Whichever film finishes 2025 as my 26th favorite movie of the year, they should feel happy, because it means they've got a good shot at winning best picture.
I mentioned in yesterday's post that Anora was my #26 of 2024 ... but so too was Oppenheimer my #26 of 2023.
It's a recent phenomenon for sure. If I glance over the other best picture winners since I started ranking my movies in 1996, they fall into three categories: much higher than #26 (I've had three #1s win best picture, which are Titanic, Birdman and Parasite), much lower than #26 (Nomadland was #82, Green Book was #69), or not seen at all by the time of the awards (12 Years a Slave and CODA, both of which I could not see in time to rank them).
Number 26 is an interesting middle ground. It acknowledges that I think the film is good, maybe even very good, but there are usually at least a handful of best picture nominees I like better. This year, there were seven, as I had a whopping six in my top ten. Only A Complete Unknown did I dislike more, if you want to put it in the negative rather than the positive sense. (I still haven't seen I'm Still Here.)
But there's also a kind of message to it, whether intentional or not, and I appear to have been sending that message to both Oppenheimer and Anora. The top 25 makes an interesting cutoff, or at least, I think of it that way because my friend who does the ranking exercise with me used to highlight his top 25 before sending his whole list. He's scaled that back to his top 20 now, but the line of demarcation between #25 and #26 still feels like it means something. And to the extent that I apply intentionality to anything I do with my bigger list, making a movie #26 says to me "I get this movie is respected, and I liked it quite a lot too, but I have problems with it."
Apparently, that is the type of movie that wins best picture.
Since we own Anora, my wife is going to watch it this weekend when I'm out of town. So we'll see what she thinks.
A Complete shutout
Only two best picture nominees did not pick up a single Oscar: Nickel Boys, my #10, which wasn't nominated in enough categories to have a real chance, and A Complete Unknown, which received eight nominations ... and won not a one of them.
Sweet, sweet justice.
You may remember that I did not care for A Complete Unknown. It was my 128th ranked movie of the year, out of 177. Granted, it was also the last movie I ranked. But I don't know if my opinion would have improved significantly if I'd been given more time to think about it. Maybe 119th.
So like what happened a couple years ago when The Fabelmans, which I also did not like, didn't win anything, I'm feeling like a necessary correction occurred here. I was bracing for Timothee Chalamet to win the best actor statue, and although I tend to prefer when the wealth is shared for Oscars, meaning I would have supported that win, I'd much rather have the (better) work by Adrien Brody recognized, even if means his second turn in that spotlight.
Then there were three nominations for ACU, other than best picture, that I thought were completely unwarranted: best supporting actress for Monica Barbaro, best supporting actor for Edward Norton, and best director for James Mangold. All of those were long shots and none of them happened.
Anyway, as I said, justice prevailed against a very overrated movie.
My personal scorecard
Although, as usual, I didn't pay much attention to the pre-Oscars discourse on likely winners (though I did pay some), and, as usual, I made my selections just before the show (actually after it had already ended, but I had seen no results), I did quite well on my picks this year, picking 15 of the 23 categories correctly. And that's even without guessing any of the random ones (the shorts) correctly to help boost my score. So it was 15 out of 20 on any categories I had a reasonable chance of getting correct, which is better than I've done in a long, long time.
My only really big miss: best actress. And this one stings a bit. I felt like I really had a dog in that race this year, and Demi Moore losing to someone like Mikey Madison, who is like 23 years old, just seems a bit of a travesty of the normal rules of Oscar fairness. Moore will never get another shot. I feel a bit how I felt when Bill Murray and Mickey Rourke, who were both nominated as best actor for my #1 movie that year, both lost Oscars to Sean Penn ... speaking of two-time winners.
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