This year’s best picture race boasts a revisionist Western, a science fiction epic, a song-and-dance musical, a grim neo-noir, a shaggy ’70s comedy, an inspirational sports drama, an apocalyptic satire and three major prize winners from the Sundance, Cannes and Toronto film festivals. Academy voters obviously didn’t plan it that way, but it strikes me as an awfully healthy something-for-everyone representation of the year in cinema. And, in a time when moviegoing options for non-Marvel-obsessed adults have never seemed more endangered, that’s hardly nothing.
Best picture is the only Oscar category in which the winner is determined by a preferential ballot, requiring voters to rank all the nominees — this year, there are 10 — in order from favorite to least favorite. The Los Angeles Times’ film/TV awards expert, Glenn Whipp, has taken several helpful, heroic stabs at explaining the higher math involved, which basically boils down to the fact that a broadly well-liked movie may ultimately have a better shot at winning than a passionately loved one.
In any event, while I don’t vote in the Oscars, here is how I would rank my hypothetical best picture ballot, in order of least passion to most.
