This year's best picture Oscar nominees include two literary adaptations, two blockbuster sequels, two movies with titles sporting some variation on the word "tar," two movies featuring violent shipwrecks, two movies with much-abused donkeys and two celebrity biopics (though only if you count "Tár," as I'm tempted to do). Do with that information what you will; in the meantime, and in keeping with the preferential ballot used for this most important of categories, I am going to rank all 10 best picture nominees, in order from worst to best. Here they are:
10. 'Elvis'
It's not a bad roster of nominees that bottoms out with a movie as grand, ambitious and unruly as this one. As a pairing of maximalist filmmaker and larger-than-life subject, Baz Luhrmann's raucous, rhinestone-studded mash note to the King of Rock 'n' Roll is undoubtedly one of his stronger efforts, and one that manages, through sheer bombastic intensity, to blow right past the pitfalls of so many indifferently conceived cradle-to-the-grave artist biopics. Messy and reductive though it may be, you can't accuse "Elvis" of indifference, or of a dearth of passion or conviction. Nor can you fault Austin Butler, giving one of the better Oscar-nominated biopic star turns in recent memory; however still attached he may be to Elvis' accent off-screen, he never settles for easy mimicry.
