Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decision to turn its back on the arts and sciences aspect of its organization, via its most desperate attempts yet to win back viewers that will never come back to the Oscar broadcast, is that 2021 actually has the potential for a first-rate Oscar show. The breadth of nominated films is wide—a full seven of my Top 10 films and five of my Bottom 10 films got nominated. Also, many of the categories are genuinely difficult to predict—Best Actress bets have been all over the map due to multiple factors, but perhaps mostly because four of the five nominated performances actually are four of the best performances of the year. Most of all 2021 has been the easiest year for anyone inclined to watch all of the nominated films to easily see them. All the features and shorts were accessible via wide theatrical releases, streamers, or art house best-of-the-year revivals.

Of the 53 nominated films, I only skipped one: this year’s box-office champ, Spider-Man: No Way Home. I just can’t drag myself to a superhero movie unless there’s a compelling reason to think there might, maybe, possibly be something different or special about it. In this case, the notable aspect was that it got all the actors who have played Spiderman over the last twenty years on screen together in the same movie. Since I have only seen two of the fifteen (!) films made about this character since 2002, I didn’t have much investment in this important cinematic event.

That the year’s highest-grossing movie didn’t score a Best Picture nomination infuriated people who mostly hate the Oscars anyway, but aside from the fact that there is still one aspect of cinema culture that the MCU hasn’t taken over, this year’s nominations have something for pretty much everyone. There is always so much to love and hate about the Oscars—but this year, the collective hate of movie lovers is aimed squarely at the show’s producers for proving once and for all that the Academy values the ratings of a TV show more than the cinematic crafts it purports to champion.

I was glad, though, that the extended awards season enabled me to see all (but one) of the nominated films at least once. This was also one of those rare years when my favorite movie could conceivably win Best Picture, though I think it’s pretty unlikely.

So here’s my admittedly snarky summation of the films Oscar has chosen to highlight. Of course, ranking narrative features, documentaries, and shorts is a little like comparing apples to oranges to grapes, but it's still an enjoyable exercise to look back over a year and see where things line up. Here are my rankings from the bottom of the barrel to the cherry on the top, with links to my Twitter capsule or full reviews of each feature film.

#52. Being the Ricardos – 3 nominations
This year’s most undeserving nominations happen to go to the film I consider the year’s worst picture. Only Aaron Sorkin could render such a joyless behind-the-scenes drama about I Love Lucy. Usually an Oscar darling, Sorkin was rightfully passed over in the directing and writing categories for his didactic yet dumb collection of Wikipedia factoids about the lives of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Kidman and Bardem getting nominated for roles in which they were both so woefully miscast proves that this body still rewards the art of a persuasive Oscar campaign. J.K. Simmons is a bit more deserving for making the cantankerous Bill Frawley into a lovable curmudgeon, but he's hard to root for because the role is written with even more than the usual heaps of Sorkin smugness and hero worship for old white guys who are unafraid to "tell it like it is," even when it isn't.


#51. The Long Goodbye – 1 nomination
Riz Ahmed produced, wrote and stars in this short film made in conjunction with his concept album of the same name. It depicts a South Asian family in London getting brutalized by an Islamaphobic, state-sponsored strike force. Ultimately, it is a disturbing but muddled and ineffective mash-up of a harrowingly brutal PSA and a slam poetry video.

#50. The Windshield Wiper - 1 nomination
2021 was not a stellar year for animated shorts (nor animated features, for that matter). The far-from-groundbreaking nature of the ani-shorts is typified by this collection of rotoscoped vignettes that feels like a discarded entry from one of Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Animation Festivals from back in the ‘90s.

#49. The Mitchells vs the Machines – 1 nomination
The favorite for Best Animated Feature, at least with everyone I know, looked to me like pretty much every other animated family film for the ADHD set, except this movie pretends it has something to significant say about contemporary society's reliance on technology when it, in fact, embraces the very thing it's supposedly warning us about.


#48. Free Guy – 1 nomination
Tonally, a live-action version of The Mitchells vs. the Machines, without the pretense that it has anything valuable to say about contemporary culture—which is actually too bad because its high-concept premise could have drawn some fascinating parallels to the need for modern labor organizing. Instead, it’s basically a metaphor for securing intellectual property.


#47. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings – 1 nomination
This was the nominated Marvel movie I did see, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what makes the interchangeable visual effects in one of these CGI fests better than another.


