Oscars: Every Best Picture Nominee Of The 2010s - Ranked Worst To Best

1. Inception

The true mark of a great film - or any great story - is how much its audience engages and re-engages with its ideas. On the surface, Christopher Nolan's mind-bending Inception is a high-concept sci-fi heist movie with guns, a huge special effects budget and a blockbuster cast. It's a curiously un-Academy like film in those terms, in actual fact.

But then you look at the details: the cast is made up of awards darlings like Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Caine, Tom Hardy and Marion Cotillard; the effects are some of the most innovative, breathtaking visuals ever put to film and the heist exists in a multi-layered mindscape as densely packed with plot as it is with symbolism.

It's a film about layers, which is appropriate given how many theories there are on what the film actually means - not just whether Cobb is awake at the end, but what almost every stroke, every character, every line means. It is more than a film even as everything that defines it in traditional filmic terms is so impressive and while Christopher Nolan might have done better in flashes, he's never put anything together so complete, so compelling and so perfect a sum of its individual parts that you have to applaud the architect behind it all on an entirely different scale.

SG

What do you think is the best Best Picture nominee of the decade? Let us know down in the comments.