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Ranking 2018 Best Picture Nominees

2018 was an absolutely terrible year when it comes to the Oscars and especially the Best Picture category. Yes, a couple of movies here were worthy of a nomination, but only a couple. The rest are either totally undeserving or even bad movies by all means. This was actually a very strong year for movies, but they picked some truly unfortunate ones to honor.

8. Bohemian Rhapsody

Words cannot describe how much I absolutely despise this hateful movie. Rami Malek won an Oscar for playing a caricature which angered me so much, but even worse is the movie’s decision to strip Freddie of any homosexual behavior and the end result is even homophobic in its true intentions. The movie itself, besides its problematic intentions, is bad across the board with a horrible script and a painful lack of any validity in its tackling of the band’s history. It’s a mainstream crap movie which had no business being on this slate.

7. The Favourite

This year my list is probably going to be pretty similar to the lists of the vast majority, but this is the only one where I wildly diverge and I have to as The Favourite is not only the most overrated movie of the year, but also the second worst overall that I’ve seen. It’s well acted and well shot for sure, but Yorgos Lanthimos is a terrible director and here he made another movie that is weird for the sake of being weird, unnecessarily crude and vulgar and yet again historically inaccurate to the point of being pointless.

6. Vice

This is another bad movie on this list and thankfully the last one. It’s actually mediocre more than bad and thus better than the above two. The first act is good and the acting is pretty solid across the board, but still none of the three actors deserved their nominations and the characters themselves are caricatures (see a pattern here). It’s an unsubtle, painfully unfunny and unsophisticated movie which further proves how incompetent Adam McKay is as a director and the fact that he was nominated for his work here is going to haunt the Academy some day.

5. Green Book

I liked Green Book quite a bit actually. I fell prey to its charms and I had to admit that it’s one hell of an engaging and effervescent flick. Both of its central performances are terrific and both characters are so well developed with the dynamic between them being excellent. The humor is also very good. But, and this is a big but, the movie’s immensely predictable, familiar and old-fashioned to a fault. There is nothing great here whatsoever and the fact that it won over Roma just goes to show that the Academy favors mainstream films over art.

4. BlacKkKlansman

The fact that this movie got such a solid, middle placement here just goes to show how painfully bad this slate of nominees is. Yes, BlacKkKlansman ended up really surprising me how especially involving it is in its very interesting, fact-based story. It’s also very effective in its thriller elements. I really liked those infiltration scenes in particular. However, the movie has nothing new to say about the subject of racism whatsoever just like the film above and it’s quite silly, unsubtle and unprofessional in more than a couple of scenes in the second half.

3. A Star Is Born

A Star Is Born is easily the third best of these nominees despite its many flaws. The entire second half is overly dramatic, boring and a big downer. I found the film overly familiar in those scenes and it needed a more modern approach overall. But, Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper are both terrific in their roles and the romance itself works so much because of the two and because of the playful dialogue and their great chemistry. Shallow is an awesome number, well deserving of its Oscar. It’s a very romantic movie that transcended its status of a third remake.

2. Roma

And this is where we come to the really good pictures. Yes, at number two which is just so problematic. Of course in terms of script Roma isn’t the greatest as I’ve seen this movie before in foreign films done better, but in terms of pure artistry alone it soars to great heights. Alfonso Cuaron’s direction is terrific and he’s well deserving of his Oscar, but his cinematography is absolutely spectacular as the movie features a lot of highly memorably shots and a beautiful stark black-and-white photography. It also has its moving sequences and is overall hugely effective as a very cinematic experience, but it could have been better nonetheless.

1. Black Panther

And the best nominated film just came shy of making my top ten list so this is the rare year where not a single Best Picture nominee entered my top ten for the year. That action-heavy, CGI mess of a third act really cost it even more praise, but still Black Panther is undoubtedly the best movie of this list and I am so glad that they finally nominated a superhero movie and a great one at that. The characters are terrific, especially its great villain Killmonger and the film works so well as a sophisticated, thematically rich political drama that favors strong dialogue and grounded in reality conflicts in favor of excessive action and humor and I loved it for that. It’s one of the best MCU as well as genre films released so far.

Films That Should Have Been Nominated:

A Quiet Place – This is an awesome horror movie that is one of the finest genre films I’ve ever seen. It’s beautifully acted, originally scripted and authentically conceived where the sound plays a big role and it ridiculously lost an Oscar. The fact that this great film wasn’t Oscar-nominated, but much weaker Get Out was really hurts.

First Man – But the case of First Man hurts me the most. I absolutely adored this movie and having in mind that they obviously love Damien Chazelle, I expected a nomination, but it ultimately never happened. It’s such a shame as this underrated movie features a different, grittier and more real approach at a biopic and it’s simply very effective.

Hereditary – Another horror movie that is very much a case of horror movies done right and done artistically even. It’s beyond creepy, but also phenomenally acted by Toni Collette and so memorable in many of its great scenes. Its more dramatic and familial approach also worked wonders to make it more scary in the end.

The Hate U Give – This teenage flick is so much better than any other film about racism this year. It caught me by surprise how deeply moving and even sophisticated it was. So well acted and so emotional, the movie was shamefully snubbed by the Academy which simply always hates on coming-of-age flicks as this year also saw very strong Love, Simon and Eighth Grade.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? – I really ended up liking this movie, though not loving it. Both Grant and McCarthy were nominated for their respective roles as was the screenplay, but the movie itself was unfortunately snubbed. In the year of terrible Vice and Bohemian Rhapsody, this is a biopic done right and entertaining for once.