heart strings as you witness all of this stuff happen. In general, this is a film that I really didn’t know what to expect going in. The only thing I heard was Jessie Buckley was a lock for best actress, it’s emotional, and it’s about William Shakespeare. Those first two statements are 100% correct. Jessie Buckley is delivering a truly phenomenal and heart breaking performance. She goes through so much in the film and that requires a world class actress like her to give this layered performance. The scene that I’m sure will be her Oscar clip, the birthing sequence is some of the best acting I saw in all of 2025. Tied to that, the film is also incredibly emotional and heartbreaking. There’s multiple sequences that had my audience dead silent. My audience was in silence to witness this tragedy of what’s happening to these characters. It feels so real and something that everybody fears could happen one day. The movie is more so about William Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes not Shakespeare. The film is about the home life of Shakespeare told from the perspective of his wife. Which makes you reinterrupt so much of Shakespeare’s work, especially Hamlet. The biggest issue I had with the film is almost the biggest positive about the film. Which is that the film is so great at ripping your heart out and being heartbreaking that it’s a film that I never wanna watch again. It’s interesting when you have these movies that are so good at doing exactly what it’s going for that it makes a movie that’s not the most rewatchable at the end of the day. 

5. Marty Supreme: This is one that I wasn’t really excited about going into. I’ve said this before but I’m not a big Timothée Chalamet fan and I found his campaign for the film to be very weird and borderline cringe. But I still was curious about it because it was getting so much awards love. The film itself is one of the wildest and craziest films I’ve ever experienced. You think the movie is about ping pong and it’s a classic underdog sports movie, that’s not at all what this movie is about at all. It’s about the journey that Marty Mauser takes to play ping pong but that journey takes him on this wild and crazy ride. It’s just crazy situation after crazy situation where Marty is getting in way over his head and not knowing when to back down. The character of Marty is so interesting as he’s a guy who keeps on making stupid decisions after stupid decisions and not knowing when to stop. There’s so many points in the film where you’re screaming at the screen from him to stop making certain decisions. But because he’s so driven by goals and his ambitions he doesn’t know when to stop. For me, this is easily Timothée’s best performance. All around he’s given a pretty great performance that hooks you and carries you throughout the entire film. Would I give him the Oscar? No. There’s other people in the category that I think deserve it more than him. But he’s still really good. But what’s fun about this movie is all of the supporting characters. You have this Hollywood icon in Gwyneth Paltrow and her returning to acting since Avengers: Endgame. They found nobody with Odessa A’zion who got people talking and she’s great in the movie despite not this being one of her first acting roles. Say what you will about the man, but Kevin O’Leary is really good in this movie. You have this fun mix of experienced and inexperienced actors in this movie. It’s not a top tier movie for me, but it’s still really good. And I 100% understand why some people love this movie and why some people don’t like this movie. 

4. Frankenstein: This was one of my most anticipated films of fall 2025. Guillermo del Toro is a great director and him tackling the Frankenstein subject matter just seemed like a match made in heaven. In an era where so many big budgeted films feel like corporate products with no distinct vision. You watch Frankenstein and it feels like a Guillermo del Toro film. Everything from the production design to the costume design to creature design all feels like Guillermo. What I found so fascinating about this film is seeing the journey of Frankenstein and The Creature and how their arcs are actually the opposite of one another. We meet Frankenstein and we think he’s this great smart man but his own ambitions and pursuit of greatness is what leads to his downfall. The image that we understood Frankenstein to be at the beginning isn’t the same we see at the end of the first half of the film. You get The Creature who we view as a monster at the beginning but we learn that’s not a monster, people perceive him as a monster because of the way that he looks. By the end of it, we understand that he’s just misunderstood. Jacob Elordi truly surprised me with this performance. I was so skeptical when he was cast, I didn’t think he had it in him. He’s able to disappear into this role and make you see The Creature and not Frankenstein. I felt like he defied expectations in a similar fashion to Heath Ledger’s Joker. Where they cast this Australian teen heart throb in this iconic character and flips everybody’s perspective on him as an actor. Frankenstein was really good and just as good as I hoped the concept of Guillermo del Toro adapting Frankenstein would be. 

