Best Picture thoughts, 2025 edition

Ten years ago, I started a tradition of writing up my thoughts about the Best Picture Oscar nominees; this year, for the first time, I had already seen all ten nominees by the time they were announced! This was certainly a surprise, because I hadn't yet seen No Other Choice and I had fully expected it to get a nomination, but no dice for that. The nomination ceremony was almost two months ago, and I probably should have written these up back then, but I was busy finishing The MIT Mystery Hunt and then after that I got busy finishing my Oscars Death Race (and a few other races). But the awards ceremony is tomorrow so time is getting short!

According to tradition, these are in the order that I saw them:

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(See also last year's thoughts.)

Oscar 2025 picks

For the past five years, I've seen every single Oscar-nominated film before the Academy Awards ceremony. This is my third year officially competing in the Oscars Death Race, but sadly this was my worst showing: I saw the 50th film on March 5th, putting me in 176th place on Death Race Tracking. (171st place on Oscars Death Race, which I guess has a slightly different set of users.) I suspect this is partly because there are a lot more racers than last year, but also Sirāt didn't arrive in local theaters until that week, and I prefer not to pirate feature films (I did get ahold of one of the doc shorts because I had seen all the others streaming and the doc shorts collection didn't have any convenient showings). Anyway, the goal is just to finish, and I shouldn't care much about leaderboard placement. Right??

So yeah, here is my annual post about what I would have voted for on my Oscar ballot, if I had been eligible to vote in every branch of the Academy. In other words, these are not my predictions (though I also did those on the ESPN Oscars Pick'em site). A number in parentheses is my rating for that movie (our of 10). Sorry, no time left to write up more thoughts other than the rankings! Enjoy the awards ceremony!

Best Picture

1. Train Dreams (8)
2. Bugonia (8)
3. Sinners (7)
4. The Secret Agent (7)
5. F1 (7)
6. Marty Supreme (6)
7. Hamnet (6)
8. Sentimental Value (6)
9. One Battle After Another (6)
10. Frankenstein (6)

See my Best Picture thoughts.

Best Director

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