Let’s be honest: there are a lot of years where the Oscar nominations are full of films that aren’t exactly great. Sure, each year has plenty of heavy-hitters, but there are often some real slogs to get through for completionists getting ready for Oscar’s biggest night. However, this year’s Oscars isn’t one such year. In fact, most of the 2026 nominees in all 24 categories are pretty good, or at least worthy of their nominations — for the most part, anyway.
If you’re one of the Oscar nuts trying to watch all 50 nominees at this year’s awards, 2026 is actually one of the better years to accomplish that goal. But all 24 categories have great films worth checking out, from the Documentary Short category all the way to Best Picture. Every nominee deserves attention, and with that in mind, we’ve gone ahead and ranked all 50 nominees in every category at this year’s awards — from the obvious Diane Warren nomination to the best film of 2025.
50
‘Diane Warren: Relentless’
1 nomination – Original Song
You’ve heard of “Oscar bait” movies, but Diane Warren: Relentless is the rare film that quite literally asks the audience, “OK, but why haven’t you given me a deserved Oscar yet??” While the first half of Bess Kargman’s documentary on legendary songwriter Diane Warren does get into her difficulties coming up in the music industry, the story is basically that Warren didn’t get paid enough, started a business, and then thrived from there on out.
The second half, however, shows just how adamant Warren is about winning an Oscar, even showing her frustration at losing in recent years (who could’ve imagined she would lose twice to Billie Eilish??). Diane Warren: Relentless ignores that Warren’s nominated songs have also been pretty bland over the last decade, but still feels like begging for an Original Song Oscar. It’s a weird doc, for sure, but at least the nominated song, “Dear Me,” is slightly better than some of her other recent nominations. Just barely.
49
‘The Lost Bus’
1 nomination – Visual Effects
Paul Greengrass’ The Lost Bus truly feels like it would’ve been one of the biggest films of the year, had it come out in the late ‘90s. This disaster-action film would’ve been a tense, gripping affair if it weren’t also packed with an extreme amount of silliness and odd choices. As we meet Matthew McConaughey’s bus driver, Kevin McKay, we learn that literally everything terrible that could happen to him has happened: he’s divorced, his dad died, his mom’s sick, his son hates him, and he has to take his childhood dog to get put down.
The actual “lost bus” part (they’re never even really that lost) is mostly relegated to driving in darkness, flames bursting out at a strange angle, and kids screaming. Even its attempt to discuss climate change as a cause feels like a cop out. For a film that feels like it could be tense and timely, The Lost Bus manages to be neither.
48
‘Jurassic World Rebirth’
1 nomination – Visual Effects
In comparison to the rest of the Jurassic canon, Jurassic World Rebirth is one of the better films in this series, but that’s a low bar for a series that’s struggled to stay interesting since the first installment. Like so many of these sequels, Rebirth constantly reminds you of what you loved about the original film, without adding enough of its own merits to the mix. The characters are bland, the story is uninteresting, and most of the action sequences are watered-down versions of what we’ve seen in the past, with director Gareth Edwards even seemingly referencing his 2014 Godzilla at one point. At the very least, the dinosaurs do look good, which is entirely the point of this nomination, but it’s truly time for this series to go the way of the dinosaurs as well.
47
‘A Friend of Dorothy’
1 nomination – Live Action Short
A Friend of Dorothy is sweet and certainly pushing levels of quirkiness to questionable levels, but cute for what it is. This short about a friendship between a widow in her 80s and a kid who wants to be an actor has its moments and is a great showcase for Miriam Margolyes. However, I found this to be too focused on Margolyes as Dorothy, to the point that Alistair Nwachukwu‘s J.J. gets lost in the process. At the end, Dorothy and J.J. agree that they both see each other in ways that other people haven’t, and while I get that from J.J.’s perspective, I have no idea what Dorothy is talking about from her perspective. In the end, A Friend of Dorothy is a fine short, and it gives Margolyes a nice spotlight, but it completely forgets about the “friend” in the title.
46
‘Viva Verdi!’
