Train Dreams - 4 Nominations

• Best Achievement in Cinematography: Adolpho Veloso

• Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song): Nick Cave (music and lyric), Bryce Dessner (music), For “Train Dreams”

• Best Motion Picture of the Year: Marissa McMahon, Teddy Schwarzman, Will Janowitz, Ashley Schlaifer, Michael Heimler

• Best Adapted Screenplay: Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar

Train Dreams is a quiet, sad, beautiful film with powerful performances - it’s a totally different speed than the entire crop of other movies in the Best Picture category. Joel Edgerton plays a railway construction worker who meets and marries Gladys. As the country’s need for logging increases, he transitions to this seasonal work, coming home each year to be with his wife and eventually daughter. When a tragic fire burns down his home, he is haunted by the idea that perhaps his daughter is alive and looking for a way home.

This is not an upbeat movie, but I found it to be wonderful. In the hullabaloo of loud and frenetic stories, Train Dreams changes the pace and makes an impact. If you’re not fond of the slower paced, or of the performances that are as much internal as expressed, then perhaps this wouldn’t be for you. But the scenery alone (and therefore, the Cinematography nom) is worth the price of admission.

 

Bugonia - 4 Nominations

 

Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score): Jerskin Fendrix

Best Motion Picture of the Year: Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, Lars Knudsen

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role: Emma Stone

Best Adapted Screenplay: Will Tracy

Longtime readers of the blog will recall that I am an ardent fan of Yorgos Lanthimos movies (and if you’re newer to his work, please go back and check out his first nominated film for International Language, Dogtooth) and he is a superb, authentic, and unique director. He has a slightly off kilter sensibility and has tremendous compassion for the oddball. He and Emma Stone have proven to be a powerful partnership making Oscar nominee after Oscar nominee (and sometimes winner!)

This is another quirky one - two conspiracy theorists, Teddy and Don, have determined that Michelle - a high powered, highly successful executive is an alien from another planet. They kidnap her because they are certain that her alien race is determined to destroy earth and all of its inhabitants. Once she understands what is happening, she attempts to employ every negotiation tactic she’s learned in her career, doing her best to gain their trust enough to let her go. It is never really explained how they have come to such deep knowledge of this alien kind, but every signal is given that at least one of the kidnappers (Jesse Plemmons) is a man who has done his homework.

The film is undoubtedly entertaining, and this is exactly the kind of picture that we expect from Lanthimos. The casting of these actors is spot on, but it is almost tragic that Jesse Plemmons was overlooked for this film. He is utterly believable and has the special sauce that allows you to escape into his reality, even if we “know” that his delusion is impossible. While I wouldn’t put Bugonia in my top three of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture, I’m awfully glad it got this recognition because hopefully more people will see it (including you!).

Hamnet - 8 Nominations

 

Best Casting: Nina Gold

Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score): Max Richter

Best Motion Picture of the Year: Liza Marshall, Pippa Harris, Nicolas Gonda, Steven Spielberg, Sam Mendes

Best Achievement in Directing: Chloé Zhao

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role: Jessie Buckley

Best Adapted Screenplay: Maggie O’Farrell, Chloé Zhao

Best Achievement in Production Design: Fiona Crombie (production designer), Alice Felton (set decorator)

Best Achievement in Costume Design: Malgosia Turzanska

Hamnet is the beautiful and deeply moving story of William Shakespeare and his family; how he met his wife, his rise in popularity, and the family that he left behind when he went to London to put on what would become enduring work that would live well beyond his lifetime. With this film, Chloe Zhao has done something powerful. While we have seen films before that play out a “real life” story that eventually become a Shakespeare play (a la, Shakespeare in Love), this feels grounded in a world that feels as real as it is theatrical, and as theatrical as it is real. Of course the technical categories lend themselves to the experience, but what makes this movie are the performances from Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, and the three child actors who play their children. (At this point, I can’t see anyone taking the gold from Jessie Buckley.)
We know that Chloe Zhao is an outstanding director, but the thing that connects her Oscar winning Nomadland to Hamnet is her ability to have enduring compassion for her women leads while still showing them to be fully human, whether pooping in a bucket in a van or giving birth alone in the woods.
And here is my big reveal - if you are going to see only 2 or 3 of the nominated Best Pictures this year, make sure that Hamnet is one of them.

Sing Sing - 3 nominations

 

• 
  2025 Nominee Oscar

  • Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song)

  • Abraham Alexander 
  • Adrian Quesada

  "Like a Bird"
• 
  2025 Nominee Oscar

  • Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role

  • Colman Domingo
• 
  2025 Nominee Oscar

  • Best Adapted Screenplay

  • Clint Bentley 
  • Greg Kwedar 
  • Clarence Maclin 
  • John Divine G Whitfield

Listen up folks! THIS. This is the movie that you want to make time to see. This is the one that opens your heart just a crack to think about the criminals behind the walls of a prison. How easy it is to simply dismiss them, to ignore their treatment, to reduce their lives to just the worst moments of them, It's so much easier to assume that nobody gets convicted who is innocent, and that life behind bars should never have any privileges because those people deserve nothing. And then there are the heroes who work to bring life changing programs to prisons - and the theater program in Sing Sing prison is one of them (and in fact, without jumping the gun, no person who has participated in the theater program has ever returned to the system once getting out of jail).

