Finalists: Vermiglio is a lushly executed rural saga in the last days of World War II when a war deserter joins the a large teacher's family, Babygirl is a surprisingly sex-positive erotic thriller about a CEO who risks it all to pursue unfamiliar sensations with a much younger intern,  intern,  and the heady dark comedy A Different Man details the psychic fallout when a disfigured man suddenly becomes beautiful [FULL TOP TEN LIST ARTICLE]

Semi Finalists: The action comedy movie-movie joy of The Fall Guy, a sad wistful funny road movie about estranged cousins and family history in A Real Pain,  a lingering poetic triple-threaded story of female friends in the big city in All We Imagine as Light, and the bold campy stylings of body horror The Substance  which performs double duty as an indictment of Hollywood's ageism.

Finalists: Payal Kapadia conjures so much quiet intimacy and lingering feeling in All We Imagine As Light, and Aaron Schimberg delivers his own brilliant screenplay for A Different Man with so many good choices that I can't wait to see what he does next. 

 Semi Finalists: Edward Berger maybe he's over-egging Conclave as one critic succinctly described, but I appreciated the elevation from potential B thriller to something special, Halina Reijn who exceeds all expectations with her finely told Babygirl, Mohammad Rasoulouf  for his pressure cooker helming of The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Julio Torres for his inspired Problemista vision, and Halfdan Ullman Tøndel for doing his cinematic lineage (Grandson of Liv Ullmann!) proud with the strange unsettling provocations of Armand.

Finalists:  I feel terrible leaving out Brady Corbet & Mona Fasvold' The Brutalist which has so many big ideas ricocheting around its sprawling narrative but in the end I guess I think Corbet's direction and the incredible crafts are the key to pulling all of it together and I prefer these five more focused triumphs above just a hair more... at least on the page. Maybe? Okay, it's a casualty of spreading the wealth!

Semi-Finalists: Justin Kurtizkes sexy melodrama Challengers gives Guadagnino so much to play with on either side of the net, Josh Margolin's funny and cozy Thelma makes the most of its miniature premise, If we were back in ye olden times and there was an Oscar category for "Story" I would definitely nominate The Substance by Coralie Fargeat, Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman recreate a lively historica night of entertainment with Saturday Night , Jane Schoenbrun crafts a haunting personal parable of the trans experience in I Saw The TV Glow, as two lonely souls bond over a fantastical television show until it becomes very real indeed, and we round out the top dozen with a Scott Beck and Bryan Wood's Heretic, a talky tense horror films that plays with our belief systems and religious histories

Finalists: Alfred Gough and Miles Millar's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice for their clever imagining of the futures of characters from Beetlejuice (1988) created by Michael McDowell & Larry Wilson, and I'm Still Here in which Murillo Hauser & Heitor Lorega adapt the Brazilian political/family drama from a book by Marcelo Rubens Paiva

Semi Finalists: Bri LeRose and Vera Drew find all sorts or richness in fusing a parody of DC's Batman universe with the trans experience in The People's Joker, Richard Linklater & Glen Powell obviously enjoyed moviefying an article by Skip Hollingsworth for Hit Man, RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes pay homage to Colson Whitehead's Nickel Boys as they riskily shift it to cinema, Justin Kuritzkes riffs on the novel Queer by William S Burroughs, and finally the underappreciated writer/director Marielle Heller makes daring choices adapting Rachel Yoder's feminist novel Nightbitch

Finalist: Adam Elliott's Memoir of a Snail  delivers an impressively confrontational intricately designed gothic tale of orphaned separated siblings and the often cruel fates that await them in life.

Semi-Finalist: Pixar's Inside Out 2  introduces delightful "new" emotions as we return to Riley's headspace as she enters her teenage years, Speaking of returns welcome back to  the return of the UK's best man/dog duo and their best villain in Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, and Orion in the Dark is an entertaining if overstuffed adventure about a boy and his fear of the dark.

NOTE: We only have three nomination spots a year since the Academy's rules for this are kind of crazy. You only need 16 features to trigger a 5 wide race with AMPAS. That's about a 33% chance of being nominated if you so much as exist! If Best Picture had the same ratio of existence to nominees, our Best Picture list would be around 80-90 nominees long each year.