Where to watch this year’s Oscar-nominated movies
Are you an Oscars completist — the kind of person who goes into a panic if you haven’t watched every movie up for an award by the time the big day rolls around? Or do you just want to prepare to win your office pool? Or just know a few basics for when your sister drags you to a party on Oscars night?
Whatever flavor of Oscar watcher you are, we have you covered. Now that the nominations have been announced, with “Emilia Pérez” topping the board with 13 nominations and “The Brutalist” and “Wicked” following with 10 nods each, it’s time to start cramming. Here’s where to find all the major movies up for statues before the Academy Awards on March 2. We’ll continue to update this list.
Emilia Pérez (13 nominations)
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A Cannes darling, “Emilia Pérez” is a bold and divisive musical from French auteur Jacques Audiard won a special best-actress award for its entire female cast of Karla Sofîa Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz. “The most bravura female performances of the year,” wrote Ty Burr in his Washington Post review, describing the visual, stylish feast of a movie as a cross between an opera, a telenovela and about half a dozen other genres. Controversy has followed, though, with Mexicans claiming that the film, about a cartel boss (Gascón) who undergoes gender-affirming surgery, trivializes issues in their country. But the film cleaned up at the Golden Globes and should have big appeal with the increasingly international Academy, particularly with Gascón, the first openly trans actress to be nominated for an Oscar. (Her co-star, Saldaña, as the lawyer who helps her, is considered the supporting-actress front-runner.)
Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, cinematography, film editing, makeup and hairstyling, sound, original score, original song (for two songs) and international feature.
Where to watch: One night only at the Avalon Theatre on Feb. 19. Streaming on Netflix.
Wicked (10 nominations)
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Jon M. Chu’s wild reimagining of the hit Broadway show “Wicked” is just the first half (at two hours and 40 minutes!) of a movie that will conclude this fall. Still, what a half-movie it is! “About as good as musical adaptations get, and more lavish than most,” Burr writes. An inversion of “The Wizard of Oz,” it’s told from the perspective of the witches: green-skinned, ostracized Elphaba (the fabulous Cynthia Erivo) and pink-clad popular girl Elphaba (a very funny Ariana Grande). Both got nominations. Its messages about the terrors of racism and othering, amid glorious costumes and dance numbers, take on particular poignancy in our political moment.
Nominated for: Best picture, actress, supporting actress, production design, costume design, film editing, makeup and hairstyling, sound, visual effects and original score.
Where to watch: Still in theaters. Available to rent.
The Brutalist (10 nominations)
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In Brady Corbet’s American opus “The Brutalist” (three hours and 15 minutes, with a 15-minute intermission), Adrien Brody plays architect László Toth, a Hungarian Jew and Bauhaus architect who escapes the Holocaust to wind up in Pennsylvania — a land hostile to both him and his uncompromising art. That is, until a newly moneyed millionaire (Guy Pearce) commissions him to build a monumental community center on a hill, and a struggle between art and capitalism, belonging and exclusion, begins. Corbet’s “big swing of an American epic,” as Burr writes, won him best director at the Venice Film Festival and earned the movie several Golden Globes, including best actor (drama) for Brody, best director for Corbet and best motion picture (drama).
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Nominated for: Best picture, director, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, original screenplay, production design, cinematography, film editing and original score.
Where to watch: Still playing in theaters.
A Complete Unknown (8 nominations)
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Timothée Chalamet spent five years preparing to play Bob Dylan in this James Mangold biopic, which follows the singer-sage from his emergence in Greenwich Village in 1961 at 19 to his upending of the folk revival by going electric at Newport ’65. The title, “A Complete Unknown,” is apt, for the singer who’s a nobody at the start and still remains an enigma. How is Chalamet, who does all his own singing? “Excellent,” writes Burr. “The technical effort has paid off, but, more important, Chalamet conveys the presence of this upstart kid folkie — the certainty and sullenness, the ear that’s listening more to the siren songs in his head than to anyone in the room.”
