A Conservative's Guide to the 2026 Best Picture Nominees

One of conservatism's enduring insights is that aesthetics carry real stakes because culture shapes the affections long before reason weighs in. That's why film is worth caring about. But caring about cinema isn't the same thing as treating the multiplex as a ballot box. That's what books and, God help me, our Twitter feeds are for.

What matters is where a film turns our gaze. Does it begin from a posture of gratitude for what endures, or does it stir resentment toward our inherited traditions and institutions? The former is in conversation with the conservative imagination. The latter might be well made. I might even enjoy it. But it's playing in a different key.

Notice I haven't said anything about a movie's take on whatever issue is dominating the news cycle. That's ephemera. Consider what stays with you when you leave the Vatican Museum. Is it where Raphael's frescoes fell in the papal intrigues of Julius II, or the glimpse they offer of the eternal? One is trivia. The other speaks to the Permanent Things.

With that in mind, here's how conservatives might approach this year's Best Picture nominees.

The Good
Train Dreams is the jewel of the lot. Clint Bentley's adaptation of Denis Johnson's novella follows Robert Grainier, a logger in the early 20th-century Pacific Northwest, across the quiet arc of his life. The film honors an ordinary man without condescension. Grainier does his job, tends his family, bears what comes. Bentley channels Terrence Malick, and while transcendence is never announced, it's hard to spend this much time among ancient forests and backbreaking labor without sensing Someone beyond the frame.

Sentimental Value is Joachim Trier's meditation on what family owes and what it costs. Stellan Skarsgård plays an aging filmmaker attempting to reconcile with his daughters following the death of his ex-wife. Trier treats the father's years of absence as genuine moral failure, not a pathology to be managed but a betrayal of duty. Crucially, the daughters are not reduced to victims. They have agency, flaws, and the burden of deciding whether to forgive. The title refers to the family home, passed down through generations. It's broken, like the family. They keep it anyway. The film understands why that matters.

F1 has been dismissed as popcorn, but form itself can carry weight. Joseph Kosinski shoots the racing sequences with the same visceral precision he brought to Top Gun: Maverick, and Brad Pitt reminds us why movie stars still matter. I’m glad the Academy listened to yours truly on this one.

Hamnet, Chloé Zhao's adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's novel, imagines the grief that preceded Shakespeare's greatest play: the death of his eleven-year-old son. The story is told through the eyes of his wife, Agnes. In that role, Jessie Buckley is devastating. The film's embrace of Agnes's imagined mysticism, which treats her turn toward the woods rather than the church as wisdom, complicates things. But the final 30 minutes are among the most powerful statements on art and loss in recent memory. Shakespeare alchemizes private agony into enduring beauty. Any film that awakens longing for one of Western civilization's great triumphs has earned its place.

The Mixed Bag
Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie's frenetic period piece, casts Timothée Chalamet as a 1950s ping-pong hustler. There's much to admire in the velocity, the editing, the period production design, and Kevin O'Leary is a revelation as the cuckolded tycoon. The film sees its charming, ruthless, sleazy antihero clearly. Unlike with The Wolf of Wall Street, you won't find yourself seduced by him despite your better instincts. You ache for Marty's comeuppance. It just never arrives.

I've argued elsewhere that One Battle After Another is less political than both its progressive admirers and conservative critics insist. Like much of Paul Thomas Anderson's work, it uses milieu as metaphor. Beneath the radical-chic surface is a story about a father trying to connect with his daughter (Chase Infiniti, in a striking debut the Academy overlooked), who is more emotionally mature than her hippie-burnout dad. Still, its sympathies, like Pynchon's, are ultimately with the left. I don't knock it for that, but it might explain the third act's egregious lapse that, for all of Anderson's gifts, is hard to overlook.

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is ravishing and confused. The film is saturated with Catholic imagery: the Creature raised in a cruciform pose, thorns haloing his head, Victor echoing Christ's final words. But del Toro wants the emotional power of Christian symbolism without the theological substance. Mary Shelley gave us a Creature who is fallen, capable of choice, and therefore capable of evil. Del Toro gives us Rousseau in Gothic costume. All that beauty, and nowhere for grace to land.

The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho's Brazilian thriller set during the 1977 dictatorship, is a competent genre exercise — a political thriller dressed in grindhouse aesthetics. Wagner Moura is magnetic, but the screenplay meanders, introducing characters who lead nowhere. The film's moral takeaway is unobjectionable (military dictatorships are bad), though I suspect its nomination functions partly as a rebuke of Bolsonaro. If the Academy wanted a foreign-language film on progressive grounds, Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice would have been superior on craft alone.

Sinners, Ryan Coogler's vampire epic set in 1930s Mississippi, arrives with a historic 16 Oscar nominations, triggering a curious amount of right-wing influencer outrage. The film is suspicious of organized religion and anchored in grievance. It's not wrong to be angry. Black blues musicians were routinely cheated by record labels, denied royalties, and excluded from ASCAP protections. Many died in poverty without headstones. The injustice was real, but a film can acknowledge that without dismissing the faith that continues to anchor black communities. What it nails is its treatment of musical heritage as a living inheritance, passed down across generations rather than frozen in amber. I'm especially pleased that Delroy Lindo, a man who has spent decades improving every film he touched, will see "Oscar nominee" precede his name. Would I have given the film every one of its 15 other nominations? Probably not, but it just wasn't made for me, and that's fine. Not all of them need to be.

The Hostile
The misplaced ire over Sinners feels like 2023 all over again. That year, Barbie absorbed the outrage while Poor Things — a far more radical film, one arguing that women's liberation could be found in Marxism and prostitution — sailed through unscathed. This year, Sinners takes the heat while another Yorgos Lanthimos film goes unexamined. Bugonia is premised on the idea that humanity is irredeemable and our extinction would be cosmic justice. I have a soft spot for satire. But there's a difference between a film that challenges my worldview and one that suggests I shouldn't exist at all. Unlike Larry David, that just doesn’t do it for me.

The outrage peddlers will tell you the Best Picture category is a wasteland. It isn't. Train Dreams alone is worth the price of admission — and worth giving thanks for. After all, what is conservatism if not gratitude that knows what it stands to lose?