The nominees for the 93rd Academy Awards were announced Monday morning and the vast majority of them are available to watch right away, due to a combination of the pandemic prompting a shift toward home viewing, an abundance of streaming exclusives and the decision to delay the ceremony until late April. There are two prominent exceptions, however: “Judas and the Black Messiah,” a nominee for six awards, including best picture, premiered on HBO Max and theaters on the same day, but its streaming window expired Sunday night. Another multiple nominee, “The Father,” up for best picture and best actor for Anthony Hopkins, is currently in theaters only, but is scheduled to arrive on premium video on demand (PVOD) on March 26. Here’s a complete rundown of where to find all the major awards hopefuls.
‘Nomadland’
Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, adapted screenplay, cinematography and editing.
How to watch: Stream it on Hulu.
In her follow-up to “The Rider,” the director Chloe Zhao again ventures into the harsh, beautiful world of the American West, where another maverick faces an uncertain future. Left jobless and houseless after a mine closure, Fern (Frances McDormand) is a widow living out of her van, roaming the country while picking up odd jobs. She finds a community of sorts in other modern-day “nomads” who have made a place for themselves in the open country, where the possibilities of true freedom are checked by the anxiety of a hand-to-mouth existence.
Nominated for: Best picture, director, actor, supporting actress, cinematography, production design, score, sound, costume design, and makeup and hairstyling.
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
Based on a screenplay by his late father Jack, David Fincher’s sumptuous evocation of Hollywood’s Golden Age is principally about Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) and the tortured process of writing “Citizen Kane” for Orson Welles. But “Mank” opens up into a much more expansive survey of the studio system, the media and the California political scene in the ’30s and early ’40s, which include run-ins with power brokers like the MGM boss Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) and William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), the glowering inspiration for Charles Foster Kane. The movie also spends time with Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), an actress trailed by scandal.
Read the New York Times review.
‘Minari’
Nominated for: Best picture, director, actor, supporting actress, original screenplay and score.
How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.
Drawn from his own childhood experiences, Lee Issac Chung’s finely wrought drama starts with a Korean-American family moving to a plot of untilled land in rural Arkansas in the 1980s. With tensions already high between Jacob (Steven Yeun) and his wife, Monica (Yeri Han), who doesn’t share his optimism over the farm’s potential to yield a fortune in Korean vegetables, the two struggle to settle into a place where language and cultural barriers are high. Their children are a worry, too, particularly a young son (Alan Kim) with a heart condition and no easy access to a hospital.
Read the New York Times review.
‘Promising Young Woman’
Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, original screenplay and editing.
How to watch: Buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. (It will be available to rent on the same sites Tuesday.)
Bored barista by day, vengeful honey pot by night, Cassie (Carey Mulligan) feigns drunkenness in nightclubs and on dates as a way of trapping men eager to take advantage of vulnerable women. In her icy debut feature, the writer-director Emerald Fennell, who worked on the third season of “Killing Eve,” gradually digs into Cassie’s past as a med-school student, which ended abruptly after a traumatic incident. As she audaciously and methodically responds to this wrongdoing, Cassie enters into a relationship with a former classmate (Bo Burnham), but her experiences with predatory men makes it difficult for her to let down her guard.
Read the New York Times review.
‘Sound of Metal’
Nominated for: Best picture, actor, supporting actor, original screenplay, sound and editing.
How to watch: Stream it on Amazon Prime.
With all the visceral force of its hero’s occupation, Darius Marder’s drama chronicles the decline of Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a punk-metal drummer who starts to lose his hearing, which threatens not only his livelihood but also his tenuous grip on sobriety. When Ruben inevitably bottoms out, his bandmate and girlfriend, Lou (Olivia Cooke), cajoles him into joining a commune specifically for deaf addicts, run by a gentle but tough-minded Vietnam veteran (Paul Raci). Ruben’s impatience in accepting his condition leads him to seek cochlear implants, but there are unseen obstacles that threaten his recovery, his relationships and his long-term mental health.
Read the New York Times review.
‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’
Nominated for: Best picture, supporting actor, original screenplay, cinematography, song and editing.
How to watch: Stream in on Netflix.
Aaron Sorkin knows his way around newsrooms, boardrooms, conference rooms, poker rooms and courtrooms — anywhere that powerful people can gather (or walk-and-talk) for snappy, consequential conversations about important things. Returning to the legal drama for the first time since “A Few Good Men,” the film that launched his screenwriting career, Sorkin revisits the unconventional and politically loaded trial of activists accused of fomenting violence around the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The defendants are a motley bunch, ranging from moderate campus liberals to hippie provocateurs to a Black Panther leader, all wrangled together to fight a dubiously broad conspiracy charge.
Read the New York Times review.