Nominated for: Best picture, director, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, costume design and sound.
Where to watch: Still in theaters.
Conclave (8 nominations)
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Gleeful fans of “Conclave” described it as “Gossip Girl” or “The Real Housewives” set in the Vatican — a total compliment. German-Austrian director Edward Berger (Oscar-nominated for 2022’s “All Quiet on the Western Front”) has turned an airport paperback about a papal election into a riveting thriller that draws parallels to our own election process, with plenty of visual panache. “‘Conclave’ is a big old Dad Book of a movie — weighty, intricately plotted, suspenseful — and that’s the source of its old-school pleasures, guilty or not,” writes Burr. One of the biggest crowd pleasers of the year, it has secret plotting, gorgeous red and white colorscapes, a terrific Ralph Fiennes performance as the tortured cardinal overseeing the proceedings and an endlessly debatable twist ending.
Nominated for: Best picture, actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, production design, costume design, film editing and original score.
Where to watch: Still in theaters. Streaming on Peacock. Available to rent.
Anora (6 nominations)
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Winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, “Anora” — a raucous and ultimately heartrending send-up of “Pretty Woman” fantasies — has committed but one crime: peaking too early. Director Sean Baker (“The Florida Project,” “Red Rocket”) delves into what might really happen if a young, foulmouthed Brooklyn sex worker (Mikey Madison, in a breakout performance) got Vegas married to the son of a 21 year-old son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn). Madison spent a year training for the lead role of Ani, from twerking lessons to dialogue coaching. “A word about Mikey Madison in this movie: wonderful,” writes Burr, who placed it at No. 2 on his best of 2024 list. Yura Borisov also got a supporting actor nomination for playing a Russian thug who’s the only person who truly sees and empathizes with Ani.
Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, supporting actor, original screenplay and film editing.
Where to watch: Still in theaters. Available to rent.
The Substance (5 nominations)
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Earlier this year, awards pundits dismissed “The Substance” — a body-horror satire from French director Coralie Fargeat — as too gory and too out-there for awards contention. They’ve since been proved wrong. Demi Moore won a best-actress award at the Golden Globes for her fierce performance as an aging Hollywood exercise host who injects a mysterious green drug to live part-time as a version of her younger self (Margaret Qualley). Of course, there’s a catch, which plays out in very funny, very bloody ways. Burr calls it “a splattery farce, in which literal geysers of blood coat the walls and our culture’s worship of the body young and beautiful is given a high-spirited thrashing,” and Moore’s barn-burner of a Globes speech about being labeled a “popcorn actress” made her the instant best-actress front-runner.
Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, original screenplay and makeup and hairstyling.
Where to watch: Rereleased in theaters. Streaming on Mubi with a subscription and on Prime Video with a premium subscription. Available to rent.
Dune: Part Two (5 nominations)
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This epic sequel to Denis Villeneuve’s first “Dune” film from 2021 is a visual feast of sand worms and the hottest young actors in Hollywood — but its Oscars haul may have to wait until a third installment lands in 2027. Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday praised Villeneuve’s “brilliant” casting (Chalamet again, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Austin Butler as psychopath Feyd-Rautha), but found the rest of “Dune: Part Two” lacking. “”It’s all meticulously conceived and impressively staged, but becomes repetitive and monotonous, devolving for anyone not completely steeped in the ‘Dune’ universe into a hazy orange-and-ocher soup of dust, smoke, flames and sand,” she wrote.
Nominated for: Best picture, production design, cinematography, sound and visual effects.
Where to watch: Still in. Streaming on Netflix and Max and on Hulu, Prime Video, The Roku Channel and Sling TV with a premium subscription. Available to rent.
