2022 Best Picture Oscar Nominations Ranked

The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg) - Astonishing. For the first time in his career, Spielberg traffics in an ambiguity that keeps this semi-autobiographical legacy film unpredictable. The scene in which the beach-blond jock confronts Spielberg stand-in Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) may be the director's best ever for the baffled and contradictory responses it's elicited. And just when you think the dénouement is going to lock into Horatio Algeresque step, Sammy walks up to his new Hollywood apartment not in triumph but in the midst of a full-blown panic attack. Not counting A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, the man's best film since Minority Report if not 1979's underrated 1941. A

Tár (Todd Field) - A film designed to be debated into perpetuity. Like a good poststructuralist, Field destabilizes the center of each scene (including the exquisite ending) and maintains an edifice of free play throughout. I haven't discussed a film so much in years, especially with people who aren't avid filmgoers. A

Elvis (Baz Luhrmann) - Reviewed here. A-minus

Women Talking (Sarah Polley) - A film designed to plunge Armond White types into apoplexy. I admired the severe visual palette and compressed intensity of this "act of female imagination." A-minus

Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund) - Vertically, yet another facile skewering of the rich and heartless. Horizontally, it shifts gears so many times that it gives whiplash to the viewer and, one must assume, Östlund himself given how he finishes it all off with a hilariously perverse non-ending. A-minus

All Quiet on the Western Front (Edward Berger) - Not sure what to do with this remake of the 1930 Best Picture Oscar winner. It's effectively anti-war, sure. But why was it remade now? B+

Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniels, 2022) - They spent so much time on this multiverse concept that they forgot to tell a compelling, non-cookie-cutter story. Once the rules of the multiverse were laid out, you could see how the rest of the film was going to lock into its narrative beats with dreary predictability. B

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh) - Reviewed here. B

Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron) - I rolled my eyes about two dozen times at this "three-hour land acknowledgment" (to borrow Tyler Austin Harper's words in Slate). But I have to begrudgingly concede that Cameron brings off his colossally dorky vision with brio and keeps all 192 of those minutes moving briskly. B

Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski) - Marginally more digestible than the godawful original. But it's essentially a remake so yeah, no. My Xmas 2022 screening of it is mercifully fading from memory to make for contemplation of much more substantial films such as Myra Breckinridge, Reform School Girls, Massacre at Central High, The Ritz, The Cassandra Crossing, etc. (to choose some recently digested titles). D+