Titanic Awards Season Post

It'll be sad when the big ship Hollywood goes down

It’s that time of year again: the season when the American film industry gives itself (and its foreign peers) a variety of awards in a high-profile ceremony, all in an effort to convince itself that it is thriving both artistically and commercially and not about to go the way of opera or ballet. I’ve written an Oscars post each of the past several years—here are my posts about the 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022 Oscar seasons, reflecting the prior year’s slate of film releases in each case—and at a quick glance the tone generally seems to range between depressed, dispeptic and resigned, with the main exception being the 2024 Oscars (for the 2023 film season), the year of Barbenheimer. Not coincidentally, Barbie and Oppenheimer are the two movies that Timothée Chalamet name-checked as films that normie moviegoers were actually eager to see, and which are therefore arguably a template for what an actually thriving movie industry would be turning out.

There were a number of films this past year that I quite liked, as there always are, but most of them were smaller, artier films, many of them foreign—the kinds of films that might appeal to the kind of niche audience that still goes to the ballet or the opera. Even that list was shorter than it has been some past years, though. Taken as a whole, the year was an artistic disappointment, at least to me. Commercially too it was a meh year, the domestic box office barely edging out 2024 because of higher ticket prices, as total ticket sales were down. Meanwhile, of the top ten domestic grossing films of the year, only one—Sinners—wasn’t an intellectual-property-driven piece of product. And only one of those—A Minecraft Movie—wasn’t a sequel, reboot or remake.

Maybe those are meaningless statistics. KPop Demon Hunters is obviously a massive hit even though Netflix played it in theaters for only a limited run of mostly singalong screenings. Despite being hulled by streaming, COVID and competition from various kinds of brain rot, the great lumbering ship of America’s movie industry hasn’t sunk yet. But it is far from sailing comfortably into port.

Still, if they can’t right the ship, at least they can have a splendid party on deck. A total of 50 films were nominated for at least one Academy Award, including 15 short films, 5 documentary features and 5 animated features. That leaves 25 live-action narrative feature films, including foreign language films, up for at least one Oscar. That’s the same breakdown as last year, and only a slightly narrower list from the year before. Unusually, this year I have not yet seen any of the animated or documentary features, nor any of the shorts. But I have seen 17 of the 25 remaining films, including all of those up for “major” awards (Picture, Direction and any of the Acting or Writing awards) and all of those up for most of the “craft” awards (all the nominees for Cinematography, Editing, Production Design, Costume Design, Score and Sound, as well as Casting). I haven’t seen The Voice of Hind Rajab yet, but I plan to before Sunday, and otherwise I’ve seen all the International Feature nominees.

So here are my feelings about those films. I’ve written about some of them already, and I’ll link to those pieces where possible below in my brief comments, before running through my imaginary ballot.

• Sinners (16 nominations, including Best Picture): I enjoyed this film quite a bit the first time around, and even more when I saw it again. Inasmuch as I have reservations, they are mainly related to its larger project, which I see as subsuming the blues into Afro-pessimism. My next piece in Modern Age looks at this film and Hamnet in relation to films from a generation ago that treat related subjects and that they can be understood as revisions of in some sense, respectively O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Shakespeare In Love. Notwithstanding my reservations about the film, I’m rooting for Sinners to win Best Picture and for Ryan Coogler to win Best Director. As noted above, Sinners is the only top-ten grossing film to be an original film not aimed at kids. And it’s a good film: well-written, well-directed and well-acted. It’s both entertaining and it’s about something. If the Oscars still mean anything, that’s the kind of film that should win Best Picture. Finally, it’s the underdog challenging One Battle After Another for the title, and I can’t root for the latter because I didn’t like it as much, nor did I think it was as good a film. Besides Picture and Director, I’d be happy to see Sinners win Cinematography, Score, Song and Casting. I’ve got other favorites to root for in the other categories, but even in most of them I’d be ok with Sinners winning instead.

• One Battle After Another (13 nominations, including Best Picture): I wrote about Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film here. I haven’t really changed my view on this one. If the Academy wants to give Anderson Best Director this year, I’ll be fine with that as a kind of body-of-work award; I’m a PTA fan, and his body of work is impressive and important. I’m not sure I’m rooting for this film for any awards, though, not even Adapted Screenplay which it is the one it is most likely to win. And it could plausibly win a ton more.

• Frankenstein (9 nominations, including Best Picture): I am not much of a Guillermo del Toro fan, and this film largely conformed to my middling expectations. I was never emotionally engaged, and I am definitely capable of being engaged by versions of the Frankenstein myth. If it wins nothing else, I expect it to win Costume and Production Design, but I hope it doesn’t; I found the design of the film to be bombastic and yet bland. Watch this film back to back with Poor Things, 2023’s version of the Frankenstein myth (which I wrote about here), and the contrast is palpable.