Sing Sing follows wrongly convicted Divine G who is recruited to the theater program and has a natural aptitude for it. He bonds with his fellow thespians and writers, and he ends up becoming one of the leaders of the program while concurrently fighting for his own release. The professional running the program is played by none other than Oscar nominated Paul Raci, from the Sound of Metal. The most important performance comes from the real Divine G who was one of the Executive Producers and writers, and Coleman Domingo gives the best performance of his career, and probably the best performance of many people's careers. Many if not most of the actors playing inmates are themselves graduates of the real program at Sing Sing, and that tidbit is not clear until the very end of the film - these actors are that authentic.

I don't know why this movie didn't get so much more attention than it did. It's a small independent, and i suspect they simply didn't have the budget to launch a proper Oscars campaign. But that doesn't mean YOU have to miss it. The moment you get the chance, sit yourself down and turn this movie on. You won't regret it.

Nickel Boys - 2 nominations

 

• 
  • Best Motion Picture of the Year

  • Dede Gardner 
  • Jeremy Kleiner 
  • Joslyn Barnes
• 
  • Best Adapted Screenplay

  • RaMell Ross 
  • Joslyn Barnes

Nickel Boys is a film based on an excellent Coleson Whitehead book which was inspired by true events. Children accused of crimes are sent to a boarding school and treated to horrendous and sometimes fatal conditions. They must do everything and anything they can to survive, and two of the boys Elwood and Turner befriend each other and look out for each other in a place where it's clear that doesn't happen all that much. The film toggles between the 60s and current day, and it's clear that the current day alumni of the school are on the spectrum of trauma coping mechanisms. They hear again and again of men who died by suicide, some are doing well, some have an inability to form lasting relationships, and really everything in between. One thing is made apparent, nobody who spent any time at Nickel Academy came out ok.

This film was shot in a particularly interesting and compelling way - we see the scenes from the 60s shot from the character's point of view, and it's some time in the movie before we even see Elwood's face, and eventually, we begin to see the film through Turner's point of view. But when we are in present day (or flash forward) the film is shot from behind the head of our lead character, though we aren't totally sure whose life we are watching. I understand that this unusual way of shooting the movie is based on the book, where the narrator switches back and forth between Elwood and Turner. What I haven't found is an explanation for why the modern scenes are shot from behind, and I have a few theories. One is that perhaps the Director is telling us that the lead character never really feels like he is living his own story once out of the academy (and there is some plot evidence for that, though I won't share because, spoiler). The other theory is that one trauma coping mechanism is to develop a high level of awareness of everything happening in one's orbit, including the ability to see behind your own back - maybe we are being told that even when this character is at ease, he is still watching his own back.

Whatever the answer may be, I have to admit that the film didn't rise to the level of greatness that the book achieved. It was good, but it takes some getting used to the camera angles, and while I like the explanation for the attempt, it does make the movie as much about the movie making as the story it's telling and I'm not certain it worked. If you only have time for a handful of Oscar films, read this book instead. 

Emilia Perez - 13 nominations

 

• 
  
  

  • Best International Feature Film, France
• • Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling

  • Julia Floch-Carbonel 
  • Emmanuel Janvier 
  • Jean-Christophe Spadaccini
• 
  • Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)

  • Clément Ducol 
  • Camille
• 
  • Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song), "El Mal"

  • Clément Ducol 
  • Camille 
  • Jacques Audiard
• 
  • Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song), "Mi Camino"

  • Clément Ducol 
  • Camille 
  Jacques Audiard
• 
  • Best Sound

  • Erwan Kerzanet 
  • Aymeric Devoldère 
  • Maxence Dussère 
  • Cyril Holtz 
  • Niels Barletta
• 
  • Best Motion Picture of the Year

  • Pascal Caucheteux 
  • Jacques Audiard
• 
  • Best Achievement in Directing

  • Jacques Audiard
• 
  Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role

  • Karla Sofía Gascón
• 
  • Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role

  • Zoe Saldana
• 
  • Best Adapted Screenplay

  • Jacques Audiard 
  • Thomas Bidegain 
  • Léa Mysius
  • Nicolas Livecchi
• 
  • Best Achievement in Cinematography

  • Paul Guilhaume
• • Best Achievement in Film Editing

  • Juliette Welfling

Remember when I said that being nominated 4 times for a single movie was pretty impressive? Well Jacques Audiard is nominated 5 times for this single movie, where he seems to have done everything except craft services. Guess what else? The film is nominated for Adapted Screenplay, because Audiard had already produced an opera libretto which was based on a book.

The story follows Rita, a discontented defense attorney who is engaged by a cartel kingpin to give him the cover he needs to transition to being a woman, including helping him fake his own death and relocating his wife and children to Switzerland. Once she has transitioned, she begins to live a new life as a philanthropist and do-gooder (with a hint of corruption on the side), and she decides that she misses her family terribly and asks Rita to bring them back to Mexico to live with her. Her ex-wife rekindles an affair she was having while still married, and adds another layer of complication to this already complicated life. The film reflects on criminality, corruption, family, and the question of whether life truly changes when the core personality does not.

Before I saw the film, I had no idea it was a musical. Selena Gomez turns out to be a non-fluent Spanish speaker who pulls off acting and emoting while speaking the language. Zoe Saldana turns out to be a trained dancer who can also really sing. And those were just the smallest of surprises. Everything about this film is not what you expect it to be, in all of the best ways. I loved it, the music and the songs are excellent and beautifully choreographed. The cinematography was exceptional. I imagine that Selena Gomez was a breath away from a Supporting Actress nomination (which would have tied EP with the three other films in history to garner 14 nominations, the record.) The whole of this film is even greater than the sum of its parts, and its parts are pretty magnificent.