While 2025 is a few months in the rear-view mirror, the movie year won’t be complete until the Oscars put a bookend on awards season. Voting for the 98th Academy Awards is over, with all of the winners getting revealed on Sunday, March 15. So before the 2026 Oscars, a team of DraftKings Network TV & Film writers joined together to share their thoughts on each of the 10 best picture nominees.
Here is how the staff ranked the nominees up for Best Picture – not in terms of their chances to bring home the hardware, but rather based on consensus personal preference.
10. F1
Cooper Albers: F1 is the second-best Top Gun movie — and that’s a compliment.
Formulaic? Yes. Derivative? Sure. But what the film lacks in unpredictability, it makes up for with undeniable star power, an original soundtrack, high-octane race sequences and on-track authenticity.
Brad Pitt shines as the seasoned veteran racer Sonny Hayes, blending his signature charisma with a troubled past and a willful disregard for the rules. Damson Idris dazzles as hot-headed rookie Joshua Pearce, forming a compelling mentor-mentee dynamic with Pitt that drives the film’s emotional core.
The movie, which grossed over $630 million worldwide, also boasts standout performances from Kerry Condon and Javier Bardem as technical director Kate McKenna and team owner Ruben Cervantes, respectively. Lewis Hamilton, who served as a producer to ensure racing accuracy, also appears in one of several cameos from real-life racers.
While F1 likely won’t redefine cinema, Joseph Kosinski has nailed the recipe for an electrifying popcorn flick — a movie that belongs on the big screen. The fact that it’s even nominated proves the film knows exactly what it is.
9. The Secret Agent
Dan Johnson: What makes The Secret Agent so arresting is Wagner Moura’s performance at the center of it, carrying a whole private humanitarian conflict of fear, intelligence, restraint and grief. After the bruised, dragonfire heartbreak he brought to Civil War—a performance built on exhaustion, moral injury and the sense that history had already taken too much—this feels like a deeper plunge into the same haunted battlefields of yore and future days. In The Secret Agent, he plays a man who seems to be editing his own soul in real time, measuring every glance, every pause, every inflection for danger. The brilliance of the performance is in how little he wastes. He never lunges for the big moment; he lets dread accumulate around him until even stillness starts to vibrate. You watch him and feel the pressure of a mind working overtime beneath a carefully managed surface, the sadness of someone trying to remain legible to himself while the world around him becomes morally illegible.
That makes him the perfect anchor for a film obsessed with surveillance, secrecy and the emotional rot of living under pressure. Moura gives the movie its pulse, but also its conscience. He has always had charisma, of course, but what is so moving here—and what makes this feel like such a rich follow-up to Civil War—is the way he uses that charisma as camouflage for a fractured soul. There is movie-star gravity in the performance, but it is bent inward, toward damage, memory and survival. He commands it all in such a way that rewards those who watch closely. In lesser hands, a role like this can harden into mere cool, all trench-coat aura and controlled intensity. Moura gives it human weather instead—sorrow, calculation, panic, tenderness—and in doing so turns The Secret Agent into something rarer than a stylish political thriller. He makes it hurt.
8. Frankenstein
Bryan Armetta: Guillermo del Toro, a master of dark fantasy, has created one of his best films to date with Frankenstein. Like much of the director’s work, this one turns a classic horror story on its head. The Monster is a heartbreaking, sympathetic character. Jacob Elordi, earning his first career Oscar nomination, delivers a wide array of emotions, often without saying a single word. In comparison, Oscar Isaac’s Frankenstein is a narcissist with deluded dreams of playing God. It’s nearly impossible not to root for the former, given the bleak, cruel world he’s been forced into.
In its totality, Frankenstein forces you to ponder what it means to be human. A beautiful score and elaborate set design help elevate this twisted tale into something unforgettable. The film has earned nine total Academy Award nominations. Elordi, del Toro and cinematographer Dan Laustsen – just to name a few – could take home an Oscar on Sunday.
