One Battle After Another is the clear frontrunner for this year’s Best Picture Oscar. It won the top prize from the Producers Guild and the Directors Guild, not to mention the Golden Globe and countless film critics’ association awards, as well as the BAFTA and the César, which are the British and French versions of the Oscar, respectively.
But you’ve already seen One Battle After Another – you have seen it, right? Right??? (Read our review here.)
Let’s move on. Here’s a list of other Oscar-nominated movies you can stream today if you subscribe to one of the major streaming services in the U.S.
Though perhaps not the Best Movies of the Year, the following are all great movies I strongly recommend. In terms of Oscar predictions, I assume most of these will lose, with One Battle and Sinners (examined here) rightly sweeping everything between them.
Nonetheless, these lesser-seen movies are well worth watching – right now.
NETFLIX: Oscar-nominated Films to Watch
I suppose Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is the Netflix movie most likely to win an Oscar this year. It’s nominated for nine awards, including Best Picture. But personally, I don’t recommend it. The Mexican auteur goes full gothic horror with his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic. It’s all candlelit Scottish castles and over the top costumes that hit just the right level of campiness. Too bad it’s got that weird, overly sharp Netflix made-for-TV look that reminded me of watching the Dark Shadows soap opera.
If you subscribe to Netflix, chances are you’ve seen this year’s animated musical phenomenon KPop Demon Hunters. If you’ve been avoiding it, get over yourself. It’s fun! The odds-on favorite for Best Animated Feature as well as Best Original Song features beautiful art design with thrilling, maximalist, anime action.
Don’t miss The Perfect Neighbor, either. Nominated for Best Documentary Feature, this emotionally brutal film is made almost entirely of police bodycam footage edited together to reconstruct the true story of a racist Karen who terrorized her predominantly Black neighborhood in Florida — and ends up shooting one of them. It unfolds like a horror movie. I felt like I knew what would happen within the first 10 minutes, and I basically did, but it was somehow more upsetting than I could have imagined. As a documentary, it is amazing this footage exists, and the filmmakers put it to exceptional use.
But for me there’s only one movie worth subscribing to Netflix just to watch. It’s Train Dreams, nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture. Is it possible that “lovely” could be an appropriate description of a movie about the existential problem of human suffering? Despite the heaviness and even violence of its themes, director Clint Bentley somehow gives Train Dreams a gentleness and stillness that evokes the feeling of taking a walk in the woods. The film shows the gradually diminishing wilderness of the American West, while still leaving us in a place of wonder at the intricate interconnectedness of all things in the flow of history.
Robert Grainier (played by Joel Edgerton) is a rough, frontier man in the early 20th Century. Train Dreams follows the winding stream of his life chopping down trees and building railroads through the Idaho forests. From Grainier’s perspective it’s a life surrounded by the beauty of nature, in intimate harmony with the earth. Ironically, though, as a logger Robert is part of the industrialist economy that would gradually wreck this beautiful land in the name of technological progress. Train Dreams takes a ecological view of the world that Grainier himself doesn’t fully appreciate until the film’s final moments. When he finally gets a bird’s-eye view on his life as a whole, it’s a cinematic wonder to behold.
AMAZON (and APPLE): Oscar-nominated Films to Watch
The second biggest streamer by number of subscribers is Amazon Prime Video, which garnered a grand total of zero original films nominated list year. Amazon’s tech company rival Apple managed to get a handful of nominations for its car racing movie F1 — but it’s certainly not worth it subscribing for.
How did F1 get a Best Picture nom? It’s beside the point that the bland plot is cobbled together out of clichés about dudes trying to be the best. That stuff is just there as an excuse for the thrilling, up-close, race car photography, which is admittedly damn awesome. Like Top Gun: Maverick, this throwback action movie has producer Jerry Bruckheimer channeling his 1980s and ‘90s greatest hits from the era of Days of Thunder, Bad Boys, and Con Air. It’s bombastic masculine spectacle of the highest order.
