Oscars 2022: All 10 Best Picture Nominees Ranked from Worst to Best

10. “Don’t Look Up”

A star-studded comedy of terrors that boasts more A-list celebrities than actual laughs, Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up” may not be quite as grim as “Vice” (even though it ends with Earth getting obliterated), but his tedious climate change allegory still stretches its one basic joke to astronomical lengths — unforgivable in a film that begs viewers to savor what little time they have left on this planet. Despite a self-effacing lead performance by Leonardo DiCaprio, a lovely turn from Melanie Lynskey as the movie’s beating heart, and one truly excellent runner about the cost of snacks in The White House, “Don’t Look Up” churns the learned helplessness of our environmental policy into a hectoring chore that strains to be funny even as it swears that its lack of funniness is precisely the point.

This Netflix juggernaut was always going to be nominated for Best Picture (its cast includes 40 percent of all living actors, and features Meryl Streep doing a Donald Trump riff with all the insight of Jay Leno), but it never does anything to belong in the race. —DE

9. “Nightmare Alley”

“The Shape of Water” may have been a bold choice for Best Picture, but that Oscar-winning fable about a mute cleaning lady who falls in love with an imprisoned fishman stretched Gullermo del Toro’s lifelong obsession with poignant genre stories to a fairy-tale ending. How would he follow “happily ever after?” Would he pivot away from his pet obsession, or would he use his newfound pedigree to double down and find new ways of arguing that men are the real monsters?

The answer, perhaps inevitably, turned out to be a little bit of both. The first of his movies not to include any supernatural elements whatsoever, del Toro’s strangely hyper-saturated adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s jet-black “Nightmare Alley” — the story of carnival barker turned con man — is a glossy circus noir shot to look like a Norman Rockwell painting of Hell. There’s something brilliant about casting one of Hollywood’s most handsome actors (Bradley Cooper) as a man who can’t bear to look at himself, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that del Toro is resisting his material; that a true believer who doesn’t expect audiences to take his stories at face value may not be the best fit for a story about someone who needs customers to swallow his every word.

“Nightmare Alley” shines a light into the hollow cavities of the human soul, but the big-hearted man behind the camera can’t help but search the darkness for signs of light. Beautiful as it is that del Toro marshaled his clout into something this lavishly perverse (and the Oscar race has been all the more interesting because of it), his latest bid for Best Picture is heading towards a dead end. —DE

8. “Belfast”

It’s the year’s other tear-jerking family drama about a clan just trying to get keep it together in the face of painful outside forces. Kenneth Branagh – bouncing way, way back from the trauma of “Artemis Fowl” but not leaning too hard into the wacky showmanship of his Agatha Christie joints – excavates some painful personal history to offer a slice of life look at the most fraught time of his childhood. 

Branagh was just a kiddo when The Troubles broke out in Northern Ireland, and the film imagines his life before all that as an idyllic existence, oriented around his tightknit family and loving neighborhood. But when discord stretches wide enough to upend all of that, nothing is ever the same. 

Except, well, the film itself. Despite some wonderful flourishes – it was shot in black and white, the performances (particularly from young Jude Hill, along with Jamie Dornan and Caitronia Balfe, to say nothing of nominees Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds) are uniformly excellent – there’s a predictability to “Belfast” that’s tough to totally shake. Perhaps, however, that’s what the Academy is looking for – a historical, painful look back that can provide some measure of a way forward. Voters at TIFF certainly went for it, anointing the film with an early prize in the form of the much-ballyhooed People’s Choice Award. —KE 

7. “King Richard”

And, just in case the “tear-jerking family drama about a clan just trying to get keep it together in the face of painful outside forces” itch had not been fully scratched: Reinaldo Marcus Green’s “King Richard” is on offer too. A more prickly and complex story than its brethren in the category — no one ever accused Richard Williams (Will Smith in a career-best performance) of being an easygoing dude — the film still doesn’t quite let itself fully loose on the mythos of the man who built tennis’ two best players. 

And maybe that’s OK, because in doing so, “King Richard” also makes the case that Venus and Serena Williams were just as much architects of their fate, fame, and career as their driven dad. That’s worth cheering for, and packaged in a propulsive sports drama that keeps up its energy while telling a complicated story over the course of many years, an old school dramedy with massive appeal. —KE 

6. “CODA”

There’s little surprising about the shape of director Sian Heder’s smash Sundance hit feature: It’s a family drama and a coming-of-age tale that combines familiar beats about finding yourself, breaking free of your family, and making plenty of mistakes along the way into one tear-jerking package. Yet what “CODA” lacks in storytelling originality, it more than makes up for with other touches of ingenuity. 

Anchored by star-making turn from Emilia Jones as teenage malcontent Ruby Rossi, “CODA” takes its title from Ruby’s lot in life: She’s the child of deaf adults, her vibrant parents Jackie (Marlee Matlin) and Frank (Oscar nominee Troy Kotsur). In fact, Ruby is the only hearing person in her household — her older brother Leo (Daniel Durant) is also deaf — and she’s long served as the Rossis’ hearing proxy to the world. But what about what Ruby wants? 

As Heder’s film evolves and leans further into the patterns of the genre, its seeming familiarity becomes one of its greatest assets. You may think you know this story, and you probably do, but you’ve never quite seen it like this, with these characters, and with this care paid to an underrepresented portion of the population. It’s a crowd-pleaser that works its formula well, and while its awards season surge might have surprised some, its appeal is obvious. —KE 

5. “Dune”

Where many have tried and (admirably) failed, Denis Villeneuve dared to try again: “Dune”! The movie! At least one half of it! If nothing else, Villeneuve’s affection for the wild and wooly material of Frank Herbert and his richly imagined space-set drama of spice and sand and worms and royal lineages is clear in every single frame. There’s force in this vision, and Villeneuve and company (including a starry cast that boasts Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, Rebecca Ferguson, and scads more, plus an enviable array of craftspeople) seem hellbent on delivering it. Stand back in awe of the desert power, it’s really all you can do. 

