Oscars 2025: There’s Something Weird About the Best Picture Nominees

It’s entirely probable that scandal, gossip, politics and a general sense of “never heard of it before” have obscured something obvious and important about this year’s 10 best picture Oscar nominees. They’re weird — every single one. They take weird forms. The people in them do weird stuff. They induce weirdness in you.

Demi Moore jabs herself with a goop known as “The Substance,” and out of her split-open back climbs Margaret Qualley, who refuses to obey the goop’s rules and proceeds to ruin their life. I paid to see this movie in a packed theater on a Saturday afternoon, where we laughed, screamed and almost threw up.

Believe it or not, that movie’s a fairy tale, a funny one. So’s “Anora.” Here, the would-be princess is a Brooklyn stripper who marries a Russian nitwit whose oligarch father dispatches a goon squad to procure an annulment. If I told you “The Brutalist” ran for more than three hours and pitted a recent Holocaust survivor against his moneybags employer, maybe you’d ask which Oscar lab cooked this thing up. Then I’d have to tell you that the scale of this thing is so strangely intimate, so redolently personal, that it feels as much eavesdropped on as its premise sounds familiarly epic.

A sugarless Brazilian dictatorship melodrama (“I’m Still Here”) is up against a sugar-encrusted American dictatorship musical (“Wicked”). “Conclave,” the pick-a-pope nail-biter, relies on so much shanking that it feels like a prison movie and features more cafeteria grandstanding than “Mean Girls.” For a spell, the front-runner had been “Emilia Pérez,” a musical fairy tale whose songs flout rhythm and melody, and whose Mexican cartel overlord mistakes her transness for sainthood. Then its star’s bigoted old tweets and some harsh comments by its mighty French director (about Mexicans and the Spanish they speak) turned the Oscar race into “Conclave.”

Then, there’s “Dune: Part Two,” a movie so expensive looking, so smoothly, tastefully, artfully done that it’s easy to remain passive in the face of all that’s weird about it. But look! It’s Stellan Skarsgard, plumped, pursy and a-vape, as a baron whose kink, in part, arises from stadium-size gladiatoring. When this series is complete, many hours will have been spent watching Timothée Chalamet as the Chosen One amid a war over seasoning. It’s “Lawry’s of Arabia,” “Lost in Spice.” The race delivers double-feature Chalamet. In “A Complete Unknown,” he boldly reimagines Bob Dylan as a figure of tremendous petulance. Otherwise, it might be the most conventional thing you could hope to see about a once-in-a-lifetime weirdo; and that counts as kind of weird.