Film critics have long warned that high-quality cinema is dying in the streaming era, but this year’s Best Picture nominees suggest otherwise: for the first time in a while most of the films up for the 2026 Oscars are excellent, and nearly all are plainly watchable. Audiences weary of short-form video may be returning to the big screen, and the Academy’s choices this season point to a renewed appetite for cinematic storytelling that marries craft with entertainment.
My top pick is Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, a meticulously made domestic drama anchored by Stellan Skarsgård as Gustav Borg, a celebrated filmmaker who re-enters the lives of his estranged daughters after their mother’s death. Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas deliver quietly powerful performances as the daughters, while Elle Fanning is convincingly out of her depth as an American actress cast by Borg. Trier’s direction gives the film a lyrical simplicity even as it weaves generational histories and personal tensions through a finely observed Oslo setting. Kasper Tuxen Andersen’s cinematography and the cast’s chemistry help the film argue, softly, that art can mend fractured bonds.
Other strong contenders show the range on offer. Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia is a return to form: a darkly comic, absurd caper that follows Jesse Plemons’s paranoid Teddy and his cousin as they kidnap Emma Stone’s ruthless pharma CEO. The film keeps viewers off-balance, shifting sympathy between captor and captive until a nihilistic, oddly satisfying conclusion. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is an energetic rock ’n’ roll fable-slash-vampire siege set in 1932; Michael B. Jordan plays twin gangster brothers in a pulpy, music-driven thrill that recalls From Dusk Till Dawn. Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme turns a ludicrous premise — a 1950s hustler’s quest to get to Japan for a world table-tennis championship — into a high-octane, oddly moving sports fable, buoyed by Darius Khondji’s 35mm cinematography and a spirited score by Daniel Lopatin.
The rest of the field includes Kleber Mendonça Filho’s political thriller The Secret Agent, Paul Thomas Anderson’s whimsical One Battle After Another, and the racing drama F1, which leans into popcorn spectacle and old-guard grit with Brad Pitt at the centre. Three nominees feel weaker: Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams is earnest but visually flat for its expansive settings; Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, despite production design, reads as ponderous and meandering (one character asks, “Can you contain your fire, Prometheus, or are you going to burn your hands before delivering it?”); and Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet plays as self-satisfied where it aims for profundity.
Seven of the ten nominees reward repeat viewing for their pleasure, complexity or craft. Whether this signals a broader revival of quality in Hollywood or simply a particularly strong year for the Academy, the 2026 slate is a welcome reminder that well-made cinema still matters. (The Conversation)
Original Source: https://theshillongtimes.com/2026/03/15/this-years-oscars-best-picture-nominees-are-strong/
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Publish Date: 2026-03-15 02:30:00
