Let’s rank the 2023 Oscar Best Picture nominees

The 95th annual Academy Award nominations were announced earlier today and, like most years, the tale is told in numbers, including 11 (the amount of nominations bestowed upon Everything Everywhere All At Once and nine (the number of nods for The Banshees Of Inisherin and All Quiet On The Western Front). But there are other numbers that suggest, whether for creative or mercenary reasons, that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that hands out the Oscars, is ready to pump the brakes on its seemingly irreversible slide into irrelevance. The first number is 16.6 million, which is the number of viewers who watched last year’s slaphappy ceremony, the second-lowest since the Nielsen ratings service began tracking the show. As old-school Oscar lovers age out, the Academy, at long last, realized that their survival depends on enticing the TikTok generation and those between the coasts to tune into its glitzy gala.

And that leads us to the second crucial number: 1 billion. For the first time in Oscar history, two Best Picture nominees have grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, Avatar: The Way Of Water and Top Gun: Maverick. This is a promising sign that voters are finally using the extra five Best Picture slots added in 2009 for their intended purpose: to nominate big-budget blockbusters to get more people to care about who wins an Oscar. Of course, Way Of Water and Maverick helped resuscitate the theatrical moviegoing experience, which has been on life support since the beginning of the pandemic, so Hollywood can’t be faulted for rewarding them with a Best Picture nod.

Fear not, though, there are enough old guard voters to ensure that the Academy hasn’t totally succumbed to sequelitis. The 10 Best Picture nominees are collectively the most fair and comprehensive batch in years, ranging from the intellectual drama, Tár, to the one-percenter satire Triangle Of Sadness to Steven Spielberg’s remembrance from whence he came, The Fabelmans. So with T-minus 47 days until the March 12 ceremony on ABC, here are The A.V. Club’s rankings of all 10 Best Picture nominees for 2023. Spoiler alert: the Academy may deem them the best, but we may not…

10. Triangle Of Sadness

Only two films have ever won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Best Picture Academy Award: 1955’s and 2019’s . While its chances are slim, , could be the third. Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund’s unsubtle but often painfully funny takedown of the one percent earned three Oscar nods including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. The film operates in a target rich environment of the vapid and wealthy who are just asking to be ripped to shreds. From the empty-headed social media influencer to the elderly couple who made their fortune manufacturing grenades, none of these people seem to care about anything other than the luxuries that their wealth has afforded them. Östlund cleverly traps them on a yacht where there’s no escape from the boat’s bonkers captain (Woody Harrelson) or the unrelenting storm that leads to the ghastliest amount of violent projectile vomiting since the Griffin family downed bottles of ipecac on . Östlund loses focus when a group of passengers winds up stranded on a desert island but, by that time, the satirical damage is done and the Oscar nominations have been justly earned. [Mark Keizer]