All 54 Oscar-Nominated Movies (and Shorts), Ranked

All 54 Oscar-Nominated Movies (and Shorts), Ranked,Some 2023 Academy Award nominees are great, some are good, and some are genuinely terrible. Cue the montage music, because we’re starting from the bottom, with The Whale.

All 54 Oscar-Nominated Movies (and Shorts), Ranked

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And so we meet at the end of a long battle. The 2022-23 Academy Awards season is nearly at its finish line, though Oscar night is sure to provide its share of surprises. But before we get to the winners, let’s slow down and appreciate the ballot in all its eccentricity. The old adage that it’s an honor just to be nominated is actually true. The trophies are nice and the speeches are memorable, but the value in the Oscars comes from the full scope of its recognition. This year, 54 films were nominated for at least one Academy Award: comedies, dramas, quite a few action blockbusters, biopics, animated features, documentaries, short films of every stripe, one anthology movie, and one peek into the madness of the multiverse. While you don’t get a sense of everything that was worth watching in 2022 from the Oscar ballot, it’s honestly a pretty good place to start. Not all 54 movies are great films. (The Oscar voters’ track record is never that good.) Instead, some are great, some are good, and a small handful are genuinely terrible. Cue the montage music; we’re starting from the bottom.

54. The Whale

Photo: A24

Directed by: Charlotte Wells
Nominations: (1) Best Actor

There’s a temptation to reduce writer-director Charlotte Wells’s debut feature to how much it made you cry and when. (“So much” and “when ‘Under Pressure’ started.”) But there’s so much more to Aftersun than the crying, or at least so much more that goes into getting viewers to the place where they’re losing all composure. Wells plays with memory and perception so well in this story of a young girl (Frankie Corio) on holiday with her single dad (a deeply deserving Oscar nominee Paul Mescal). We’re also looking backward on these events from the perspective of the grown-up girl who’s trying to piece together a narrative about her dad from these memories that makes some sense. There’s a lot that hangs in the air in Aftersun, from dread to regret to heady pre-adolescent emotions to the hints of something darker lurking around Mescal’s character. It’s all so delicately realized as the story builds questions on top of questions, all while drawing you into a complicated but clearly loving father-daughter story. The catharsis at the end is far from cheap heartstring-tugging but a full-body realization of the big-picture story that’s been playing out this whole time. It’s a masterpiece of intimacy, and I cried my face off.

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