7. Train Dreams
Sam Connon: Film and poetry don’t usually intersect as directly as they do in Train Dreams, Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s somber 2011 novella about an American logger in the early 20th century. Will Patton’s narration frames the story of Robert Grainier’s life in such a folksy, bittersweet way, utilizing really sensitive prose to build a truly unique world. It perfectly encapsulates what Robert is experiencing, describing the countless magnetic side characters he meets and how time seems to pass them all by.
Between this and 2024’s Sing Sing, Bently and Kwedar know exactly how to tug on an audience’s heartstrings. And yet, Train Dreams is far more than the admittedly predictable tragedies at the center of it. Robert’s trauma doesn’t feel overdone, but rather explored in a more tender way than most films would dare to do. There is room for growth and acceptance, even if loss and loneliness never truly fade away. By the end, Robert has lived long enough to see a whole new world take shape, and it is beautiful to see him find his place in it once again. And it’s hard to talk about this movie without noting just how beautiful it looks, obviously. Just gorgeous.
6. Hamnet
Jeff Pratt: Jessie Buckley delivers the best performance of the year across the board, regardless of category. It should come as no surprise that out of all the best actor/actress nominations, she is by far the heaviest favorite to take home hardware from her respective group. Buckley immaculately toes the line between her character’s almost mythical, profound connection with nature and the unavoidable hardships that so many mothers faced in the late 1500s. As an audience, we experience the highest of highs and lowest of lows through her, all while she carves out a life for herself alongside one of history’s most infamous characters in William Shakespeare.
In a film with such a commanding leading performance, it would have been easy for the rest of the act to pale in comparison. That’s not the case with Hamnet. Paul Mescal grounds the larger than life persona of Shakespeare into a mere man with simple dreams, gifts and flaws. Jacobi Jupe gives so much life to the character of Hamnet that when it is inevitably ripped away, we grieve as if we’ve lost our own wonderful, gifted child. His brother, Noah, ties together the final act and pulls it across the finish line with a brilliant performance as Hamlet. This is a film that will stick with me for far longer than when Buckley walks across the stage to accept her Oscar.
5. Bugonia
Bryan Armetta: At least half of Bugonia’s runtime takes place inside a basement. The dialogue is almost entirely between three characters. Still, this film manages to keep viewers on their toes for almost two hours. Emma Stone is fantastic as always, earning a well-deserved Best Actress nomination. However, the standout in this one might be Jesse Plemons. He manages to capture the paranoid, at times incoherent, state of a conspiracy-brained man turned societal afterthought.
Another collaboration between Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos elicited some eye-rolls from filmgoers. As someone who didn’t care for 2023’s Poor Things, I understand why. With that being said, the duo are firing on all cylinders in Bugonia. It’s the type of film that manages to say something without coming off as condescending or losing any entertainment value in the process. And that ending? Even if it wasn’t your cup of tea, you have to admire directors that take big swings. Love it or hate it, this is a difficult film to forget.
4. Sentimental Value
Dan Johnson: While Sentimental Value isn’t Trier’s most lovely film, it might be his most tender—this grown-up, patiently accruing family drama that keeps finding new rooms inside the same wound. The setup is deceptively simple, almost wickedly so. A once-celebrated filmmaker returns to Oslo after a death in the family, and he tries to pull his estranged daughter—now a stage actress—back into orbit by casting her in his comeback picture. She refuses, so he pivots to a young Hollywood star, and suddenly the art becomes both apology and weapon. That’s Trier at his best, right there: affection with teeth, intimacy with stakes, bloody love.
What also makes it quintessentially Trier—and what makes it feel cut from the same cloth as his 2016 Norwegian-American debut, Louder Than Bombs—is that the movie isn’t just about grief or estrangement, but about how narrative itself becomes a coping mechanism. In Louder Than Bombs, memory is a contested terrain, a family each holding a different map and insisting it’s the only true one. Here, Trier folds that same fracture into form: scenes, rehearsals, film-within-film textures, the slippery overlap of lived history and performed history, like the past is always trying to scramble and shoulder its way back into the present.
