2026 Oscar Nominees (pt. I)

Train Dreams

F1

Good morning good afternoon good evening and good awards season to you, my dear reader. Life has been stressful lately, to say the very least. I won’t even comment on the fact that the pedo-in-chief just started a war, at the risk of trivializing the horrors that have just taken place. I think it goes without saying that my least favorite season (Spring) is off to a rocky start, but I’m here to finally wrap up the other tumultuous season we’ve been imbued in: awards season. In a year with numerous deaths and disorder that have further opened the door to fascism, talking about this frivolous topic seems more tone-deaf than ever. But I hope you’ll forgive me for finding comfort in discussing the movies up for prestige this year, and taking solace in dissecting the expensive couture garments adorning each film star, because it brings me joy and a fleeting sense of purpose in this bizarre and often-depressing time. Though every Oscars race throughout time has featured similar themes, nepo dynasties, and even controversies, the films on the roster this year are, at the very least, interesting and somewhat different. This isn’t a my-eyes-see-Oppenheimer year, where one film swept every category, rendering the event far less competitive and as a result, less thrilling to watch. This is a year of wildcards and dark horses, where genre and international films have been given more attention than usual, and some of the winners of the pre-req awards have been reflective of what the populace actually viewed and appreciated this year. Let’s briefly talk about the Best Picture race. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners—which is my undisputed favorite film of last year, a film I saw thrice in theaters and have not stopped talking about—has made history with 16 Oscar nominations, and this feels like a victory for underdogs, people of color, vampire enthusiasts, horror film connoisseurs, and in general, people with good taste. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is nominated for 9 awards which is exciting, but I am particularly excited for Jacob Elordi’s Best Supporting Actor nom—he is continually proving that he is one to watch, admire, swoon over, etc. If Sinners doesn’t sweep (my preference) then it might be Paul Thomas Anderson’s cathartic and wonderfully cinematic One Battle After Another, which has garnered annoying discourse on the internet, when I find that the over-hyped and overwhelming Marty Supreme (also with 9 noms) actually deserves annoying discourse. I can’t even get into how frustrating Marty Supreme was, despite Gwyneth Paltrow, Tyler the Creator, Timothée Chalamet all turning out impressive performances. Still, it’s looking like it’s going to be Timothée’s year to finally win Best Actor, despite the increasingly-suspicious Safdie-bros-beef. (But let’s be real: if he wins, I will be pretending Timothée won for Call Me By Your Name, as he was meant to.) I won’t say much about Bugonia, because like most Yorgos Lanthimos movies, I hated it! But at least he had the decency to cast my crush Stavros Halkias, who I can’t wait to see on that red carpet. I loved Sentimental Value and I love Renate Reinsve, and I know many other viewers did as well, but I wonder if the Academy is sentimental enough to actually give the film any of the many nominations it has received. That leaves us with four Best Picture nominees, yet to be picked apart by yours truly, so let’s dive right into two right now.

Let’s begin with the more serious of tonight’s two entries into the Academy, a film that I knew would be sad, I prepared myself to be sad for, and yet ironically it left me feeling nothing: this is Clint Bentley’s film Train Dreams. Adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella of the same name, Train Dreams documents the long and harrowing life of a man named Robert Granier (played by Joel Edgerton), and all that he experienced and witnessed in his 80 years on Earth. The film opens on a line that I found to be beautiful and mystifying: “There were once passageways to the old world… the great mystery, the foundation of all things, even though that world is gone now, you can still feel the echo of it.” Robert is born into the world on an unknown date at an unknown time to unknown parents who abandon him in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, where he begins his life, in search of a purpose he never quite nails down. As he grows up, he meets a young woman named Gladys (Felicity Jones), and fairly soon the two are married, build a log cabin by the Moyie River, and welcome a baby girl. As the film’s narrator states, “All the sudden, life made sense to him.” In early 20th century America, jobs are limited, especially as a new war begins, so unfortunately this means Robert has to travel to work. He becomes a logger on a team of men constructing the Spokane International Railway, and as the narrator explains, “His work took him far from home, and he worked with men from faraway lands he’d never heard of like Shanghai and Chattanooga… In ten years they’d build one out of concrete and steel, rendering this railroad obsolete.” When Robert is working, the lighting is darker, colder, the sounds of chopping down trees and men being injured ring loudly in his ears. The days and nights are long, the men barely speak to one another, and most unnerving of all is the cruel treatment of Chinese people, innocently, valiantly working alongside this team. When Robert is home, the lighting is brighter, warmer, it never seems rainy or cloudy, and his wife and daughter are healthy and happy and overjoyed to all be together. The trio have little picnics by their idyllic little slice of the river, they cook food and make fish traps, and Robert and Gladys are reminded why the time apart is worth anything at all. The big sad twist (if you can even call it that, given the trajectory of this film’s vibe) happens so early on in Train Dreams, that, quite honestly, it really didn’t affect me. I didn’t get a chance to connect with the characters who are taken away, and I wasn’t at all shocked when sadness came like a loud, jarring wave. So, on one hand, I was grateful to the creators of this film, for making its great big trauma so manageable, even if that wasn’t the intention. But on the other hand, there was still about an hour left in this movie, and I wondered if it would ever make me feel anything at all. The result was somewhere between apathy and strong emotion, where I theoretically cared about the outcome of the film, but found little stake in any particular character. There were moments of curious, compelling suspense that added to the “American folklore” vibe that this film was clearly going for, and the writing and the cinematography in some instances were genuinely beautiful. But the overall result was a bit flat for me, a bit too standard in the gratuitous grief department to really stand out in a year full of such disparate and diverse Best Picture nominees. Joel Edgerton led this film with ease, Felicity Jones was easy to root for, but some of the standouts to me were Kerry Condon, Nathaniel Arcand, and William H. Macy, who didn’t get enough screentime, in my opinion. It may not have been my favorite, but at least Train Dreams had an interesting, believable story, that was told in under 2 hours.