‘One Night in Miami’
On Feb. 25, 1964, the boxer Cassius Clay, not yet known as Muhammad Ali, squared off in a title bout against Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship. With shades of Nicolas Roeg’s “Insignificance,” Regina King’s lively directorial debut gathers some real heavyweights at the Hampton House after-party, where Clay (Eli Goree) mingles with other Black icons like the activist Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), the running back Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and the singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.). Their conversations reveal the private flaws and neuroses of public figures while also expressing a shared vision for freedom, prosperity and independence.
Read the New York Times review.
‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’
Nominated for: Best actor, actress, production design, costume design, and makeup and hairstyling.
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
As a gifted, swaggering, mercurial jazz trumpeter whose ambitions mask an anger and pain that simmers beneath the surface, Chadwick Boseman gives a performance for the ages in this tightly wound adaptation of August Wilson’s stage play. Set almost entirely during a recording session in Chicago in 1927, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” works primarily as a showcase for actors like Boseman and Viola Davis, who stars as a demanding singer whose ensemble is laying down tracks for white producers. Tussles over the creative direction of the album lead to deeper conflicts over race and how much power even a revered Black artist can wield in white society.
Read the New York Times review.
‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’
Set to detonate for maximum election-year chaos, Sacha Baron Cohen’s sequel to the provocative 2006 docu-comedy “Borat” continues the cultural learnings of his Kazakhstan journalist after his previous adventures ended with a 14-year trip to the gulag. This time, he returns to America with his teenage daughter, Tutar (Maria Bakalova), and the two infiltrate the CPAC convention, a far-right anti-lockdown event in Olympia, Wash., and, finally, the hotel room of Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor. Baron Cohen’s willingness to put himself in harm’s way seems especially impressive in this hostile Trumpian landscape, but Bakalova’s up-for-anything intrepidness matches him beat for beat.
Read the New York Times review.
‘The United States vs. Billie Holiday’
Nominated for: Best actress.
How to watch: Stream it on Hulu.
Critics were largely unkind to “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” Lee Daniels’s biopic about the famed singer in the later part of her life, but Andra Day’s lead performance summons the voice and the heartbreaking trauma that shaped songs like “Strange Fruit.” Working from a script by the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, Daniels emphasizes the addiction and abuse that chipped away at Holiday’s psyche, as well as her relentless persecution at the hands of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Ironically, the one person who treats her well is an undercover agent (Trevante Rhodes) who develops mixed feeling about the case as he gets closer to her.
Read the New York Times review.
‘Pieces of a Woman’
Nominated for: Best actress.
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
Allegations of abuse against Shia LaBeouf brought the wrong kind of attention to Kornel Mundruczo’s uncompromising drama about the loss of a child and its ruinous aftermath, but Vanessa Kirby’s performance as a grief-stricken mother is not easily forgotten. Kirby and LaBeouf star as Martha and Sean, a couple whose marriage comes unglued after their baby girl dies during birth. As the two pursue legal action against the midwife (Molly Parker), their divergent responses to the tragedy proves especially isolating to Martha, who’s also dealing with her overbearing mother (Ellen Burstyn).
Nominated for: Best supporting actress and makeup and hairstyling.
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
J.D. Vance’s best-selling 2016 memoir was offered up as a window into the lives of poor, backcountry folks who supported Donald Trump in large numbers, but weren’t acknowledged by the country’s political and media elite. Critics were largely unpersuaded by the book and Ron Howard’s screen adaptation, but Glenn Close’s performance as Mamaw, the salty matriarch of the Vance family, got plenty of attention. (Not all of it great. She’s the rare actor nominated for both an Oscar and a Razzie.) The film follows J.D. (Gabriel Basso), a Yale law student, as he heads back home to Ohio to contend with various family emergencies, triggered by his mother (Amy Adams) overdosing on heroin.
Read the New York Times review.
‘Another Round’
Nominated for: Best director and international feature.
How to watch: Stream it on Hulu.
Poised between a boozy campus comedy and a sobering reflection on midlife crises, Thomas Vinterberg’s lively Danish film stars Mads Mikkelsen as a high-school history teacher who’s barely going through the motions as an educator and a family man. The morning after a delightful, liquor-soaked dinner together, he and his three colleagues (Thomas Bo Larsen, Lars Ranthe and Magnus Millang) decide to embark on an experiment: If they all day-drink to a certain level, perhaps the social lubricant will allow them to perform at a higher level. The experiment works swimmingly for a while, but the hangover inevitably sets in.
Read the New York Times review.
‘The White Tiger’
Nominated for: Best adapted screenplay.
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
The Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani started his career with social dramas like “Man Push Cart” and “Chop Shop,” about immigrants working on the margins of American society. His latest feature, based on Aravind Adiga’s novel, travels to Bangalore for a rags-to-riches story of Indian entrepreneurship, but “The White Tiger” has the same concern with the harsh inequalities that makes his lead character’s ascendence so rare. Cunning and shifty in his efforts to change his station, an Indian driver (Adarsh Gourav) ingratiates himself with his wealthy clients while devising an entryway into their world.
Read the New York Times review
Other Major Nominees
‘Collective’
Nominated for: Best international feature, best documentary
How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.