#46. Affairs of the Art - 1 nomination
As I mentioned, the pickin's must have been pretty slim this year for the Animated Shorts category, hence the inclusion of one of the films by animator Joanna Quinn about a Welsh factory worker and housewife named Beryl. In this episode, Beryl muses on her obsession with art. The film becomes tedious at about minute 6 of its 16-minute running time.


#45. Tick, Tick... Boom! – 2 nominations
When it comes to cinematic celebrations of bright young mediocrities at the cusp of their artistic awakening, 2021 was a banner year. We were treated to The Hand of God, The Souvenir: Part 2, Last Night in Soho, The Tender Bar, and this little gem. But while this was one of my least favorite pictures of the year, I don’t begrudge either of its nominations. The editing by Andrew Weisblum and Myron I. Kerstein is lively and even occasionally inventive, and Andrew Garfield fully commits to every aspect of his performance. That I find Jonathan Larson even more insufferable now than I did before seeing the movie is a credit to Garfield, and I don’t mean that as a backhanded compliment. He really delivers in this performance.


#44. Nightmare Alley – 4 nominations
I consider Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel to be the weakest of the 10 Best Picture nominees. Yet ironically, if del Toro and Kim Morgan had gotten a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay I would have said it was well deserved. I’ve read the book, and I think they do a fine job of adapting it into a screenplay. However, the resulting film is so artificially rendered in terms of what it is nominated for—cinematography, production design, and costumes—that I was never able to enter the world their screenplay describes. Every frame of this movie feels utterly artificial. Perhaps that’s because the filmmakers never decided if they wanted to make it in black and white or color, so they opted to try for both. More than any picture I’ve seen in a long time, I felt like I was watching movie stars playing dress-up, not actors embodying characters.


#43. BoxBallet - 1 nomination
An impressionistic animated short from Russia about a boxer and a ballet dancer that captures the unique physicality of each. The characters are pretty inconsistent from scene to scene, I guess that's intentional (?).


#42. Cyrano – 1 nomination
While they didn’t all make big money and certainly weren’t all great films, 2021 was quietly the comeback year for movie musicals that the Academy has been predicting (or maybe just wishing for) since 2002. Along with the nominated West Side Story, Tick, Tick... Boom!, and Encanto, we got Annette, In the Heights, Dear Evan Hanson, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, and, of course, Cinderella (a possible winner of Oscar’s new super exciting fan-favorite Twitter contest!!!!!). The last of these musicals to be released in theaters was this re-telling of Cyrano de Bergerac. Far too much of a confused hodgepodge of styles and tones to get nominations for songs, music, acting, editing, or directing, but the costumes are certainly… noticeable.

#41. Cruella – 2 nominations
Speaking of noticeable costumes, here’s a movie that—while I can’t say I liked it much—richly deserves its nominations for Best Costume Design and Best Makeup and Hairstyling. It’s a story about a villainous fashion designer, so it had better be a showcase for couture that makes a statement. In this year’s other film about a fashion designer, Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, the main character is viewed as a genius designer by her professor when she unveils a generic ‘60s era dress that she could have bought for $25 at a thrift store before showing up to class. Such is certainly not the case with the extreme Cruella.


#40. Luca – 1 nomination
Disney released a lot of sub-par animated features this year (and last year). This saccharine, heavy-handed plea for tolerance was better than the previous year’s lacklustre Onward, but only slightly. Worth seeing for its rendering of the Italian Riviera.


#39. Four Good Days – 1 nomination
Maybe thirteen will be a lucky number for hit-maker Diane Warren. The songwriter has racked up more nominations without a win than almost anyone in Oscar history, but her song "Somehow You Do" is as generic and forgettable as this mother-daughter addiction drama starring fellow still winless multi-nominee Glenn Close.


#38. Audible - 1 nomination
This short doc about the football team at the Maryland School for the Deaf features a few potentially compelling characters, but it's shot and edited in an aggressively manipulative style that feels like a reality TV show combined with a badly clichéd sports movie.  


#37. Don't Look Up – 4 nominations
Adam McKay’s lame, condescending doomsday farce certainly sparked a lot of debate in 2021. The intelligent arguments it engendered amounted to, “You’re an idiot if you like this movie,” vs “You’re an idiot if you don’t like this movie!” Spectacularly unworthy of its Best Picture and Original Screenplay nominations, and the editing and score are nothing to write home about either.


#36. Coming 2 America - 1 nomination
One of many 30-years-later sequels, this is a nostalgia exercise in which even the filmmakers seem like they would rather have just watched the original movie again. But it's kinda fun, and the nominated makeup and hairstyling is every bit as impressive as it was in the 1988 picture.


