The 98th Academy Awards arrive on 15 March, and the nominations reveal an industry wrestling with itself — torn between genuine artistic ambition and the gravitational pull of familiar, self‑satisfied prestige. Some films earned their place through craft and conviction. Others coasted in on baseless reputation alone.
There are years when the Oscars feel like a coronation, and years when they feel like a referendum. This year is the latter. The nominations read less like a celebration of cinema and more like a ledger of the industry’s anxieties: its hunger for relevance, its fear of risk, its reflexive deference to certain names and certain kinds of noise. And yet, buried within the usual awards‑season self‑regard, there are flashes of genuine artistic courage — films that remind you why the medium still matters.
At the centre of this tension sits Sinners, the year’s juggernaut with a record‑breaking sixteen nominations. It is the rare frontrunner that actually deserves its dominance. Ryan Coogler’s film is furious, muscular, and morally alive — a work that refuses to flatter its audience or sand down its edges. In a year defined by self‑congratulation, Sinners feels like a rebuke: a reminder that cinema can still be dangerous, still be political, still be art. Its success is heartening precisely because it wasn’t engineered for awards; it earned them.
The same cannot be said for One Battle After Another, a film so enamoured with its own cleverness it forgets to be anything else. Its thirteen nominations feel less like recognition and more like muscle memory — the Academy rewarding a certain kind of prestige object simply because it knows how to recognise one. It is a film that mistakes volume for depth, swagger for insight, and self‑importance for substance. That it has become an awards‑season darling tells you as much about the Academy as it does about the film itself.
Somewhere between these poles sits Marty Supreme, a nine‑time nominee and the year’s most unsettling character study. Josh Safdie’s film is a portrait of ambition as erosion — a man so convinced of his own exceptionalism that he hollows out everyone around him. Timothée Chalamet’s performance is a live wire, all momentum and self‑mythology, refusing to soften the character’s edges. It is the kind of nomination that feels earned, not inevitable.
The rest of the Best Picture slate — Frankenstein, Sentimental Value, Bugonia, Hamnet, The Secret Agent, Train Dreams — forms a constellation of the year’s preoccupations: grief, reinvention, political fracture, the search for meaning in a world that keeps shifting underfoot. Some of these films are muscular, some mannered, some quietly forgettable. Together, they map the contours of a film culture trying to decide what it wants to be.
The acting categories reveal similar tensions. Chalamet’s nomination is one of the few that feels genuinely necessary; Michael B. Jordan’s work in Sinners is another. But elsewhere, the Academy falls back on familiar instincts. Leonardo DiCaprio’s nomination for One Battle After Another is predictable in the way weather is predictable: a system too large and too habitual to resist its own patterns. The Best Actress field, by contrast, feels alive — Jessie Buckley and Renate Reinsve anchoring it with performances that understand the power of restraint, of emotional intelligence, of tonal precision.
Even the new Best Casting category tells a story. That Sinners, Marty Supreme, and The Secret Agent dominate here is no accident; these are films built from ensembles that feel lived‑in rather than assembled, worlds populated rather than decorated. It is a long‑overdue recognition of a craft that shapes the emotional architecture of a film more than any technical category ever could.
And then there is Documentary Feature, the category where the Academy traditionally performs its conscience. This year’s nominees — The Alabama Solution, Come See Me in the Good Light, Cutting Through Rocks, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, The Perfect Neighbor — form a chorus of political urgency. They are films about systems under strain and individuals pushed to the margins: the American justice system, authoritarian pressure, surveillance culture, the fragility of dissent. It is the most overtly political slate of the year, and perhaps the most honest.
What emerges from all this is a portrait of an industry in flux. The Oscars have always been a mirror — sometimes flattering, sometimes unkind — but this year the reflection is unusually stark. Hollywood wants to reward ambition, but it also wants to feel safe. It wants to champion new voices, but it cannot quite let go of the old ones. It wants to be relevant, but it cannot stop congratulating itself.
And yet, despite all this, there is something undeniably compelling about the contradictions. Sinners and Marty Supreme show what happens when filmmakers trust their audience and take risks. One Battle After Another shows what happens when the Academy mistakes noise for depth. The rest of the field reveals a year in which cinema stretched, stumbled, and occasionally soared.
Whatever happens on 15 March, the nominations alone tell us everything we need to know about where Hollywood is — and where it still refuses to go.
By Pat Harrington