I’m Still Here (3 nominations)
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Fernanda Torres was the surprise winner of best actress (drama) at the Golden Globes in a field filled with movie stars. But “I’m Still Here” surprised even further by getting a best-picture Oscar nomination, as well as best actress for Torres, amid a field of Hollywood heavy-hitters. Set at the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1971, the film from director Walter Salles follows Torres as a matriarch who must rebuild her family when her politician husband is “disappeared” by the government, never to return. It’s a story of hope and resistance against far-right rule, based on real-world events, that has particular resonance in liberal Hollywood now — and is Brazil’s submission for international feature. Torres is only the second Brazilian to be nominated for best actress. The first was her mother, Fernanda Mantenegro, for Salles’s “Central Station.”
Nominated for: Best picture, actress and international feature.
Where to watch: Still in theaters. Available to rent.
Nickel Boys (2 nominations)
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“RaMell Ross reinvents the cinema as a language of hope,” Burr raves about the surprise best-picture nominee, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an abusive residential school for “troubled” Black boys at the end of the Jim Crow era. Ross took a huge risk by shooting “Nickel Boys” from a first-person point of view. No violence is shown on-screen, though we know it’s present; nearly 100 deaths took place on the grounds between 1900 and 1973. Instead, the audience is forced to bear witness, to see what the experience might be like as one of the teenage boys trapped there. The least commercial of all the best-picture nominees, it is the one that feels most like a piece of art that will endure for eons to come. “It is one of the most visually and sonically gorgeous movies of the year,” writes Burr, “and it is also a tragedy that left me weeping for two men, this country and the world.”
Nominated for: Best picture, adapted screenplay.
Where to watch: Still in theaters. Not available to stream but will eventually be on MGM+, followed by Prime Video.
Sing Sing (3 nominations)
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A drama from A24 about a theater program in a maximum-security prison, starring a cast of formerly incarcerated actors (plus Colman Domingo), “Sing Sing” earned a reputation for leaving audiences in tears. Domingo plays Divine G, an intellectual who claims to be wrongly incarcerated and prides himself on his skill at Shakespearean soliloquies. His foil is Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, playing himself, as a hardened thug with raw talent who sets Divine G on his heels. It’s “a tenderhearted, heavy-handed dramedy,” Burr writes, that recalls “The Shawshank Redemption” with its message that incarcerated men are people, too. (Maclin didn’t get a supporting actor nod, but he was nominated for co-writing the screenplay.)
Nominated for: Best actor, adapted screenplay and original song.
Where to watch: Back in theaters. Streaming on Apple TV.
A Real Pain (2 nominations)
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Jesse Eisenberg wrote and directed this awkward buddy comedy about two cousins with polar opposite personalities who take a tour of World War II sites in Poland in honor of their late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Much of the movie’s praise has gone to the now-Oscar-nominated Kieran Culkin as Benji, the live wire to Eisenberg’s staid, married David. (The title “A Real Pain” could apply to his character.) Burr calls it “one of the very best movies of the year” and writes that “Culkin walks a line between obnoxiousness and delight; it’s a performance both liberating and touched by a deeper, more inarticulate sadness.”
Nominated for: Best supporting actor and original screenplay.
Where to watch: Still in theaters. Streaming on Hulu with a subscription and Disney Plus with a premium subscription. Available to rent.
The Apprentice (2 nominations)
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For a time after the election, it seemed like this gritty, controversial movie about Donald Trump’s early years as a New York real estate magnate was dead in the water. Who in Hollywood would want to see “The Apprentice”? Enough to give Sebastian Stan a nod for his starring role as the future 45th and 47th president and Jeremy Strong one for his uncanny portrayal of the reprehensible Roy Cohn. And this after the movie faced so many Shakespearean distribution issues it almost didn’t get released at all. Stan’s Trump isn’t an impersonation, but “an unnerving combination of technique, impersonation and inhabiting,” Burr writes, while Strong’s Cohn is “reptilian and mesmerizingly assured, the snake in the garden of the Big Apple.” Another fun addition: Strong’s nomination sets up another matchup with his “Succession” co-star Culkin, who’s won nearly every precursor award.
Nominated for: Best actor and supporting actor.
Where to watch: Available to rent.
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