#35. Robin Robin - 1 nomination
It wouldn’t be the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts without one from Aardman, the British studio that gave us Creature Comforts and Wallace and Gromit. In a year where most of the films in this category are not safe for kids, this much too long and much too cute Holiday short about a bird raised by a family of mice will be hard to beat.


#34. When We Were Bullies - 1 nomination
This oddly effective personal documentary short about a filmmaker trying to recreate a school bullying incident from his childhood doesn’t get too deep into the question of why kids are cruel to each other, yet I was surprised how caught up I got in a style of documentary that usually turns me off.


#33. Three Songs for Benazir -1 nomination
One of several short documentaries about life in Afghanistan by Elizabeth and Gulistan Mirzaei. This one centers on a young, married, uneducated father in Kabul who decides to join the Afghan army despite his family's disapproval. It spans too much time for such a short film and it ends right when it seems like it's about to get really interesting, which makes it feel like a promo for a longer film more than a great short film.

#32. Lead Me Home - 1 nomination
The documentary short proves to be far too limiting a format to chronicle the massive homeless problem in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles and explore the societal reasons that efforts to address the issue don’t get implemented.


#31. Bestia - 1 nomination
A provocative stop-motion short from Chile about a real-life functionary who tortured women for the Pinochet regime is notable for utilising the form to tell a story that might be too horrific to explore in a live-action short.
 

#30. On My Mind - 1 nomination
This short from Denmark about a guy at a bar who really, really needs to record a karaoke version of the Willie Nelson song “Always on My Mind” intrigues and holds our interest but doesn’t quite land with the power it thinks it does.


#29. Dune – 10 nominations
Alfred Hitchcock supposedly once said that the greatest special effect in cinema is a close-up of an actor's face. But I think that's only the case when a screenwriter (no matter if working with an original idea or adapting pre-existing material) builds a character and situation around it. Otherwise, it's just... a close-up of an actor's face. Dune is many things, but it is predominantly a collection of close-ups of actors' faces. It certainly earns its Best Sound nomination. But no picture that’s just half a picture should ever be considered the year’s Best Picture.


#28. The Hand of God – 1 nomination
Writer/director Paolo Sorrentino won the equivalent of the Best International Feature Oscar in 2014 for his emotionally powerful The Great Beauty, about an aging Italian writer. Now he’s got another chance with this semi-autobiographical film about the adolescence of a future Italian filmmaker. But this film feels bereft of emotion unless mild annoyance counts.


#27. Flee – 3 nominations
History-making for scoring Oscar noms for Best Documentary, Best Animated Feature, and Best International Film, this moving, powerful story is told in a style that I found distinctly unmoving and not nearly as powerful as it might have been in another medium. I know I’m in the minority here, but I found the animation flat and unengaging.


#26. The Power of the Dog – 12 nominations
Another of 2021’s most acclaimed pictures that I found lacking is Jane Campion’s gothic western—the year’s most-nominated film. I think it will also take home the most awards of the night, including Best Picture and Director. But despite my lack of enthusiasm for the movie. I would be thrilled to see Kirsten Dunst win Best Supporting Actress for imbuing an underwritten, two-dimensional character with levels of depth and nuance that enthralled me whenever she was on screen. I would also not begrudge Cumberbatch his Best Actor nomination, nor Jonny Greenwood the nom for his score—though I think it’s his superior work in Spencer that should have been recognized.


#25. Encanto - 3 nominations
Another less-than-stellar Disney animated picture that looks great but moves too fast for us to appreciate the imagery. This one does have some catchy tunes, though the nominated song “Dos Oruguitas,” is hardly its best number.


#24. The Dress - 1 nomination
This short follows a lonely, chain-smoking Polish little person who works as a maid at a rundown hotel and wants more than the life she’s ended up with. The Academy seems to love shorts that turn dark and violent unexpectedly, but I would like to think this got its nomination because the lead, Anna Dzieduszycka, is such a captivating screen presence.

#23. Belfast - 7 nominations
Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film was considered a lock for a Best Picture nomination and the film to beat before it even hit theaters, which probably helped sink its chances after it didn’t turn out to be as great as the hype. The actors are all lovely, but I can’t say any deserve nominations.  Van Morrison’s "Down to Joy" strikes the perfect nostalgic tone, but the other nominations are a real stretch… Best Sound? Maybe Cleanest Sound? Nominations like this make me wonder if sound editors make their picks based on how well they can hear individual FX tracks when they watch a movie.