You can feel the lineage, too, from Reprise’s chaptered electricity and The Worst Person in the World’s structural playfulness—except the play is sadder now, wiser, less interested in being clever than in being honest. The house itself becomes a kind of thesis. Homes as inherited spaces which are themselves records of all that’s happened there. Inexorable rot. For it’s a question we ask of ourselves, structurally, is it not: how is it possible for us to remain standing and architecturally-sound beneath the weight of all our heavy humanity & harrowed histories?
Sentimental Value‘s acting is the kind of calibrated, quietly-ferocious work Trier seems to summon ritually from his casts. Stellan Skarsgård’s filmmaker-father isn’t a monster, which is the whole problem; he’s charismatic enough to keep fooling himself. And, maybe, you. Renate Reinsve plays the daughter with that Trierian specialty blend—competence as armor, volatility as the leak beneath it—so every interaction feels like a negotiation between the person she is and the person she was forced to become. And Elle Fanning, as the outsider star who gets invited into the family’s unresolved weather system, does something especially sharp: she doesn’t save the story, she complicates it, the way a new witness changes the testimony.
By the end, Trier lands a final beat that barely needs words, the kind of closing gesture that doesn’t resolve the fracture so much as teach you how to live with its outline. And if that sounds—ahem—sentimental, he’s already ahead of you—because he knows sentiment is only embarrassing when it isn’t earned.
3. Marty Supreme
Cooper Albers: Timothée Chalamet delivers a career-defining performance, an EF5 tornado personified, tearing through the film as his titular character leaves devastation in his wake.
Part period drama. Part ping pong epic. Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is, at its core, a cautionary coming-of-age story that leaves viewers with no nails left to bite, no room left on their seats to lean any further — and maybe even a newfound appreciation for the color orange.
2. Sinners
Sam Connon: Ryan Coogler spent a decade of his career tied almost exclusively to massive franchises in Creed and Black Panther. Prior to last year, his only fully original feature was Fruitvale Station, which came out all the way back in 2013. Coogler didn’t hold back in his fifth directorial effort, blending his signature authorial touch with the blockbuster tricks he learned along the way to deliver Sinners. Even before the movie turns into a gruesome vampire bloodbath, Coogler paints an incredibly detailed and engaging picture of a prohibition-era Mississippi.
Michael B. Jordan’s dual-performance as twins Smoke and Stack is worthy of all the attention it’s getting, as are the supporting performances from Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld and Jack O’Connell. Miles Caton, making his acting debut, is the true anchor or the story, though, and not just because of his elite musical talents. Sinners is about ancestry, the blues and Black exploitation, so much of which rests on Caton’s Preacherboy. Between an enthralling musical sequence around the midpoint and a truly unique epilogue, Sinners and its themes do not work without Preacherboy.
Add to that all the narratives around the film’s release, from Coogler’s ownership of the rights to its surprise box office explosion and SAG breakout, and you’ve got the defining film of 2025.
1. One Battle After Another
Charlie Cummings: Paul Thomas Anderson is nothing if not consistent. Greed and selfishness getting in the way of family and morality? Ball on tee, squared up and launched. One Battle After Another is perhaps his magnum opus on this topic.
It blends the gut-wrenching interpersonal drama of There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread with the irreverent, often slapstick humor of Boogie Nights and Inherent Vice. In short, all of the best elements of PTA movies. Throw that kind of storytelling in a contemporary setting that could not be more relevant to the struggles of today, and you have a classic. Landing the plane with a seat-gripping final sequence made this the year’s top movie. Hats off to all involved in making this masterpiece.
That’s how DraftKings Network writers ranked the 10 films up for Best Picture, but what did they think of 2025 in movies as a whole? Click here for the full rankings!
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