Ranking the Best Picture nominees for the 2024 Oscars

For an intimate, understated film like Past Lives to get a nomination for Best Picture, that’s as good as a win as far as we’re concerned. And it’s probably the most this indie darling can hope for at the Oscars. Though we ranked it as the best film of 2023 in our staff poll, it’s a tougher sell to Academy voters, who tend to prefer more flash and spectacle in their best pictures. Whatever happens now, writer-director Celine Song, who was nominated for her screenplay but not her direction, has officially made a name for herself as a filmmaker to watch. The same can be said for the excellent cast, including Greta Lee and Teo Yoo as former childhood friends separated by distance, time, and culture, and John Magaro as the husband who refuses to fall victim to cliché. To its credit, so does the film.

The Zone Of Interest was one of our longshot predictions this year, so we’re thrilled to see it get a much deserved nomination for Best Picture. Jonathan Glazer’s haunting portrayal of a Nazi commandant (Christian Friedel) and his family going about their ordinary lives in their comfortable home just outside the gates of Auschwitz took critics and audiences by surprise when it premiered at Cannes last year, and it’s has been quietly humming in the background ever since. The film’s devastating emotional impact is hard to forget. It was also nominated for Best Sound, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film, which it’s heavily favored to win. It’s somewhat paradoxical, but all those other opportunities to give The Zone Of Interest an award could diminish its chances for a Best Picture win.

The Maestro momentum has been anything but steady this awards season. It came out of the gate hot at the Venice International Film Festival, earning praise for its lead performances by director Bradley Cooper as legendary composer Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as his devoted wife Felicia, both of whom also received Oscar nominations today. But perhaps the film peaked too early. Academy Awards campaigning can be a tricky business—you have to pretend like you don’t desperately want an Oscar, while at the same time subtly signaling that you do. Many saw Cooper’s approach to the film as too nakedly ambitious, but it did result in a respectable seven nominations. Whether Maestro wins any of them or goes home empty handed, at least Cooper’s career trajectory from actor to highly regarded filmmaker remains on course.

What a delight it was to see American Fiction among the 10 Best Picture nominees this year, and for cast members Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown to get deserved recognition for their outstanding performances. Cord Jefferson’s hilarious and Oscar-nominated screenplay, adapted from the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, is wry and self-aware, yet also deeply sentimental. It’s as much a family drama and a character study as it is a satirical takedown of publishing and media groupthink. The comedy might be a bit too broad at times for conventional Academy voters, but the fact that it’s in the service of social commentary works in the film’s favor. Looking at the competition this year, though, it’s just too steep to consider this a major contender.

Even after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes it’s hard to tell whether anyone outside of the circle of critics and awards watchers had Anatomy Of A Fall on their radar this year. Certainly writer-director Justine Triet, who received nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay (along with her partner, Arthur Harari), wasn’t a name most people would recognize. Nevertheless, the complex legal thriller has consistently ranked high on lists of the best films of 2023, and it got a boost at the the Golden Globes after its surprise win for Best Screenplay, so its multiple Oscar nominations should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention. We don’t anticipate it’ll beat out the heavy hitters for Best Picture, but we wouldn’t call it an upset this time if it walked away with another statue for its sophisticated and ambitious script.

We previously said that if the term “bittersweet” didn’t already exist you’d have to invent it to accurately describe The Holdovers. It must also be a good description of how Alexander Payne is feeling about not receiving a nomination for his direction, a major oversight in our opinion. It was his painstakingly crafted canvas of a vintage New England boarding school and its wintery surroundings that allowed Oscar nominees Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph to paint their characters so precisely. Not to mention the third member of the film’s main trio, newcomer Dominic Sessa, who deserved a supporting nod just for keeping up with them. Still, five nominations isn’t bad for a sparse throwback comedy that takes some time to warm up to.

Speaking of barriers to overcome, the very concept of Barbie, combined with its popular (and distinctly feminine) appeal, had plenty of critics speculating that the Academy would shun it in favor of more serious films at this year’s Oscars. They weren’t totally wrong. Greta Gerwig, the driving force behind the film and the reason it was deeper and more thoughtful than it ever needed to be, didn’t receive a nomination for her direction, and Barbie herself, the perfectly cast Margot Robbie, wasn’t recognized for her performance either (though, as a producer, she’s technically a nominee for Best Picture). Although the film did score eight Oscar nominations, anywhere else they’d be a 10. (Sorry, we couldn’t resist. We’re really pulling for that song.) It doesn’t ultimately matter. A lack of a Barbie Oscars sweep won’t take away anything from its popularity or massive box-office haul. Gerwig, Robbie, and Barbie are all going to be just fine.

We recently speculated that Killers Of The Flower Moon might be squeezed out by Oppenheimer at the Oscars, and that’s pretty much what happened. What we didn’t expect was for Poor Things to also overtake Martin Scorsese’s best film in years. Still Killers Of The Flower Moon has a lot going for it—it’s an epic historical biopic with a phenomenal pedigree—and 10 nominations to prove it, spread across the major and technical categories. Throughout this awards season, Leonardo DiCaprio has been a staunch advocate for his co-star Lily Gladstone, promoting her far more than himself, so it wasn’t a shock to see him left off the list for Best Actor. Gladstone, meanwhile, is a very strong contender for Best Actress after winning a Golden Globe for her role as an Osage woman who becomes a target of greedy white men. The additional recognition for music, editing, production design, and more, plus Robert De Niro for Best Supporting Actor, assure that it’ll get some love from the Academy somewhere. It may not be enough to overcome the unstoppable Oppenheimer surge, though.

If there’s an Oppenheimer spoiler in this race, it’s got to be Poor Things. The sexy, surrealist, coming-of-age comedy from visionary director Yorgos Lanthimos could not be any different from Oppenheimer if it set out to be exactly that (though oddly, both use a mixture of black-and-white and color footage for thematic effect). These two films are actually a great example of the range of cinematic artistry in the medium, from ultra realism to pure fantasy. Each is carried along by accomplished actors at the top of their game, yet they ultimately represent the strong voice and clear vision of their creators. So how in the world can anyone compare them? That’s for the Academy to decide now. Ultimately, it’ll have to come down to a matter of taste. Poor Things would be the edgier pick. Some voters may prefer the imaginative, allegorical nature of the film, and its formal experimentations. If there’s enough of them, it could push the film to the top.

The undisputed frontrunner in this year’s awards race will be tough to beat. From the moment it arrived in theaters last July, Oppenheimer seemed precisely engineered to bring director Christopher Nolan the Oscar glory he so clearly craves. The immense scale of the film (figuratively and literally, as in the huge IMAX 70mm prints), the solemn significance of the subject matter, the framing of the story in parallel time periods, and the stacked cast of talented actors, were all part of the plan leading up to this moment. Nothing is guaranteed, of course, especially when it comes to the Oscars. The race is still ongoing, and things can swing in any direction between now and when the final voting period ends on February 27. But Nolan and all the nominees associated with Oppenheimer have to be feeling pretty pleased today, and they’ve got good reason to be.