Oscars: Every Best Picture Nominee Of The 2010s - Ranked Worst To Best
26. BlacKkKlansman
A bonafide Spike Lee dubensteiner, the writer and director lights this one up and lets it burn the whole damn house down.
Lee takes the almost unbelievable true story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer who helps infiltrate the KKK, and makes it into his best film of years. Not only does he make the story feel believable, but he also expertly captures the time period while ensuring the points he makes connect and feel relevant to the present.
Lee wants to let you know that he's angry, but he channels that through the story and its characters, and the film contains plenty of his trademark humour to balance it out. It's a difficult juxtaposition, and a credit to the work of editor Barry Alexander Brown as much as anyone that they pull it off. BlacKkKlansman's story isn't just an important one, but one that's brilliantly told, from the interplay between John David Washington and Adam Driver to *that* ending, will will haunt you long after the credits have rolled.
JH
25. Phantom Thread
There are few onscreen relationships as toxic as the one between Reynolds Woodcock and Alma in Phantom Thread. The former is an obsessive, high-maintenance drama queen who flies into a massive tantrum should his silent breakfast be compromised by needless distractions like "crunching" and "his children", while the latter will resort to a small dose of poisoning to remind Woodcock how much he needs her.
It's a love story unlike any other, capturing a kind of considered, unspoken, methodical love that isn't exactly healthy, but is undeniably palpable and real. Director Paul Thomas Anderson does wonders to represent that feeling through every painstakingly-detailed frame, each one so annoyingly perfect and ethereal it comes across a little surreal. PTA makes it clear that this isn't reality, but the reality Woodcock has created for himself, and that suits everyone caught up in it just fine.
JB
24. Room
A powerful tale of survival, a showcase of the love that exists between a mother and her child, and the things the former will do for the latter, and an account of what childhood is supposed to be, and what happens when that's taken away, Room is hardly ever an easy watch.
Led by astonishing performance from Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay, it is, for the most part, a rather harrowing experience. As they're trapped in the shed, you feel trapped there with them; desperate for escape, clinging on to the fading glimmer of hope. And when it does come, the palpable relief is accompanied by the sense that things can't ever be the same again.
Most incredible is that, even through the loss of innocence and atrocities inflicted, a sense of optimism pervades through the movie, coming in the spots you need them most, and leaving you feeling completely rewarded for the pain by the time it comes to an end.
JH
23. Gravity
Like 127 Hours, The Martian The Revenant and Beasts Of The Southern Wild, The Academy has a bit of a fetish for stories about characters driven to really EXIST at the edge of human life by some terrifying adversity or other. The institution loves to see the triumph of human endurance and if you can tell that sort of story while also making the characters irresistibly likeable (so you feel their pain more) and shoot it all gorgeously (to juxtapose their misery), you're onto a winner.
Gravity hits all of those beats, telling the claustrophobically tense story of an astronaut trapped in space, which is both technically astonishing and - more importantly - completely emotionally astute. That makes particular sense, considering it was made by Alfonso Cuarón, who kinda knows how to write people and emotions, after all, but the fact that he makes it such an empathetic situation is what makes it so horribly affecting.
SG