2024 Best Picture Oscar Nonimees Ranked

Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross) - Ross applies the unlocked, myriad-faceted ways of seeing from his 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening to this adaptation of Colson Whitehead's 2019 novel and the worst I can say for it is that his phantasmagoric technique blunts the twist ending of the novel. But even that minor drawback has compensations for Ross demonstrates the capacious properties of Black sound and vision to vanquish the forces that attempt Black genocide. Grade: A

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat) - Reviewed here. Grade: A-minus

Anora (Sean Baker) Whizzes by at roller-coaster speed until the devastating ending in which two atomized laborers try to find a connection and together wonder if they’ll be exploited for an eternity. Also, a sequel to The Last Showgirl avant la lettre. Grade: A-minus

I'm Still Here (Walter Salles) A brutal but somehow relatively quiet account of Eunice Paiva’s quest for justice concerning the 1971 murder of her politician husband Rubens Beyrodt Paiva at the hands of Brazil’s military dictatorship. The multiple endings that push the story into several futures started to irk me until I realized what Salles was doing - bearing witness to the rich and accomplished lives Eunice and her family enjoyed despite rage-inducing tragedy. Grade: A-minus

A Complete Unknown (James Mangold) Now that Boomers got their anonymously directed Wiki-film on Bob Dylan’s betrayal of folkie purity, based on Elijah Wald’s brisk, fun Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, we need one about his betrayal of Boomer purity, one that, in the words of ILX user President Keyes, “covers the important parts of Dylan’s life: Kurtis Blow collab, We Are the World, Soy Bomb, lingerie commercials, Nobel prize, joining Twitter” to which Alfred Soto adds "...talking to Arthur Baker about producing Empire Burlesque" to which I'll add Self Portrait, Renaldo and Clara, lyrics that acknowledge the existence of Alicia Keys, posting a Machine Gun Kelly video on his Instagram, etc. Grade: B+

The Brutalist (Brady Corbet) A pungent take on the Jewish immigrant experience in America post-WWII. But the controversial epilogue is not the problem; it’s the random point at which the story breaks immediately before. Why end it with Erzsébet making Harrison’s abuse of László public? What happened to Harrison in the wake of this news? And why not dig deeper into what made László an architectural genius, meditating on process more or what made him stand out against other architects? In short, why did it have to be 215 minutes if such huge, compelling chunks of László’s life would be excised, leaving the feeling that the film is both too short and too long? Grade: B+

Wicked (Jon Chu) Too damn long. But I loved all the discourse around it - the memes, the straight boys performing friendship via its songs on TikTok, the girls who came dressed in full costume on opening day, the singalongs. This film was popular. Grade: B+

Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard) Reviewed here.  Grade: B+

Conclave (Edward Berger) Typically mid Oscar fodder, more TV Movie of the Week than Cinemah. Docked a notch so I’m not tempted to watch it again. Grade: B

Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve) Actually sustains interest across its length. But that’s still 166 damn minutes of humorless proper nouns to stomach. Are camp and world building at odds forever? Docked a notch so I’m not tempted to watch it again. Grade: B