1 nomination – Original Song
Viva Verdi! seems as though director Yvonne Russo knows that this retirement home for musicians, created by opera composer Giuseppe Verdi, will have great stories to tell, but no idea where they’ll come from. Because of that, Viva Verdi! is scattered and hits on certain elements of this home briefly before moving on to the next idea. We get interviews with the people who stay here, but only quick snippets of their lives before we move on. We get presentations of them performing, including moments where they perform with the younger musicians who also live at the home, but it never delves too deeply into this cyclical story of the last generation teaching the new one.
The instinct of Russo is right: it is a great world worth exploring. But the way Viva Verdi! shows this home is so fractured that it makes you wish Russo would pick one angle and stick with it, rather than trying to make sure it captures everything all at once.
45
‘Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud’
1 nomination – Live Action Short
While I didn’t necessarily want Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud to steal the style of Kristen Johnson‘s Cameraperson completely, I do sort of wish Craig Renaud‘s approach had been to focus on his brother through the footage he captured during his life. Whenever we get away from Brent’s clips, it’s mostly for moments where people talk about how important Brent’s job was — and it was, but we can already get that through the clips we’re seeing.
The footage Brent captured before his death is powerful, but it falls into an issue that many doc shorts have, which is that they exist in a middle ground where they can only do so much before becoming a full-sized documentary. Part of me either wants this to give us more of Brent’s life, or just let that be told through his footage; instead, we’re in this in between that doesn’t quite work. Still, the footage is all we need to realize just how incredible Brent Renaud and his work are.
44
‘Perfectly a Strangeness’
1 nomination – Documentary Short
Man, sometimes a movie is just three donkeys discovering an observatory, and that’s fine. Perfectly a Strangeness is really pushing the definition of documentary here, and there’s no way this wasn’t orchestrated in some ways. However, it’s hard not to get wrapped up in Alison McAlpine‘s fairly basic short, simply because the donkeys are a lot of fun to follow, and the imagery itself is gorgeous. Is this going for anything more than donkeys and gorgeous nighttime footage? Who knows, but it works well enough for its 15 minutes.
43
‘Children No More: Were and Are Gone’
1 nomination – Documentary Short
This message is powerful and important to present, but there just isn’t enough to Children No More: Were and Are Gone. We’re presented with a group in Tel Aviv that silently opposes the war in Gaza, as others scream their dissent on the streets. Each person in this group holds a sign describing a child who has died in Gaza due to Israel, and it’s heartbreaking to witness. But presenting these demonstrations is all there is, and while that’s certainly important to document, there isn’t much else to Children No More.
At a certain point, they decide to go into areas where people don’t agree with them, and the main drama becomes the people of Israel yelling at these demonstrators for being ignorant. The drama starts to come from worrying that these people are actually going to be attacked for their beliefs. Children No More: Were and Gone needs a bit more meat on the bone, or it doesn’t need to be 36 minutes.
42
‘Jane Austen’s Period Drama’
1 nomination – Live Action Short
It’s kind of nuts that this one received an Oscar nomination for Best Live-Action Short, as it is essentially a comedy sketch masquerading as a Jane Austen parody. About periods. The comedic timing of this short is often funny, but it also mostly relies on goofy names and jokes about periods, and at 12 minutes, we can feel this concept starting to grow old. It isn’t bad, and it is great that a comedy is on the shortlist in a category that is almost always dour. But beyond nailing the tone and look of Austen dramas, you could easily find dozens of sketches online each year that are basically doing this premise. However, it is nice to see the Academy at least nominating silly comedies for once.
41
‘Kokuho’
1 nomination – Makeup and Hairstyling
The highest-grossing live-action film in Japanese history, Kokuho is an ambitious historical epic set within the world of kabuki. For those who don’t know much about this style of acting (including myself), Sang-il Lee’s film is an intriguing primer, especially exciting when it allows Ken Watanabe to play around in this specific type of performance. As a love letter to kabuki, Kokuho is very effective, but when it focuses on the story of two boys raised together in this universe, it doesn’t entirely hold together, especially as these two grow apart the older they get. Kokuho is an ambitious, beautiful-looking film stylistically that absolutely earns its Makeup and Hairstyling nomination.