2019 Oscars Best Picture Nominees Ranked

3. BlackKklansman

Blackkklansman 2018 Movie

BlackKklansman Review

If history was to repeat itself, BlackKklansman would not be director Spike Lee’s first Best Picture nomination, but given that it is, it’s truly one of the most hard to argue against in the entirety of the 2019 field of nominees.

The true story of a newly hired cop turned undercover investigator and his infiltration of the Klu Klux Klan seems to have hit the zeitgeist at just the right time and the content on offer in BlackKklansman freely alternates between Lee’s signature zest/comedic timing and moments of anxiety-inducing horror and pain that resonate long after the viewing experience has ended.

John David Washington, Adam Driver and Topher Grace are each fantastic in their roles, while the screenplay offers moments that bring laughs and tears in equal measure. The true selling point of BlackKklansman is, however, the direction. Spike Lee’s work moves freely between high concept art and simplistic, almost documentarian filmmaking, the visuals of the film being perhaps the most vital aspect of this film’s assembly and elevating already fantastic material to being one of the very best films of the year.

BlackKklansman would be a worthy winner of the Best Picture award in 2019, its spot at number 3 on this list coming via the slimmest of margins to the films that are to come. This is a fantastic, memorable, meaningful piece of cinema that struck just the right chord between accessible and challenging to become one of the most universally appreciated Spike Lee ventures yet and indisputably one of the very best Best Picture nominees at this year’s Oscars.


2. The Favourite

The Favourite 2018 Movie

The Favourite Review

Yorgos Lanthimos’ dark comedy period drama offers three stellar performances from three incredible female actors, has some of the most overwhelmingly beautiful set design, is paced to absolute perfection and features some of the best modern examples of silent cinema in-camera and editing techniques that has been on offer in Western cinema for a long time.

This difficult to conceive film about the three way personal and sexual relationship between real-life Queen Anne and her two closest confidantes was to live or die by how it walked the tight rope of its tone, but under the mindful ever-present guidance of its auteur director Lanthimos, managed to do so despite quite impossible odds, the outcome being something so sensationalist yet familiar to the Period Drama genre that the outcome was a classic in both regards.

Colman was the revelation that all who’d seen her television work had insisted she was capable of, while Stone and Weisz each offered their best borderline comedy performances each worthy of Supporting Actress recognition within themselves, meanwhile the script was sharp, witty and powerful, the cinematography at times breathtaking and the score among the very best the genre has produced in decades.

The Favourite began its journey as the off-kilter outsider for awards season attention but has slowly won over the minds of some of the most important people in Hollywood through its sheer class and brilliance. This is clearly one of the films of the year and only just misses out on the top spot in this list by the slimmest of margins owed to number one’s slowly accelerating twist of the heart strings…




1. Roma

Roma 2018 Movie

It’s not very often that we are gifted the opportunity for a foreign language film to be represented to quite the level that Roma is at the Academy Awards in 2019, but thanks to Alfonso Cuaron’s phenomenal efforts as screenwriter, cinematographer and director, and Netflix’s financial plunge into the Oscars campaign race, the Mexican film about a member of the help has become one of the most talked about awards season movies of the lot; not least because it is, at times, simply breathtaking.

Debates rage around whether streamed movies are movies at all, and as such the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences have maintained their stance on eligibility being earned through the exhibition of any film in at least two North American territories for at least 7 days in the year prior to their awards show. Roma was Netflix’s first real step back from their deep-rooted stance against exhibiting any of their releases, and this came in spite of the business’s ardent opposition to exhibiting Roma in France, thus causing the film to be banned from entering competition at the Cannes International Film Festival.

Yet, given its eligibility and subsequent nomination in the Best Picture category, Roma seems to be the quiet champion of a more traditional style of cinema merged with modern techniques and exhibition. In many respects Roma feels like the first true representative of the future of the film industry. This is despite how Cuaron and his team developed a film in Roma that was almost timeless in its appeal and presentation, so much of the piece being told through imagery and silence rather than more modern staples of dialogue and events. This was also so strongly reinforced by the film’s black and white colour palette which blurred all aspects of establishing an us and them or a then and now.

If we are to judge art as being instrumental to understanding the time in which it was made but also universal and timeless in terms of the story it’s telling, then Roma simply has to be the Best Picture at the 2019 Oscars.

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This is bound to be a ranking that features a lot of opposition, especially from the more hardcore fans of the lower ranking movies, so if you are one of those people (or would just like to add your two cents) please feel free to leave a comment in the comments section below!

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