Oscars: Every Best Picture Nominee Of The 2010s - Ranked Worst To Best
70. Green Book
On a surface level, Green Book is fine. There's a very easy-going charm to the movie that allows it to coast along, mostly on the back of two strong lead performances from Viggo Mortensen and especially Mahershala Ali.
The trouble with Green Book, though, is that it feels like a movie for 1989, not 2019. Its approach to racism is all filtered through the lens of Tony Lip, whose son co-wrote the damn movie, and thus feels like a movie designed to make white people feel better about racism. Shirley is given far less consideration, as is the Jim Crow era, or even the Green Book of its title. In a year where so many films are taking such complex and considered approaches to the same subject matter, Green Book isn't good enough.
JH
69. Lion
Lion leans just ever-so-slightly too close towards going full Oscar bait, although it avoids coming incredibly close thanks to its heartwarming story and captivating the lead performances.
The first half, which follows young Saroo separated from his family in India, is excellent. Sunny Punwar is irresistibly charming in a way few child actors ever are, and these moments are both affecting and unpredictable. Unfortunately, it becomes a little more conventional - and baity - when we switch to adult Saroo. The plotting is a little muddled, but Patel's performance still makes it work.
JH
68. The Theory Of Everything
You can almost set your watch these days to how quickly people turn on films like The Theory Of Everything. It seems the biopic of Sir Stephen Hawking is too nice, too "Oscar-baiting" and just too good to be considered a real contender. If you admire Eddie Redmayne's stunning performance as Hawking, you're apparently only encouraging him, as if a complete physical transformation like that deserves anything but praise.
Sure, it's fully invested in emotion provocation, but this is an emotionally provocative story and a film's success in making you feel shouldn't be transformed into a stick to beat it with simply because you feel foolish enough to have felt it. The Theory Of Everything is very good. Eddie Redmayne is brilliant in it. It's a story dedicared to one of the most important men in scientific history and if you believe it doesn't deserve praise for being a fitting celebration of him, you're sadly mistaken.
SG
67. The King's Speech
While arguably any other film from 2011 should have won Best Picture over The King's Speech (such as Inception, Black Swan, The Fighter, or even Toy Story 3), the biopic is still solid when taken in isolation, bolstered in no small part by the great performances from Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter.
Problems do creep in with Tom Hooper's direction, though. The filmmaker has a distinct style, for sure, with bleak colour palettes and a reliance on close-ups focusing on wringing the most emotion out of any scene. But that style is adhered to with such a stubbornness, regardless of the needs of the scene in question, that whatever power it may have held is diluted. For a story like The King's Speech, that's not too distracting, but it still feels like there could have been a better way to visually bring it to life.
JB