Just when you think you’re out, the Oscars inevitably pull you back in.
This year’s biggest night in movies is set for March 12 at 8 p.m. ET, and will be televised on ABC per tradition (and a lucrative broadcast deal for the Academy). Cinema’s highest accolades have been broadcast for at-home viewers since 1953, when Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth” took home Best Picture.
The 95th Academy Awards ceremony has as many analysts focused on the success of the show itself as the winners in each category. With Hollywood vying for audience attention, exactly which people tune into the Oscars — and the more opaque question of why — stands to cast a shadow over not just the future of how we honor film artistry, but the brass tax of business at the box office.
“Top Gun: Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water” stand out as crowd-pleasing blockbusters and top honorees. They’re joined in the race for Best Picture by “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Elvis,” “The Fabelmans,” “TÁR,” “Triangle of Sadness,” “Women Talking,” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which leads the race with a staggering 11 nominations.
Where should you head after you’ve finished binging those 2023 masterworks? You could start by ticking off other performances in the Best Actor and Actress categories (Paul Mescal is devastating in “Aftersun”), flipping through the gorgeous Best Animated Feature nominees (here’s looking at you, Marcel), or finding somewhere to see all 15 dazzling shorts nominees.
Listed alphabetically, with the shorts race held until the end, here are the 51 movies to know for this year’s Academy Awards. Also, check out IndieWire’s 2023 Oscars streaming guide and a list of the competition’s most surprising snubs.
Samantha Bergeson, Ryan Lattanzio, and Christian Zilko contributed to this story.
“Aftersun”
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“Aftersun”
What it’s nominated for: Best Actor (Paul Mescal)
“A stunning debut that develops with the gradual poignancy of a Polaroid, Charlotte Wells’ ‘Aftersun’ isn’t just an honest movie about the way that we remember the people we’ve lost — fragmented, elusive, nowhere and everywhere all at once — it’s also a heart-stopping act of remembering unto itself. Here, in the span of an oblique but tender story that feels small enough to fit on an instant photo (or squeeze into the LCD screen of an old camcorder), Wells creates a film that gradually echoes far beyond its frames. By the time it reaches fever pitch with the greatest Freddie Mercury needle drop this side of ‘Wayne’s World,’ ‘Aftersun’ has begun to shudder with the crushing weight of all that we can’t leave behind, and all that we may not have known to take with us in the first place.” —David Ehrlich
Read IndieWire’s review of “Aftersun” (Grade: A)
“All Quiet on the Western Front”
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“All Quiet on the Western Front”
What it’s nominated for: Best Picture, Best International Feature Film, Best Cinematography, Best Adapted Screenplay (Edward Berger, Ian Stokell, and Lesley Paterson), Best Visual Effects, Best Production Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Sound, Best Original Score
“There might be some fresh insight to be gained from a new adaptation of ‘All Quiet,’ despite the ripple effects of its influence: war, sadly, has not ended because of films about how awful it is. And its futility and absurdity remain constant, even as its face evolves with the times. Sadly, Edward Berger’s handsome, but expected version of the story doesn’t add much to the canon except for some starkly beautiful imagery.” —Katie Rife
Read IndieWire’s review of “All Quiet on the Western Front” (Grade: B)
“All That Breathes”
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“All That Breathes”
What it’s nominated for: Best Documentary Feature
“If it’s inevitable that such a detail-obsessed portrait occasionally seems overwhelmed by its options, death has an unfortunate way of refocusing our attention, and so it goes with Sen’s non-hierarchical look at Delhi life. ‘All That Breathes’ doesn’t look directly at the horror that erupts from the city’s anti-Muslim fervor — it watches the violence foment on TV, then later confronts us with unsettling still images of the destruction it left behind — but it’s a testament to the film’s slow-building effect that this tragic climax feels like a testament to the urgency of Wildlife Rescue, and not just a threat to the people who run it.” —DE
Read IndieWire’s review of “All That Breathes” (Grade: B+)
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”
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“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”
What it’s nominated for: Best Documentary Feature
“That title. Even before it screened, ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’ cast a shiver across the Venice Film Festival competition, sounding more like a line from a Yeats poem than the latest documentary from the director of ‘CITIZENFOUR.’ The big news: the film lives up to it. Already a robust director, Laura Poitras has leveled up with a towering and devastating work of shocking intelligence and still greater emotional power.” —Sophie Monks Kaufman
Read IndieWire’s review of “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” (Grade: A+)
“Argentina, 1985”
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“Argentina, 1985”
What it’s nominated for: Best International Feature Film
“The American myth-making machine’s love for pumping out heroes, like so many cape-wearing sausages, finds its antithesis in ‘Argentina, 1985,’ an entertaining biopic about recent Argentine history that takes the baton from Shakespeare’s idea that ‘some men have greatness thrust upon them.’ This is very much the case for Julio Strassera (Ricardo Darín), a family man who is aghast at his appointment as lead prosecutor in what became known as ‘The Trial of the Juntas.’” —SMK
Read IndieWire’s review of “Argentina, 1985” (Grade: B+)
“Avatar: The Way of Water”
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“Avatar: The Way of Water”
What it’s nominated for: Best Picture, Best Visual Effects, Best Production Design, Best Sound
“Cameron has always treated story as a direct extension of the spectacle required to bring it to life, but the anthropocenic relationship between narrative and technology was a bit uneven in the first “Avatar,” which obscured the old behind the veil of the new where his previous films had better allowed them to intertwine. An out-of-body theatrical experience that makes its predecessor feel like a glorified proof-of-concept, “Avatar: The Way of Water” is such a staggering improvement over the original because its spectacle doesn’t have to compensate for its story; in vintage Cameron fashion, the movie’s spectacle is what allows its story to be told so well.” —DE
Read IndieWire’s review of “Avatar: The Way of Water” (Grade: A-)
“Babylon”
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“Babylon”
What it’s nominated for: Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Original Score
“A dorky Caligulan ode to the early days of Hollywood, Damien Chazelle’s sprawling ‘Babylon’ may begin in 1926, but the movie is soon burdened with a clairvoyance that allows it to become unstuck in time. Several of the epic’s characters are haunted by glimpses of a future they’re powerless to prevent, a curse that its director brings to bear by drawing inspiration from across the entire spectrum of film history.
Burdened with the knowledge that this $80 million studio project could be the last of its kind, ‘Babylon’ refracts Hollywood’s first major identity crisis through the prism of its latest one. It reminds us the movies have been dying for more than 100 years, and then — through its heart-bursting, endearingly galaxy-brained prayer of a finale — interprets that as uplifting proof they’ll actually live forever. It just doesn’t have any idea how the movies will do it, or where the hell they might go from here.” —DE
Read IndieWire’s review of “Babylon” (Grade: B)
“Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths”
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“Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths”
What it’s nominated for: Best Cinematography
“‘Bardo’ gets away with its have your cake and eat it too approach to ambivalence because Iñárritu makes such a ludicrous spectacle of trying to resolve it. Once a scrappy young filmmaker, he’s since become an Oscar-winning auteur with several nice houses but nothing that truly feels like a home. Now, it appears as if Iñárritu’s increasingly overwrought efforts to affirm his own significance — to make art of such undeniable gravity that he no longer has any need for roots — have left him stranded in the Bardo and hounded by the same voices that inspired him to write the bitter critic who Lindsay Duncan played in ‘Birdman.’” —DE
Read IndieWire’s review of “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” (Grade: C+)
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