Meet This Year's Oscar Best Picture Contenders

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor
and Keith Kimbell, Metacritic Film Editor – November 11, 2018

Though the next batch of Academy Award nominees won't be unveiled until January 22, 2019, there's already plenty of Oscar buzz for films that have reached theaters in the past few months as well as a few more due to open in the coming weeks.

While the top two or three favorites have been well established since the major fall festivals (TIFF, Venice) ended in September, the remainder of the best picture field appears to be up for grabs. Which are this year's likeliest contenders for the top Oscar? In the gallery above, check out all of this year's top prospects (in alphabetical order).

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Beautiful boys, erased

▣ Beautiful Boy Now in theaters (released Oct. 12).
▣ Boy Erased Now in theaters (released Nov. 2).

If you can't tell these two bleak coming-of-age dramas apart, you can at least appreciate the challenge facing the studio executives tasked with mounting Oscar campaigns for the two films this fall. Of the pair, Amazon's Beautiful Boy seems to have the best overall Oscar prospects, and should at least lead to nominations for stars Timothée Chalamet (playing a young meth addict) and Steve Carrell (who plays his father). The Joel Edgerton-directed Focus Features drama Boy Erased appears to be the better film (at least according to critics), with Lucas Hedges playing a young man forced into gay conversion therapy by his preacher father (Russell Crowe). It could be that neither one cracks the best picture field, though neither is completely out of the race, assuming that Academy voters can remember which is which.

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