And yet. Villeneuve and his team made the film with the express interest in making a second part, ensuring a cleaved narrative and zero sense of closure, not exactly a zingy combo. Surely, leaving the audience wanting more is a good thing, but leaving them wanting so much more could backfire when it comes to the awards gambit. We’ll reserve full judgement until we can see the full story played out on the big screen, no mater how impressive this first entry may be. —KE 

4. “Licorice Pizza”

The most laid-back of this year’s Best Picture nominees — yet somehow also the most controversial on multiple different fronts — Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza” lacks the scope and severity of the movies that typically earn him a ticket to Hollywood’s biggest night. Sure, PTA’s first coming-of-age story reveals the genre to be the ideal playground for a filmmaker whose characters have always been defined by pathological self-invention and an animalistic need for acceptance, but this sweetly chaotic San Fernando romance (of sorts) seemed destined for the cult status of “Inherent Vice” and “Punch-Drunk Love” rather than the Oscar also-ran glimmer of “There Will Be Blood” and “Phantom Thread.” It doesn’t even star Daniel Day-Lewis (as far as we know). 

And yet “Licorice Pizza” has resonated with the impact of its creator’s more austere masterpieces, in part because newcomers Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman are so indelible as the only true grown-ups in a town full of overgrown children, and in part because of how enjoyably it confronts the childishness inherent to even PTA’s most serious characters (and mostly because of Bradley Cooper’s cameo as cocaine Godzilla). “You’re never going to remember me,” Alana Kane tells Gary Valentine soon after they meet, but even just a few minutes into the movie we already know that neither of them will be possible to forget. Time isn’t an excuse or an obstacle in “Licorice Pizza,” it’s the only thing that allows these people to find each other in the first place. And despite the deceptively effervescent vibe of the movie around them, that realization proves deep enough to last forever. —DE

3. “West Side Story”

Steven Spielberg doesn’t do flop eras — “The Post” is better than people give it credit for, and “Ready Player One” is bolder than its reputation suggests — but the prospect of America’s most revered filmmaker riffing on a classic like “West Side Story” during the clouded sunset of his career might have smacked of a retreat. Then we saw what he actually did with it, and it couldn’t have been clearer that Spielberg is still in a league of his own. 

Built on a revelatory Tony Kushner script that brings Sondheim and Bernstein’s “Romeo & Juliet” update into the real world, Spielberg’s “West Side Story” honors a sacred piece of musical theater by flexing all over it with some of the most exhilarating setpieces the director has ever shot. It takes chutzpah to reimagine a ditty like “Cool” as the backdrop for a dance fight on par with anything in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and vision to make a dated song like “I Feel Pretty” seem like more than a frothy reprieve from the darkness, but Spielberg’s exuberant gift for spectacle — his sheer, palpable love for what movies can do — lends this star-crossed tale an urgency that it’s never had before. 

We could harp on the woodenness of Ansel Elgort’s performance, quibble with the decision to strip Tony and Maria of the second act song needed to galvanize their romance, and dare to suggest that Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography is a little overcranked at times, but this “West Side Story” is undoubtedly the work of a master. While it wasn’t properly rewarded at the box office, Spielberg’s film couldn’t be more deserving of its place among the Best Picture nominees. —DE

2. “Drive My Car”

It should never feel surreal when a film as extraordinary as Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” is nominated for Best Picture, but even now — at the tail-end of an Oscar season so long that no human can remember a time before it began — it’s still hard to wrap our heads around the fact that a heavy three-hour stage whisper of a drama from the decidedly uncommercial Japanese auteur behind “Happy Hour” and “Asako I & II” will be sitting alongside the likes of “West Side Story” and “Don’t Look Up” at the Academy Awards on Sunday night. What a thing. 

It would be impossible not to root for Hamaguchi’s delicate and beguiling Haruki Murakami adaptation (about a grieving theater director! Obsessed with Chekhov! Who doesn’t even want to have sex with the mysterious young woman hired to be his chaffeur!) even if it weren’t such an arresting study of the distance between people and the forces that allow them to draw closer to each other. Steered by remarkable performances from Hidetoshi Nishijima and Tôko Miura, “Drive My Car” encourages us to find our own solace in the silence beyond words, and insists that even the people we love most are liable to get lost in translation. Of course — as Nishijima’s character whould be happy to show you — that’s what subtitles are for. —DE

1. “The Power of the Dog”

Jane Campion’s ability to mine the depths of human emotion — particularly in the kind of people who have otherwise oriented themselves to not share in any way at all — is unmatched, and in her latest masterwork, she takes that concept to a variety of thrilling ends. Based on Thomas Savage’s novel of the same name, Campion turns the (very personal) story of a conflicted cowboy into a wrenching exploration of human desires. All that and an anthrax murder? Giddy up! (And, if you somehow missed said anthrax murder, please, do yourself – and Campion – the respect of watching the film again.) 

But what sets Campion’s film apart from the pack is the high level of craft on display in every facet of the feature. There’s no question why the film made off with the most Oscar noms of any film this year (12, in everything from directing to acting to other craft categories) after proving to be an awards juggernaut over the course of a protracted season. But will it win the big guns? As is often the case with great art, it really doesn’t matter – this one will endure long after we put this season out to pasture. —KE