I cannot say the same for tonight’s next movie, a movie I knew I wouldn’t like, a movie that was not made or marketed with me in mind, but a movie I still approached with an open mind and an open heart for bro-cinema: this is Joseph Kosinski’s F1 (which also randomly stars Kerry Condon!). Though I was initially shocked to see this movie in the lineup for Best Picture noms, I reminded myself that there is always at least one entry that buys its way in, and given Apple’s more prestigious films that have (more understandably) earned Oscar noms in recent years, I think it’s safe to say the tech bros were feeling left out. Nominated for 4 Oscars this year, F1 was a project developed by Kosinski, Brad Pitt, Jerry Bruckheimer, and real-life F1 racer Lewis Hamilton, and while it was initially reported to have had a budget of $300 million, Kosinski later corrected this number to the modest $200 million. On the description for F1 on the Apple TV app, this movie is described as “action” and “revitalizing”, to which I said, “…sure, Jan” and pressed play. F1 follows Brad Pitt as fictional competitive driver Sonny Hayes, who, you guessed it, is a nomadic, rough-and-tumble, wannabe cowboy maverick who plays by his own rules on his own schedule. Sonny used to drive for Formula One, but due to a gambling addiction and a scary wreck he experienced, he’s been doing his own thing, taking jobs as a racer-for-hire for NASCAR and various other non-official, I guess more low-brow forms of racing. After nearly thirty years of competitive driving his way—which means living out of a van and never staying with one team for too long—Sonny is approached by his old Formula One teammate, Rubén (Javier Bardem), who, you guessed it, needs Sonny’s help. Rubén now manages the struggling APXGP F1 team, which just rolls off the tongue, and he pleads with Sonny to join. At first, Sonny laughs in his old friend’s face, but Rubén explains that unless APXGP wins one of the nine remaining Grands Prix of the season, his investors will sell the team. After Sonny begrudgingly agrees, he becomes acquainted with the team’s technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon) who is a *gasp* woman(??), and ambitious hotshot rookie driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris.) Sonny is old, Joshua is young, how will the two ever work together? Well, over the course of nearly three fucking hours, this movie is gonna show us. (For the record, real-life F1 races typically last under two hours, so I’m not sure why this movie needed to be this long.) As I gazed upon this generally dull film before me, a few things stood out. First, this movie was clearly extremely expensive to make, and I know the F1 crowd is generally richer than the NASCAR crowd, yet I don’t know any racing fan who actually paid to see this—only fellow film nerds. Second, Simone Ashley was fully cast and filmed in this movie only to have her entire role removed, and I really think she might’ve humanized the rookie character if she was cast as his love interest—which I’m assuming is the only purpose another woman in this movie would’ve served. And third, Brad Pitt has certainly had some kind of work done to his face, and I need to hear from some TikTok doctors about what those procedures might’ve been, though no amount of surgery could take away the fact that he abused his wife and children. And I have to wonder, did Brad Pitt feel at all humiliated watching his own geriatric ass on screen, trick-driving while a Chris Stapleton song assures the audience that “I’m just as bad as I used to be”? Since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I can tell that Brad Pitt thinks he’s Robert Redford or Paul Newman, but he’s not even Bing Crosby. Clearly, F1 was technically challenging to make—capturing each swiftly-paced race and giving attention to every nook and cranny of these unbelievably expensive cars was likely quite the feat. Apple even designed a custom onboard camera for the car based on an iPhone and powered by its A-series system on a chip. But I wish that same passion, care, and painstaking time was spent (even slightly more) on the script. Every problem presented to us in F1 is unbelievably low stakes for a movie about such a high-stakes sport. Are these two cross-armed-opposite leads ever gonna respect each other? Yeah :) Is this underdog team even capable of winning? Oh yeah :) Is Brad Pitt gonna get to fuck that hot nerdy chick? Hell yeah :) As I’ve explained on this blog, many times, I have a soft spot for bro cinema, and the mindless beauty that a team of men can bring to a movie about a team of men. But F1 was almost clinically bro-tastic. It lacked the humor and thrills and harebrained hijinks of a proper bro movie, while masquerading and marketing itself as the ultimate bro movie—a prestige bro movie, if you will. But a Hans Zimmer score cannot improve such a weak script, clever editing cannot help a movie that is so mind-numbingly mid in its execution of a half-assed hero’s journey, and Brad Pitt certainly cannot save a movie from being just like the other PR-crisis-induced vanity projects he does exclusively now. F1 was boring, it was long, and it was more predictable than an episode of Entourage—without any of the fun actor cameos but all of the pandering to men. Well that’s all the time and energy I have left in me for these movies, but we’re in the home stretch of this Oscar race, divas. Until next time, zoom zoom.