• Marty Supreme (9 nominations, including Best Picture): I thought this film was a fun ride that didn’t stay with me much at all after it was done. It also doesn’t benefit from too much reflection, partly because the story doesn’t actually make much sense, but more because it lacks a coherent moral center. The protagonist kills several people, for example, and while he’s definitely supposed to be an antihero of sorts whose vitalism outweighs his other faults, there’s a difference between rooting for a self-centered jerk and rooting for a murderous sociopath. Timothée Chalamet does demonstrate once again, though, that he is a bona fide movie star; nobody who isn’t could carry this film, and he does. That might be enough for him to win the Acting Oscar, which wouldn’t be a crazy choice, but my rooting interest is elsewhere.

• Sentimental Value (9 nominations, including Best Picture): This was one of my favorite films of 2025, and I would be rooting for it to win Best Picture if it had a prayer, but it doesn’t—and probably shouldn’t, just for the sake of the health of the film industry. But I found Sentimental Value deeply moving and pretty perfectly executed: great script, great direction, great acting, great production design. I think I haven’t written about it only because I don’t have some profound analysis to share; I just thought it was great. Oddly though, I can’t say what I’m rooting for it to win, because it has real competition that I care about in every category where it is nominated. So I’ll root for Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas to massively upset and win Best Supporting Actress, and just be happy with whatever this film does win.

• Hamnet (8 nominations, including Best Picture): As noted, my next piece for Modern Age will discuss Hamnet among other films. In the meantime, spoiler: I did not like this film. The simplest way to explain why is to say that this is a film purportedly about the redemptive power of art (in this case, the theater) that seems completely uninterested in the specifics of that art, to the point that it does not truly show us the art at all. Yes, we see bits of a purported staging of Hamlet, but barely, and we do not see Hamlet affecting anyone; we see people acting affected, and are supposed to simply accept the assertion that their experience of art had something to do with it. I am rooting for it to lose everything, very much including Best Actress, which I would be happy to see go to Kate Hudson, Renate Reinsve, Rose Byrne or Emma Stone (in that order), all of whose performances I preferred to Jessie Buckley’s.

• Bugonia (4 nominations, including Best Picture): I’m surprised that this film got a Best Picture nod at all, a testament, I suspect, to just how impressive a director Yorgos Lanthimos is rather than to any affection for this deeply weird film—which, to be clear, I was quite glad to see. I wrote about Bugonia here. I’m rooting for it to win Best Adapted Screenplay, but really that’s me rooting against all the alternatives. I’m mostly just glad it was invited to the party.

• F1: The Movie (4 nominations, including Best Picture): Like Marty Supreme, a fun ride that was not particularly memorable, but that actually makes sense for a film like this, a pure Hollywood product rather than an indie darling’s bid for Oscar gold. I don’t have much to say about it; the pieces all fit together the way they are supposed to, and it goes vroom. I don’t expect it to win anything and I don’t have a rooting interest in it doing so. I’m only rooting against it winning for Sound.

• The Secret Agent (4 nominations, including Best Picture): I was looking forward to this film enormously, and in certain ways it delivered magnificently. The cinematography is gorgeous. The costume and production design are wonderful. The music, ah, the music. So of course it’s not nominated for any of that. Wagner Maura did snag a Best Actor nomination, and the film was nominated for Casting as well, both deserved. But I found the film to be tonally all over the place, the story incredibly confusing, the script a structural mess and texturally disappointing. I’m very much in the minority here—a lot of people love this film—but I am not rooting for it for anything.

• Train Dreams (4 nominations, including Best Picture): This is another critical darling that I was quite disappointed by. It landed for me as emotionally one-note and cloyingly sentimental. I didn’t really believe in these people as people; they felt like representations of feelings, or of a single feeling, and that I was expected to share that feeling simply because it was so insisted upon. It didn’t work, at least not on me. Train Dreams is being particularly praised for its cinematography, and there are many beautiful shots, but I found it quite visually repetitive. I was never surprised by beauty; it felt rather like every shot was hung there to be appreciated, if that makes any sense. Anyway, this is another one where I am in the minority—most people seem to love this film. I didn’t.

• Avatar: Fire and Ash (2 nominations: Costume Design and VFX): I thought this was better structured than the prior installment of this franchise, but the sense of wonder (without which there’s not much to talk about) is long gone, and that’s reflected in box office numbers that barely exceed the extraordinary cost of making and marketing this behemoth. I wouldn’t be shocked if James Cameron never gets to finish the series in the manner to which he has become accustomed. Oh well.

• Blue Moon (2 nominations: Actor and Original Screenplay): I thought this film was both delightful and quite sad, and much more affecting than director Richard Linklater’s other film of the year, Nouvelle Vague (which I saw at the New York Film Festival). It’s a portrait of Lorenz Hart at the very end of his career, on the night that Oklahoma! opened on Broadway, transforming both the American musical and the career of his former creative partner, Richard Rogers, and leaving Hart permanently behind. The film has a wonderful script and career-best acting from Ethan Hawke as Hart, but he’s almost overshadowed by Andrew Scott’s razor sharp performance as Rogers. Since my own film is a chamber piece, I’m particularly taken these days by highly contained, unity-observing films that nonetheless feel cinematic, as this one does. I’m rooting for Hawke to win Best Actor in a massive upset, and I would be rooting for the screenplay to win too but strategically I have to root for another winner.

