Best Pictures #128: My Pick for Best Picture of 2025

by A.J.

 Best Pictures #128: My Pick for Best Picture of 2025

The 98th Academy Awards

The 98th Academy Awards ceremony for films released in 2025 was held on March 15th, 2026. Conan O'Brien once again hosted, bringing his lively persona and humor to the ceremony; all of the non-Conan related comedy, such as forced banter between presenters, fell flat. Sound problems seemed to persist throughout the ceremony, most notably during Barbara Streisand's spoken tribute to the late, great Robert Redford; when it was time for her to sing, Barbara had a different microphone. 

Before the ceremony even began this was already a historic Academy Awards with Sinners earning the most nominations of any film in Academy history. This indeed did turn out to be a historic Academy Awards ceremony for a few different reasons. The frontrunner for Original Song, Golden from K-Pop Demon Hunters, won to no one's surprise; but it became the first K-Pop song to win an Academy Award. Sinners won only 4 of its 16 nominations, but one of them was for Autumn Durald Arkapaw for Cinematography, making her the first woman to win that category. Sinners also won Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan, Original Screenplay for Ryan Coogler, and Original Score for Ludwig Göransson. A rare tie, only the 7th in the 98years, in the Live Action Short category, between The Singers and Two People Exchanging Saliva, shook things up, and no doubt helped certain Oscar pools. Amy Madigan now holds the record for longest gap between nominations with 40 years passing between her Supporting Actress nomination for Twice in a Lifetime and her second nomination for the horror movie Weapons. Thankfully the wait was worth it and she took home the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. 

Overall the class of nominees for 2025 turned out to be eclectic group. Two foreign language movies, The Secret Agent form Brazil and Sentimental Value from Norway) were nominated for both Best Picture and Best International Feature, making that category a bit tricky to predict. Ultimately, Sentimental Value took home to Norway the Best International Feature Oscar. The Academy's aversion to horror is well known so it is very satisfying that two horror films, Frankenstein and Sinners were included in the Best Picture nominees. F1, a big budget crowd pleaser and Train Dreams, a small, thoughtful personal drama, both earned recognition. Marty Supreme, about a table tennis hustler in the 1950's, and Hamnet, about Anne Hathaway/Shakespeare, are both period dramas inspired by fictionalized representations of real people and were included as well. Only the Academy's love of Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos explain Bugonia's inclusion in the Best Picture nominees. Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another ended up being the big winner of the night, taking home 6 Oscars, including the big award, Best Picture. 

My Pick for Best Picture of 2025: One Battle After Another

It's no secret that I am a fan of writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson; I have been since I saw Magnolia in theaters when I was 14. He has long been on the Academy's radar, earning nominations, without winning, since 1997's Boogie Nights, so his wins for Best Adapted Screenplay, Director, and Best Picture, are, on one hand, a long time coming. On the other, One Battle After Another is a singular cinematic achievement. Anderson is such a talented and skilled filmmaker that any one of his films ranks among the best of its respective year. No matter the subject matter or the setting, his films have the sprawling scope and feel of an epic (with Hard Eight and Punch Drunk Love being the still excellent exceptions). The characters in his movies are allowed complexities and contradictions and unspoken motivations, allowing for captivating performances from the cast. Each P.T. Anderson picture feels like a treat. One Battle After Another is no different. Many things make this movie timely, and thus political, but the core of the movie is about a father and daughter; about parents wanting to protect their children from the problems of the past and realizing that is not possible; about how hope rests in the next generation. This is what will give One Battle After Another a lasting resonance no matter political landscape may be. I can't wait to see this P.T. Anderson movie again and I can't wait to see the next one. 

Best Pictures #124: 2025 (98th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee: Sinners

by A.J.

Best Pictures #124: 2025 (98th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee

Sinners

"A sinner like me, I can't ask for more than that."

I used to say that a genuinely good horror movie only comes along every 5 years or so. Thankfully, the last few years have proven me wrong. 2025 was a good year for horror movies, but the clear stand out was writer-director Ryan Coogler's Sinners. It was a box office and critical hit, a rare combination for a horror movie. It is also rare for the Academy Awards to recognize a movie released in the first half of the year. It is even rarer for the Academy to recognize horror movies. So, it is very remarkable and exciting that Sinners not only received Oscar nominations, but received 16 nominations including Best Picture, the most of any film in Academy history. This is fitting because Sinners is a most remarkable and special film. 

