2025 Oscars: Ranking This Year’s Best Picture Nominees (Based on How Good They Actually Are)

The 2025 Oscars Nominations have been announced, and as usual, there is a lot of hot debate about the nominees that were chosen – or not chosen. Right up front: there won’t be a lot of geek culture interest in this year’s Academy Awards nominees for Best Picture – Deadpool & Wolverine and Nosferatu were two genre movie favorites fans thought could make the cut, but didn’t, leaving Dune: Part Two, Wicked, and (to a lesser extent) The Substance to represent for prestige films that were also big genre crowd-pleasers.

So how about the other seven films now contending for the Best Picture Oscar? As usual, the nomination will be the biggest marketing boost for many of these movies, and viewers are already getting curious about which films are worth watching before the Academy Awards ceremony takes place on March 2nd.

Below, you’ll find a list of the 10 Best Picture nominees for 2025, ranked in order of their viewing worthiness (at least for fans like us).

10. I’m Still Here

The quintessential Oscar-bait movie: a performer-driven biopic drama about overcoming hardship and tragedy, led by one of Brazil’s greatest actresses, Fernanda Torres (who has already won a Golden Globe for the film). Torres plays Eunice Paiva, the wife of Brazilian congressman Rubens Paiva, who vanished in 1971 after being openly critical of the nation’s military dictatorship. Eunice was forced to search for the truth about her husband’s disappearance for decades, making many personal sacrifices along the way. I’m Still Here is Hollywood’s long overdue celebration of an international star – but not exactly a “fun” or “thrilling” cinematic viewing experience by any stretch.

9. The Brutalist

Another quintessential Oscar-bait film, The Brutalist, has many instances of beautiful cinematic imagery; it’s also 3 hours and 34 minutes long and has some pretty weird turns to it. Writer/director Brady Corbert already took home the Golden Globe for “Best Motion Picture, Drama” and now has 10 Oscar nominations to boast about. And yet, The Brutalist seems like this year’s big awards season darling that few people will actually watch. And if you do watch it, you’ll likely be pausing often.

The film follows a Hungarian-Jewish architect named László (Adrien Brody) who emigrates to Philadelphia after WWII and tries to find work so that he can sponsor his wife (Felicity Jones) and niece to follow, after being separated from them in the concentration camps. László gets a miracle opportunity when his architectural designs find a dedicated sponsor in the form of snobbish and ill-tempered industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Peace). While László and Harrison initially form bonds of friendship and professional respect, the differences in their cultural realities soon start creating serious cracks in the foundation of their relationship.

8. Emilia Pérez

The biggest surprise of the 2025 Oscars was Emilia Pérez leading the pack with 13 nominations. The film is a Spanish-language musical about a Mexican drug cartel boss who solicits an underappreciated lawyer’s help in faking his death so that he can transition into a woman and start a new life. Even with a geek culture icon like Zoe Saldana starring, and pop star Selena Gomez earning acclaim for her performance, Emilia Pérez is one of the more eccentric films to earn this level of Oscars acclaim. But unless you love musicals that also have subtitles, it’s probably not your cup of tea.

7. A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unkown doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to biopics, but that’s alright. The film features many stars that geeks know and love, like Timothée Chalamet (Dune), Edward Norton (The Incredible Hulk), Boyd Holbrook (Logan, The Predator), P.J. Byrne (The Boys), and others. With Logan‘s James Mangold at the helm, A Complete Uknown is as perfectly fine a rock star biopic as Mangold’s Johnny Cash film Walk the Line was.

6. Nickel Boys

RaMell Ross’s movie adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel plays like a Terrence Malick film if it was actually a racial nightmare. Told from the 1st-person perspective of two black boys living at a reform school in 1960s Florida, the film exposes a dark corner of actual American history: Florida’s infamous “Dozier School for Boys,” which for decades allowed serious abuses to be committed against students (particularly black students), including dozens of murders and mass burials.

Watching two young souls experience all of that firsthand is darkly mesmerizing and deeply heartbreaking, but still (somehow) beautifully poignant in its view of life and friendship. It’s also bubbling with underlying tensions and dangers in virtually every scene or conversation, so Steele yourself for that immersive reality check about racial injustice and generational trauma.

[RELATED: How to Watch All 10 Oscars Best Picture Nominees]

5. Conclave

This year’s big Oscars ensemble film is Conclave, a movie that brings together some of acting’s biggest veteran talents (Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini) and lets them cook. Based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris, the story follows a Cardinal (Fiennes) who is unexpectedly thrust into the pivotal role of leading a conclave of priests in choosing the next pope – only to find himself in a whirlwind of competing socio-political agendas and biases, while trying to spiritually weigh a choice that will define the church for decades.

It’s the kind of grown-up cinematic work you think of being at the Academy Awards, full of deep ruminations on spirituality, morality, and power structures in the modern world. However, it also requires a serious mind to engage with and is an easy film for many to write off as “boring” for its lack of action – even though every scene of verbal chess is dripping with tension and subtext, conveyed by top thespians.

4. Anora

Anora is this year’s Uncut Gems: a modern NYC drama about a complex but charismatic protagonist. Sean Baker (The Florida Project) is no stranger to the slightly surrealist odyssey of the American hustle-n-grind, and Mikey Madison (Scream 5) is a tour de force as the titular Anora – a stripper/escort who takes a wild (but naive) shot at getting her fairytale ending after she meets the wealthy playboy son of a Russian oligarch. This film is many things, but “boring” is never one of them. The biggest “must-see” recommendation out of the lesser-known films on this list.

3. The Substance

Horror made it into the 2025 Oscars Best Picture race thanks to The Substance, which has already brought home a Golden Globe for Demi Moore’s performance in the film. The Substance is bitingly witty with its satirical subtext, but also an unironic example of Hollywood’s navel-gazing obsessions. Thanks to director Coralie Fargeat’s freakishly kinetic directorial style, the unique story, a booming soundtrack, and some top-tier performances from Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid, The Substance is a Best Picture nominee that lives up to the hype and raises its genre.

2. Wicked

One of the two crowd-pleaser favorites vying for Best Picture this year, Wicked has rightfully flown higher than being just a film to become a pop culture phenomenon. The performances of Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba) and Ariana Grande (Galinda) are the beating heart of the film, but a supporting cast with the likes of Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Yeoh, a killer songbook, and new directorial heights being reached by Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians), kill any further doubt about whether this movie adaptation can stand alongside the Broadway classic. However, as you can see below, Wicked‘s greatest heights may be achieved with the upcoming sequel…

1. Dune: Part Two

There are very few films that still make theatergoers of all ages and backgrounds believe in movie magic – but Dune: Part Two is definitely one of them. Director Denis Villeneuve got a very mixed reaction from audiences after the release of the first Dune movie – Part Two not only finished the story of Frank Herbert’s Dune novel on a stronger note, but it had many viewers feeling like it was a completely different (and far better) film than the first part.

Dune 2 has managed to secure five Oscar nominations despite being released all the way back in March of 2024. That’s more than enough proof of the lasting impression the sequel has made on both audiences and cinema. It’s everything that a prestige-level blockbuster should be and a sci-fi film that may not be surpassed in quality and resonance for quite some time.

Most of the Academy Awards Best Picture nominee films can currently be streamed online through various services. The awards ceremony will air on Sunday, March 2nd on ABC at 7pm EST.