#22. House of Gucci – 1 nomination
The shamelessly gaudy, over-the-top film of 2021 deserves its nomination for Best Makeup and Hairstyling every bit as much as Cruella, and for the same reasons. But House of Gucci is an even more over-the-top and more fun movie!


#21. Writing With Fire - 1 nomination
The first Indian film nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature tells the story of the only news agency in India run by Dalit women as they make the shift to digital media from 14 years of print. These journalists from an oppressed caste, risking everything to speak truth to power, are certainly inspiring, but the film is unwieldy and unfocused. Maybe the uneven nature of the editing suits the subject?


#20. CODA - 3 nominations
The shamelessly feel-good film of 2021 somehow became the front-runner in most Oscar pools by the day of the show. If it wins, it will be the first time a Best Picture winner has received so few nominations, with none in technical categories. In a year when many of the important craft awards were moved off of the live broadcast, this film winning would be the ultimate middle finger to the Arts and Sciences aspect of the Oscars. It would, however, be a satisfying irony in a year when the Academy is so desperately trying to win back a mass audience if the top prize went to a film that is only available on a streaming platform the vast majority of Americans do not subscribe to. This is a perfectly enjoyable two and a half star picture. It’s nowhere near worthy of the top honor. Nominating writer/director Sian Heder for Best Adapted Screenplay and Troy Kotsur for Best Supporting Actor provides the type of fresh red carpet excitement that comes when a talented new voice and new face join the Oscar Club, but it doesn't change the fact that this is both an overwritten and overacted movie.


#19. Spencer - 1 nomination
While I didn’t fall head-over-heels for Pablo Larraín and Steven Knight’s hybrid of The Queen and The Shinning, Kristen Stewart’s performance as Princess Dianna is richly deserving of a nomination. I also think Timothy Spall would have been a worthy Supporting Actor nomination and Jonny Greenwood’s score is without a doubt one of the year’s best.


#18. Raya and the Last Dragon – 1 nomination
The best of the crowded slate of recent sub-par Disney animated fare, but probably not one we’ll be talking about much in the decades to come.


#17. Ascension - 1 nomination
This exploration of working life as experienced at various social classes in contemporary China is a compelling, impressionistic documentary that recalls films like Koyaanisqatsi as well as the observational style of Fred Wiseman, though it isn’t quite in the same league with those works.


#16. The Eyes of Tammy Faye - 2 nominations
A surprisingly strong docudrama with a wonderfully nuanced central performance from Jessica Chastain that recalls John Hurt’s turn as The Elephant Man in that it invites the viewer to see past the Oscar-nominated make-up and experience the feelings of the person inside. A most worthy Best Actress nomination.


#15. No Time to Die - 3 nominations
2021’s most long-delayed and eagerly anticipated blockbuster didn’t exactly set the world on fire and neither did its nominated visual effects or sound, which were fine for flash and bang. Billie Eilish’s title song was a significant hit but I felt pretty lukewarm about it as I did with everything in this movie. Still, a James Bond movie is like a pizza—even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.


#14. Ala Kachuu - Take and Run - 1 nomination
A Kyrgyz girl with dreams of going to college is kidnapped and forced to marry a man she's never met, all with her family’s blessing. Director Maria Brendle’s issue-awareness short avoids the blunt sermonizing of Riz Ahmed’s The Long Goodbye in favor of making its points via the medium of cinematic storytelling. Alina Turdumamatova's first-rate lead performance grounds this disturbing and emotional movie about “bride kidnapping." The straightforward narrative is edifying without ever feeling didactic nor melodramatic.

#13. Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom - 1 nomination
Local Hero meets Himalaya in Bhutan's first nomination for Best International Film. It gives us the window on a cultural subset that can often be the raison d'etre of this category. Sentimental and a little schmaltzy, for sure, but also beautiful and sweet.


#12. The Queen of Basketball - 1 nomination
This entry in the New York Times’ Op-Docs series tells the story of Lusia Harris, the first woman ever drafted by an NBA team and a groundbreaking figure in women’s basketball history. Told entirely via a joyful interview with Harris mixed with archival footage of her amazing but little known career, it is everything a great short documentary profile should be.


#11. King Richard - 6 nominations
Speaking of great sports profiles, Will Smith is one of the few winners that's easy to predict this year. This film is the most traditional Oscar film of the year but it's worthy of all its nominations in part because it subverts its Oscar-bait tropes while still delivering exactly what the Academy loves, and what viewers want from both a sports movie and a biopic.


