Oscar voters don't just vote for winners in categories; they rank the nominees for best to worst. Having seen all eight of this year's Oscar nominees for Best Picture, I present how I would complete that ballot. For the record, I think the first five are excellent, two are very good, and only #8 in my opinion does not deserve its nomination.
1. Nomadland: If most films are prose, this is poetry. Writer/Director/Producer/Editor/Magician Chloe Zhao has fashioned a fictional character into the very real disappearance of a Nevada town after a factory closes and uses it as an entry point into nomad culture in current day western United States. Most of the people in this movie are playing themselves, yet actors Frances McDormand and David Straithairn fit right in. The film created such a hold on me, and captures the beauty of the West while also capturing the pitfalls of the nomad culture. A truly unique experience.
2. The Father: There have been some good looks at dementia (most notably Still Alice), but this is in a different league. Director Florian Zeller adapted his own French play to place us in the mindset of a man losing touch with reality. The subtle production design and the lead actor, Anthony Hopkins, create a tension almost at the level of a horror film, except this is an everyday horror, not a fantasy one.
3. Promising Young Woman: Writer/Director Emerald Fennell has fashioned an angry rebuke to the "boys will boys" attitude. She and lead actress Carey Mulligan walk a tightrope with righteous anger and dark comedy. They mostly pull it off -- while the final scene is emotionally correct, it does not make sense the more you think about it. That's one slight flaw. But mostly, this is the angry indictment that rape culture deserves.
4. Minari: Writer/Director Lee Isaac Chung finds a way to get lots of little details right. This story of a family pursuing the American dream, and the strain on a marriage when that dream is not coming true. This dream is trying to grow Korean vegetables in Arkansas. But that simple description does not establish how beautiful the film is, underlined by Emile Mosseri's gorgeous score, my favorite 2020 score after Soul.
5. Sound of Metal: Has a sound design ever been so essential to a film? Director Darius Marder has delivered a film which uses its unique sound design to places us in the main character's dilemma. The rock n roll drummer played by Riz Ahmed has his hearing rapidly deteriorate and the film has many sequences where we experience that failing hearing for ourselves. It is a unique and powerful experience.
6. Judas and the Black Messiah: The story of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton is a worthy one, and I am glad it was made. My issue was the film? Hampton was 21 when he was murdered, and Bill O'Neal was 20 at the time. Daniel Kaluuya is 32, and LaKeith Stanfield is 29. While both are excellent, they are too old for these characters. For me, this is enough of a flaw to place it behind the five films above, though it is still a very good film.
7. The Trial of Chicago 7: Has an ending scene ever been more self-defeating? Writer-Director Aaron Sorkin's script, as usual for him, is packed with great dialogue. I was already quite familiar of the trial of leaders of protests during the 1968 Democratic Convention is entertaining during its runtime. But the final scene is invented, and is tonally so wrong that it undermines the credibility of the entire film. So while I enjoy most of this film, and have re-watched it a couple of times, that last scene is a blemish that places it under all but one of the other nominees. Also, Sacha Baron Cohen is 15 years older than the man he plays, Abbie Hoffman, and fails to capture his spirit. He should not have been nominated for this performance. (I would have nominated Mark Rylance instead.)
8. Mank: This is the most disappointing film of the year. It was an exciting project: A biography of Herman Mankiewicz, who wrote Citizen Kane, directed by David Fincher, with Gary Oldman as the title character. Watching the film felt like homework. The hoped for clashes with Orson Welles over Citizen Kane are relegated to the last 15 minutes of the movie. The rest of the movie concerns blah blah blah Louis B Meyer something something William Randolph Hearst and I did not care. This is so inside baseball that it flew past me as a movie buff. The film brightens up in the scenes with Amanda Seyfried, who is very good as Hearst's mistress. This is a David Fincher film, so the technical credits are top notch and deserve most of its nominations. But too often, I was reminded of Denis Leary's six sentence recap of The Doors (1991): "I'm drunk. I'm nobody. I'm drunk. I'm famous. I'm drunk. I'm dead." Except Mank is never nobody in this film, he never becomes truly famous, and he doesn't die at the end. That leaves Mank as: "I'm drunk. I'm drunk. I'm drunk." And I'm bored.