There’s been a string of these car racing movies recently as Hollywood keeps trying to recreate the magic of Ford v Ferrari (2019). I thought Gran Turismo (2023) was as much fun as F1, despite being an ad for Playstation. But really, if you feel the need for speed, just re-watch Ford v Ferrari currently streaming on Netflix.
DISNEY and HULU: Oscar-nominated Films to Watch
If you want to watch some of this year’s animated features that will lose to KPop Demon Hunters, Disney+ is your place to watch Elio and Zootopia 2. But don’t forget that Disney+ is integrated with Hulu now. Hulu usually has indie films, including foreign imports, but those smaller films typically don’t come out on streaming until after the Oscars (in order to capitalize on a marketing boost from any wins).
Right now Hulu happens to have Best Makeup and Hairstyling nominee The Ugly Stepsister – even though it’s really a Shudder original, which streams through AMC+. This midnight-dark Norwegian fairy tale, by writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt, is a grown-up take on Cinderella told from the stepsister’s point of view.
The Ugly Stepsister deconstructs the original Grimm Brothers fairy tale with its grotesque satire of European beauty culture. Would we side with Cinderella if she weren’t beautiful? The Ugly Stepsister takes a naturalistic approach before erupting in surreal body horror. It was extreme enough that horror distributor Shudder released it as “unrated” in America, so it’s hilarious to see it streaming on Hulu, now incorporated into Disney+, literally on the same screen as the Disney animated classic.
HBO Max: Oscar-nominated Films to Watch
HBO is owned by Warner Brothers, which got a record 30 Oscar nominations this year. Of course, Warner Brothers is about to be bought by Paramount+, which has – you guessed it – zero Oscar nominations this year.
You’ve already seen One Battle After Another and Sinners, so what else is streaming on HBO Max? Well, Weapons, for one. Duh. The bonkers horror movie was the most fun I had at the movies last year. You really should have seen it in the theater. But you know that (or will after you see it).
For a less-obvious recommendation, check out If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, starring the Oscar nominated Best Actress Rose Byrne.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is Eraserhead for moms. If you’re unfamiliar with David Lynch’s cult classic nightmare of fatherhood, imagine existential terror expressed in surrealism and prone to body horror – a description that applies just as well here.This emotionally intense portrait of a mother’s psychological breakdown when her school-age daughter is essentially re-attached to her by a (symbolic) umbilical cord.
Writer-director Mary Bronstein makes the strong cinematic choice to keep the camera on Rose Byrne as the mother, shooting mostly in closeups for a suffocating, exhausting effect. We never directly see her daughter, aligning our sympathy even as mama becomes more unhinged.
It’s the sort of chaotic and self-destructive character Bronstein’s husband Ron created in his screenplays for the Safdie Brothers in movies like Good Time, Uncut Gems and this year’s Marty Supreme (not currently streaming, alas). What must life be like in the Bronstein house? Yikes. But, hey, train wrecks are fun to watch.
PEACOCK: Oscar-nominated Films to Watch
During the run-up to the Oscars, Hamnet is likely to stream on Peacock any day. But you can watch Hamnet’s fellow Best Picture nominee Bugonia while you wait.
I was annoyed by Bugonia’s ending, which I won’t spoil here, but any Yorgos Lanthimos film is worth watching. Here the generally misanthropic Greek auteur brings his weird sensibility to a story about a mentally unstable individual, played by an intensely creepy Jesse Plemons, who kidnaps a tech CEO played by Lanthimos muse Emma Stone. (Stone was nominated for Best Actress, but Plemons was robbed!)
It’s an interesting premise executed with great performances of fascinating characters, and plenty of Lanthimos’s signature fisheye lenses. MVP: Composer Jerskin Fendrix‘s unhinged score.
(Read our takes on Yorgos Lanthimos’s films, both fervently “pro” and decidedly “con.”)
