Oscars: Every Best Picture Nominee Of The 2010s - Ranked Worst To Best
38. Midnight In Paris
You could say that Midnight in Paris is a bit of a cheat movie. How can a film all about romanticising the past and transporting the viewer back to an idealised version of the roaring 1920s and letting them rub shoulders with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jean Cocteau not evoke the kind of warm, comfort blanket feeling that so many Oscar movies rely on for success?
It can't, but Midnight in Paris is so good because it doesn't just rest on that draw for a whole 90 minutes. Instead it picks it apart and deconstructs the entire idea of nostalgia and romanticising a past generation instead of living in the moment and making the most of the present. Not to the point where that invalidates the reading of the film as a straight throwback, but enough to make it more than the inoffensive compilation of iconography it could have so easily been.
JB
37. Black Panther
The first superhero movie to be nominated for Best Picture, you can argue that others before it (The Dark Knight, Logan etc) have been more deserving. But the fact a comic book movie has broken through at all is something to be celebrated, and among the nominees this year it's difficult to argue against Black Panther's inclusion.
The film does have some issues with its third-act - the visual effects here are especially bad - but that's forgivable when what comes before it is so good. The cast, characters, story, and world-building are extremely well done. The art design and cinematography are gorgeous, the music powerful, and Michael B. Jordan gives a towering performance that ranks among the MCU's best. To so deftly handle themes around colonialism, slavery, black culture and black lives is impressive. To do so while still being a highly entertaining superhero flick is even more so.
JH
36. Moneyball
If you've ever aspired to pick up a pen and write something professionally, there are a few films that you should immediately be jealous of. Jealous in a good way - the kind that grabs you by the grey matter and tells you to get your sh*t together and work - but jealous all the same. When Harry Met Sally is one of them. Moneyball is another.
Written so well that nobody seemed to notice it was about maths and baseball losers, Moneyball manages to somehow retain the romance of an underdog sport movie story (because even when you're not invested in the sport, you're invested in the romance), despite the story fundamentally being about the opposite. Here, analytics and cold hard calculations are made human by energy, emotion and just really, really great performances. It's like the Sandlot only with graphs.
SG
35. Hell Or High Water
Considering he's written only a handful of films and was most notable initially for acting in Sons Of Anarchy, Taylor Sheridan is a bloody genius. Adding his wry writing spirt to a cast led by Chris Pine, Oscar powerhouse Jeff Bridges and The Best Actor In The World Ben Foster proved a recipe for sun-bleached, neo-Western glory.
It's essentially a heist film flirting with the Western genre that eschews the need for gun-play or even Tarantino-style verbal dick-swinging for strong characters and a screenplay you'll wish you'd written. And by God it looks beautiful too. Too many modern Westerns are obsessed with the idea of showing the sun-parched rolling plains as some sort of desolate wasteland: here they look like paintings you want to roll around in. With Chris Pine. Or Ben Foster's moustache.
SG