In his 5th collaboration with Ryan Coogler (after Creed and the Black Panther movies to name a few), Michael B. Jordan plays gangster twins Smoke and Stack in 1932 Mississippi. After 7 years in Chicago they return to their hometown loaded with cash, Irish beer, Italian wine, and a secret trunk to set up a juke joint, have a good time, and watch the money flow in. They reconnect with friends and lovers, not all of whom are excited to see Smoke and Stack return. They also take in their teenage cousin, Sammie (Miles Caton), nicknamed Preacherboy, who is supremely gifted at the guitar and playing the blues, which sets him at odds with his stern preacher father. 

There are two halves to Sinners and any film with this kind of structure, especially one where the tone and even genre shift drastically, risks being uneven or a letdown in one way or another. From Dusk Til Dawn is a perfect example of this: the general consensus is that the first half of the movie with the gangster brothers is superior to the vampire action second half. The two halves are so distinct that they seemingly have little to do with each other and many people wished the whole movie was just about the gangster brothers. Sinners does not suffer from this problem. It does not feel uneven or disjointed. All of the character work and relationships of the first half of the movie are not thrown out for the second half. The actions and fates of the characters are informed by everything that has come before. Coogler’s Oscar nominated original screenplay never goes on autopilot. 

The marketing was secretive about just what specific type of horror faced the characters. Yet, it was never meant to be a secret, and certainly isn’t now, that this is a vampire movie. The film itself only speaks of evil and devil in vague terms at first. Aside from some quick imagery at the beginning, nothing supernatural happens for the first 40 minutes, but Sinners is not hiding that it is a horror movie. It takes its time getting to the horror but it does not waste that time. 

A prologue tells us how there can be people so gifted at making music that it conjures spirits of the past and the future and it can also attract evil. Sammie “Preacherboy” is such a person. The film's signature sequence of has Preacherboy’s music fulfilling the promise of the prologue in a dazzling and transcendent scene that should not work, that would be silly and pretentious in a lesser movie, but all of the right notes are hit in just the right way and the result is movie magic. 

Preacherboy is also the lynchpin between the story of the brothers and their nightclub and the assault of vampires who are drawn by his music. The mysterious party crashers are led by Remmick (Jack O'Connell), who also plays and enjoys music and speaks about equality and unity, about relieving pain and saving people. The best villains never see themselves as villains but Remmick only barely conceals his sinister and monstrous nature. More than victims and blood, he seeks to consume an entire person and their gifts and background and culture. The vampires have a collective mind, but it is clear that Remmick’s clan is not a round table.

Michael B. Jordan makes playing twins seem easy. It helps that they are dressed similarly but distinctly (Smoke wears blue; Stack wears red) and after their introduction they spend time apart allowing their personalities to grow. Jordan’s performance is what distinguishes the twins. It is no surprise he has earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination. It is also no surprise that the other standout performance comes from Delroy Lindo as Delta Slim, a drunken blues musician whose drunkenness and weary face show the pain and tribulations he has endured. Lindo has earned a Supporting Actor nomination, surprisingly the first of his long and impressive career. 

Sinners fits nicely under the pretentious term “elevated horror” that gets applied to arthouse horror films that receive awards and are liked by serious, scholarly critics. This is an “elevated horror” movie in the same way that Leonard Maltin describes the Astaire/Rogers musicals of the 1930’s as escapism that elevates the soul. The truth is that Sinners is a great movie whether you want to analyze it for themes and subtext or want to watch a tense, bloody vampire movie. Ryan Coogler made a horror movie that exceeds all expectations, as a horror fan I can’t ask for more than that. 

Sinners is streaming on HBOmax.

Nominees: Zinzi Coogler, Sev Ohanian, Ryan Coogler

Director: Ryan Coogler Screenplay: Ryan Coogler Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O'Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo Production Company: Proximity Media Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures Release Date: April 18th, 2025 Total Nominations: 16, including Best Picture Other Nominations: Actor-Michael B. Jordan; Director-Ryan Coogler; Original Screenplay-Ryan Coogler; Supporting Actor-Delroy Lindo; Supporting Actress-Wunmi Mosaku; Cinematography-Autumn Durald Arkapaw; Production Design-Hannah Beachler (production designer), Monique Champagne (set decorator); Costume Design-Ruth E. Carter; Editing-Michael P. Shawver; Makeup and Hairstyling-Ken Diaz, Michael Fontaine, Shunika Terry; Original Score-Ludwig Göransson; Original Song-"I Lied to You", music and lyrics by-Ludwig Göransson, Raphael Saadiq; Sound-Chris Welcker, Benjamin A. Burtt, Felipe Pacheco, Brandon Proctor, Steve Boeddeker; Visual Effects-Michael Ralla, Espen Nordahl, Guido Wolter, Donnie Dean; Casting-Francine Maisler