3. One Battle After Another: I’m probably going to get a lot of flack for not having One Battle After Another in that #1 spot on this list. Hey, I really dug this movie and it got much better on rewatch. I really liked the film on first viewing but was a bit confused where the “Best of the year” came from. It’s #3 on the list, so it’s not in that #1 spot. But I understood more of what people were seeing with this film. Paul Thomas Anderson crafted this thrilling and exciting movie that’s so relevant to today. It’s so relevant and does such a good job of tackling the relevance that it makes people uncomfortable because it does such a great job. Everything from the pacing to the editing makes the movie fly by. The film is almost three hours long and it’s hopping around between so much in the film but you never lose focus and you’re never bored. The film has this constant sense of urgency and forward momentum to keep the audience engaged. It’s kind of common now for movies to have long runtimes pushing three hours long. Several of the movies on this list fall into that category. But this film doesn’t feel three hours long, it’s an example of a long movie that earns that runtime. Given that Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the most acclaimed directors of the last 30 years he’s able to recruit so much top level talent. Everybody here is great and giving very solid performances. It’s no surprise that Leonardo DiCaprio is great because when has he not been great? But his performance is really good in this movie as he’s able to balance being this weird guy that’s drugged out of his mind and can’t remember stuff but also giving this very vulnerable performance at the same time. Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro are also great in this movie. One is this villainous disgusting guy that you hate and the other one is meant to act as the comedic relief of the film. When you put it all together you get a movie that’s really well done and constantly entertaining from beginning to end. 

2. F1: This is probably my hottest take in regards to best picture nominees. Because for most people, putting F1 above One Battle After Another on this ranking is terrible for so many people. But this is my ranking and I thought F1 was the better film over One Battle After Another. What I love about this film is that it feels like a classic old school blockbuster, it’s a type of movie that we don’t get a lot of these days. Between this film and Top Gun: Maverick, Joseph Kosinski is the director that’s still making these types of movies. Where they’re big, cinematic, and worthy of the big screen but without a $250 million budget a bunch of CGI. With the editing, sound, and cinematography, Kosinski made the racing sequences so exciting and thrilling. During the sequences, you feel like you’re in the car with these characters. It made for some of the most exciting moments of the year where I was grasping my arm rests and on the edge of my seat during the final race of the film. It also has a fantastic score by Hans Zimmer. This is one of the biggest snubs in my mind is not this film’s score not not getting a nomination. It’s so vibrant and loud and it sticks with you. It’s the type of film score that you wouldn’t expect for a movie like this but it works so well. Brad Pitt is in his 60s but is still the true definition of a movie star. He’s not giving this Oscar worthy transformative performance. But he’s doing what Pitt does the best, which is playing the coolest characters and the fact that he’s able to do this when he’s 60 proves that he’s truly one of our greatest movie stars. He’s partnered up really well with Damson Idris, who is the young new hot shot. You buy into the fact that they’re annoyed and frustrated by each other while also respecting each other at the same time. I’m very curious to see what Idris does next with his career because if he’s able to go toe to toe with Brad Pitt then clearly he has something. This film isn’t designed to reinvent the genre, it sticks to the formula but it does the formula right, so you don’t really care that it’s predictable. 

1. Sinners: Sinners breaking the Oscar nomination record with 16 nominations, making over $300 million, and got fantastic reviews is exactly why Hollywood needs to make more original movies. Warner Brothers gave Ryan Coogler $90 million to go and make this movie and it paid off. I hope that with this film’s success and many other film’s success in 2025 that Hollywood learns the right lessons and greenlights more original films with big budgets. More specifically, why did this film work? First up, it’s able to seamlessly mix a bunch of things that shouldn’t work together but do. The film is a vampire horror film that’s a celebration of blue music and tackling racism and it’s able to do all of this so well. It doesn’t get preachy with any of the messaging or what it’s trying to say. It tells it through story and character, and that’s why it’s so effective and why it connected with so many people and why it’s so celebrated. From there, Coogler is able to take you to a different time and place. Everything from the costume design to the production design is incredible and deserves the Oscar nomination. Because you’re so soaked in this world it makes you care about the performances and the characters so much which is important because we spend so much time with them. Michael B. Jordan gives his best performance of his career in this movie. The way he’s able to portray these twins and make them feel different. He’s able to have movie star charisma while also being emotional and human. The whole ensemble of actors is pretty incredible with the veterans like Delroy Lindo or the newcomers with Miles Caton. Tonight, we’ll see if it wins best picture and I hope it does.