#10. Licorice Pizza - 3 nominations
Much like CODA, if this emotion-stroking picture with only 3 nominations, none of them in craft categories, wins Best Picture it will be an unprecedented upset. But I don’t think anyone believes that this winsome but undeniably slight effort from Best Director and Best Original Screenplay nominee Paul Thomas Anderson has a chance at winning in any of its categories. I would have loved to see Alana Haim in the Best Actress category instead of Nicole Kidman, but it is not the kind of role or performance that the Academy goes for.


#9. Please Hold  – 1 nomination
The year’s best nominated short imagines a not-too-distant future where an automated criminal justice system sends drones to arrest people on the street, runs prisons like self-serve grocery store checkouts, and makes money directly off of those it incarcerates. What’s most frightening is that it barely feels like speculative fiction or heightened reality. What’s most surprising is that it’s a dark comedy that earns some hard laughs with its bleak subject.


#8. The Tragedy of Macbeth - 3 nominations
This striking Shakespeare adaptation uses first-rate screen craft, such as its nominated production design and cinematography, to create a spare, theatrical environment where The Bard’s text can take center stage and the cast, headed by Best Actor nominee Denzel Washington, can hold forth. I would have loved to see Kathryn Hunter score a nomination as all the witches!


#7. Summer of Soul – 1 nomination
With the most recent Academy rules for selecting the Best Documentary Feature, the most popular doc usually takes the prize, especially if it’s a music doc. But that would be fine with me as Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s début feature is one of the year’s ten best pictures and, despite being about an event that took place fifty years ago, it’s about as apt a film for 2021 as I can think of.


#6. The Worst Person in the World - 2 nominations
It’s rare when the Academy nominates a foreign language picture in the Best Original Screenplay category, but since Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt wrote, in my opinion, the year’s best original screenplay, it’s also exciting. Renate Reinsve should certainly have the 5th Best Actress slot that Kidman is occupying. 


#5. The Lost Daughter - 3 nominations
This refreshingly cinematic novel adaptation lets the internal lives of the characters remain internal. Maggie Gyllenhaal gives her actors the space to convey her films’ narrative and themes without relying on typical book-to-film conventions. Thus making this one of the year’s best-adapted screenplays and enabling the cast to deliver excellent, sometimes wordless performances. I think this is the first time we’ve had two actors nominated for playing the same character in the same film, and Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley deserve their Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress nods. Dakota Johnson belongs in Supporting Actress as well.

#4. Attica - 1 nomination
The year’s best documentary both for its style and subject. Utilizes uses old-fashioned documentary techniques to explore a story that is as old as our country.


#3. Drive My Car - 4 nominations
This three-hour Japanese meditation on grief and loss is the most unlikely Best Picture nomination of the past thirty years. I get how a timely genre picture like Parasite gets nominated and even wins, but a slow, non-English drama focused mostly on driving in a car and reading a play? It must have benefited from coming out and getting great reviews right at the time Academy members were filling out their ballots. But how wonderful that this fantastic movie got nominated not just for Best International Film, but for Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay as well.


#2. Parallel Mothers - 2 nominations
Pedro Almodóvar is no stranger to the Academy; his films have been nominated many times in many categories. But while his latest, my second favorite movie of the year, didn’t score a nomination for the writer/director it did nab the honor for its most worthy participant, and I think she has a good shot at winning! Penélope Cruz has given us so many wonderful performances, many in films by this director. But for my money, this is the very best work she’s ever done. Alberto Iglesias, another frequent Almodóvar collaborator, is also nominated for his excellent score.

#1. West Side Story - 7 nominations
Considering how stupid I found the very idea of Steven Spielberg making another movie of this iconic musical, I’m astounded that it ended up as my favorite film of the year. But the master of nearly every genre he tries his hand at delivers a film that’s entirely different yet every bit as inspiring and exquisitely crafted as the original 70mm extravaganza helmed by Robert Wise sixty years ago. This version was a box-office failure for perhaps understandable reasons—a tragedy coming out during a really tough year, an old fashioned musical that doesn’t exactly appeal to the youth market, a remake of a beloved classic most people (myself included) were dubious of, and many other elements that made for unreceptive audiences. But the level of craft on display in this picture blows away everything else I saw this year. All its nominations are more than worthy, especially Spielberg for directing, Janusz Kamiński for cinematography, and Ariana DeBose for supporting actress. I would have nominated Tony Kushner for his adapted screenplay as well, the subtleties of his alterations might have made his contribution seem minimal but just the opposite is true.