• It Was Just an Accident (2 nominations: International Feature and Original Screenplay): Jafar Panahi’s latest film blew me away when I saw it at the New York Film Festival, and it hasn’t faded at all in my memory. This is an incredibly complex and powerful film that kept surprising me. In contrast to The Secret Agent and One Battle After Another, I followed and appreciated its repeated shifts in tone without the slightest trouble; they served to make the climax all the more surprising and powerful, and then the conclusion gives one final knife-sharp twist. The acting, the writing, the cinematography, everything is superlative and completely in the service of the story. Experiences like this are why I go to the movies. It’s unlikely to win for International Feature because that will likely go to Sentimental Value—which I also loved—so I have to root for it to win Original Screenplay. It deserved to be nominated for Best Picture.

• Sirāt (2 nominations: International Feature and Sound): This road trip rescue odyssey was, as they say, a bad trip, but still one very worth experiencing. But be warned. It starts out ominously, then lulls you into a false sense of security, only to kick you brutally in the head. By turns reminiscent of Hard Core, Mad Max: Fury Road and The Wages of Fear, I wish it could win more than Sound. It had better win that.

• If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (1 nomination: Actress): I’m thinking of writing a piece about deliberately unpleasant films, because I feel like that’s almost a genre, and one that has grown of late, but then I’d have to see all of those films, and that feels like punishment. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, about a stressed mom with a sick child (I think she has an eating disorder) who experiences life as a catalogue of escalating insults and abuse, is certainly one of them. It’s a bit like a cross between The Babadook, 2014’s indie horror darling about a mom stressed by an impossible child, and this year’s Die, My Love, a very strange film from the always-interesting Lynne Ramsay about a new mother’s descent into outright delusional insanity, but it worked less well emotionally for me than either of those while also being more consistently unpleasant. I suspect that’s because If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is supposed to be a comedy, which fact in itself tells you something about the state of our filmic psyche.

• Song Sung Blue (1 nomination: Actress): This film is the antidote to If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Everyone involved is quite plainly working overtime for the audience’s entertainment, and boy do they deliver. I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats. And this is another film with a career-best performance, in this case from Kate Hudson. It deserves some love. Now I really want to see the documentary of the same name that this film is based on.

• Weapons (1 nomination: Supporting Actress): Of all the films that garnered an enthusiastic audience response this year, this is the one that made me feel the oldest, because I just didn’t get it. There’s a great deal of talent and artistry on display in every department, but in the service of what precisely I’d be hard-pressed to tell you. Amy Madigan does a fine job in her role, and relative to a horror movie standard it’s quite elevated . . . but it’s still a horror movie performance. Which is appropriate for a horror movie, but nonetheless . . .

So there you go. By category I am rooting for (not predicting):

• Picture: Sinners

• Director: Ryan Coogler, for Sinners, though I’d also be happy to see Joachim Trier win for Sentimental Value and wouldn’t be upset if it went to Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another

• Actor: Ethan Hawke, for Blue Moon

• Actress: Kate Hudson, for Song Sung Blue

• Supporting Actor: too many good choices, honestly; I’m not sure I can pick; Stellan Skarsgard I suppose, though he should have been considered a lead

• Supporting Actress: Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, for Sentimental Value, though Elle Fanning was also excellent in the same film

• Adapted Screenplay: Will Tracy for Bugonia

• Original Screenplay: Jafar Panahi and collaborators for It Was Just an Accident, though if I weren’t specifically rooting for that film to get some love I’d be happy to see Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier win for Sentimental Value, or Robert Kaplow win for Blue Moon

• Casting: Francine Maisler for Sinners

• Cinematography: Autumn Durald Arkapaw for Sinners

• Costume Design: Ruth E. Carter for Sinners, though Miyako Bellizzi’s anachronisms in Marty Supreme were certainly interesting

• Makeup and Hair Design: Thomas Foldberg and Anne Cathrine Sauerberg for The Ugly Stepsister, which I haven’t even seen

• Production Design: don’t really have a dog in this fight

• Editing: too many good choices, honestly

• Sound: Amanda Villavieja, Laia Casanovas and Yasmina Praderas for Sirāt

• Original Score: Ludwig Göransson for Sinners

• Original Song: “I Lied to You” from Sinners (note: I haven’t seen all the nominated films in this category, but I have heard all the nominated songs)

• Visual Effects: don’t really have a dog in this fight

• International Feature: since it won’t go to It Was Just an Accident, I’ll be happy if it goes to Sentimental Value

Happy watching.