Good evening, Commentists! It’s Oscar night, and I’m here to set the stage for your finest cinematological dick jokes. Here are the nominees for Best Picture, ranked, and my predictions for which of them will actually win.

10. Darkest Hour

Impeccably acted and unexpectedly pretty to look at. There are no bad movies nominated for Best Picture, just great movies and good movies and movies I’m actually a little angry at for not being as good as they could have been, and Darkest Hour is just a good movie. It’s the year’s second-best film about the evacuation of Dunkirk, depicting an emotionally complex but morally sanitized Winston Churchill in one of his life’s more admirable moments.

9. The Post

Full marks to Stephen Spielberg and everyone else involved for turning this movie around extremely quickly. Spielberg got the film in March or so of 2017, and my first memory about The Post is being surprised to learn it existed, in November 2017 or so. It’s a smart, entertaining newsroom flick, not on the level of, say, Spotlight, but an achievement all the same.

8. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

This one, yep, this is the one that could have been so much better. Three Billboards is a great movie about the destructive power of grief, and a great movie about a woman raging against an uncaring patriarchal order (the dentist scene is an especially wonderful moment in this vein), a great movie about family violence, even, and a totally clueless movie about racism and police violence. Yeah, maybe it’s cathartic seeing a black billboard painter fearlessly face down a racist cop in the middle of nowhere, but it’s not believable. Mildred uses black people as goads and as props, to needle the police and to justify her crusade. This would be great commentary if Three Billboards seemed at all aware that this was what she was doing, but instead it mostly falls into the same trap as its protagonist. I went into Three Billboards wanting to love it unreservedly, and if McDonagh had been a little more realistic about his ambitions for the film, I’m sure I would have.

7. Call Me by Your Name

Look, I don’t want to tell anyone how to do their job, and even if I did I don’t think the casting director for Call Me by Your Name would listen, because it scored one acting Oscar nomination and could conceivably have had two more. But, Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer don’t look 17 and 24 years old respectively (the ages of their characters in the book Call Me is adapted from), they look respectively younger and much older, and while I don’t really think Call Me is a story about sexual predation, that’s a lot harder to reconcile with what’s actually onscreen than it needed to be. I don’t blame anyone for being uncomfortable with this movie, and it’s too bad because it really is beautiful and touching otherwise.

6. Phantom Thread

That’s a hell of a thing for Paul Thomas Anderson to spring on his audience right at the end of his movie, isn’t it? (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, trust me, just watch the movie. It’s worth seeing and it still hasn’t made its budget back.) You could reasonably accuse Phantom Thread of dragging for much of its runtime (my parents almost walked out of it from sheer boredom) but if you watch carefully, it’s always laying the groundwork for that one ridiculous moment. Side note: I saw that Jennifer Lawrence didn’t like this movie, which is funny because it’s about exactly the same thing as mother!.

5. Lady Bird

lady snow’s Best Picture for 2017, and with good reason. I’ll let her tell you about it.

“I liked when Lady Bird dove out of the car, obviously. She’s a character with a lot of spirit, and I definitely relate to her from my own time growing up. And I appreciated the way the movie handled depicting a dysfunctional family. Just because you’re dysfunctional doesn’t mean you don’t still love each other a lot, and this family clearly did.”

4. Get Out

Definitely one of the smartest films nominated for an Oscar in 2017. If I have a complaint, it’s that I didn’t find Get Out as scary as some of the other great horror movies of the year (Raw or It Comes at Night to name a couple) but it’s disturbing on another level and it does what I like most in a horror flick or thriller, manipulating the tropes of the genre to explore some deeper aspect of human experience, in the manner of recent classics like The VVitch or It Follows.

3. Dunkirk

Dunkirk, on the other hand, is precisely and perfectly executed real-life horror story where the horror is the entire message. Every aspect of Nolan’s production is fine-tuned to create maximum anxiety, including the odd-sounding but deadly effective story structure. I saw Drew Magary joke over on Deadspin that they forgot to write a screenplay for this movie, but while obviously Dunkirk doesn’t have the ornate dialogue of Call Me by Your Name or the exquisite character development of Lady Bird, I think Dunkirk‘s carefully sequenced cliffhangers are their own sort of great writing.

2. The Shape of Water

Guys, go see The Shape of Water, but please don’t take your kids. Some parents a few seats over from lady snow and I did, and it was deeply, deeply uncomfortable. Fortunately, I quickly forgot they were there, because The Shape of Water is a thoroughly immersive spectacle that never loses its human scale even though probably the most important character isn’t human and, um, has scales. Anyway, The Shape of Water was clearly made with so much care and love, and makes Sally Hawkins having a relationship with a fish man not just believable but totally compelling.

1. Mudbound

I Can’t Believe You’re Doing This Shit Again, Can’t You Just Pick From The Real Nominees Like A Normal Person: It’s my post series and I’ll do what I want.

No One’s Watching The Oscars Tonight To Find Out What You Think: Okay. I know. Fine. The actual predictions then.

Will Win/Should Win: The Shape of Water. This is so far from a sure thing, with all the hardware that Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri has picked up this awards season. I see Best Picture this year as eventually a two-horse race, and you can definitely make the case that Three Billboards should be favored, but in the end I have to trust the same gut that told me Moonlight last year and Spotlight two years ago. I just don’t believe the Academy will choose a film with Three Billboards‘ delirious highs but numerous glaring issues over a rock-solid, attentively crafted and deeply moving story like The Shape of Water.

Upset Special Two-For One: Lady Bird, Get Out. A lot of people who should know better are already talking themselves into a Get Out win. That’s likely to end in disappointment, but here’s the case both for both Get Out and Lady Bird: They’ve got directing, acting, and screenplay nominations. They’ve got substantial campaigns behind them, and plenty of popular support. And maybe the changing membership of the Academy makes it less like the Golden Globes and the guild awards. Both films are still pretty big long shots, in my opinion. If Lady Bird in particular wins, it’s probably going to mean I was wrong about a lot of other awards.

But What About: No, sorry, I think Dunkirk‘s fantastic, but it’s not going to happen. No, not even if it wins Best Editing.

make it snow is an alot of beer who’s watched alot of movies. Did you know that the red carpet is red so it won’t show bloodstains when Michael Shannon murders someone? Anyway, enjoy the show!

What’s that? I didn’t do original art for all the movies? I promise it’s coming, in a recap post after the awards.