I Watched Every Oscar Nominee for Five Consecutive Years - Was It Worth It?

Here we go again!

 On March 15, 2021, Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas announced the year's Oscar nominations remotely from a random studio somewhere in London. That's not how it normally happens, but it was the most normal I had felt since the beginning of COVID: sitting on my couch, watching two celebrities fake enthusiasm and struggle through names and categories. The feeling didn't last, but shortly thereafter I realized it was feasible - maybe for the first time - for me to watch every nominee before the ceremony aired. Not just Best Picture (my usual goal), but everything across all 23 categories. The ceremony had been pushed to the end of April and most films were getting digital releases as cinemas were either still shuttered or hobbling along with reduced seating and dodgy air filtration promises. I hadn't set foot in a movie theater for over a year, and this seemed like a decent way to fill the hole in my movie-loving heart.

I don't remember exactly when I committed to the bit, but my Letterboxd diary shows I started tagging entries with "Oscar completist" on March 20th after watching what would turn out to be the year's (undeserving) Documentary Feature winner, My Octopus Teacher. For five years I have managed to see every nominated film, employing the tag an additional 135 times. Granted, at least half of those are shorts, and a handful I would have pursued anyways... But that's still an awful lot of films to track down for no other reason than they are competing for that tiny golden man. Every year feels like the last time I'll do this, and five years is a natural off-ramp. But do I want to stop? Should I stop? And most importantly: Has it been worth it? I have conflicting feelings about the whole experiment. Probably best to break it down into pros and cons.

Let's get this out of the way first, though: I think the Academy Awards matter. Not because they really represent the cream of the year's film crop. The Oscars are far too political to be a fair fight. If you can campaign and bribe your way to the nomination, then credibility is lost. Also, ranking art is at best a critical thinking exercise and at worst toxic to the craft. If you consider the Oscars the final word in quality you stand to be disappointed. But they do get us talking about film - on a reliable schedule and in the best possible time, even! (What else are you up to in late winter?) And being included gives the movie a better chance of being remembered in an era of divided attentions. And highly deserving films make it through year after year. (My personal favorites have been in contention for at least one statue four out of the past five years.) They just always find themselves competing with vanity projects and aggressive Netflix entries. And they rarely win. But that's life. What loses is often more interesting than what wins, as general consensus tends to play it safer than I would like, in and out of art. With that in mind, let's start weighing the good and the bad.

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom: a lovely little film out of Bhutan that earns extra points for delivering on its titular promise.

Pro: Watched Some Great Movies, Especially the Shorts

Every year the nominees have presented me with something I would never have watched but ended up loving. There was Quo Vadis, Aida? and Opera in 2021, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom in 2022, The Quiet Girl and Ice Merchants and The Elephant Whisperers in 2023, Nyad in 2024, and Wander to Wonder and The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent this year. Several of these are short films, which are usually the most obscure pieces in competition and sometimes discounted for feeling more like pitches than fully developed projects. But every year one or two really surprise me. Last year I started tracking the Academy shortlists, which narrow the fields of 10 awards categories. All three shorts groups are included, with 15 titles listed in each. These lists are - as the Oscars Death Race community on Reddit reminds me year after year - invaluable to 100-percenting the nominees, as a great many of the shorts are available online before the nominations but will depart Vimeo, YouTube, etc. for theatrical runs or other streaming services once nominated. And like the feature-length competitors, I don't always agree with the Academy's picks. But we'll discuss that in the next section. I saw good art that I otherwise would not have seen because of the Academy Awards, and that is a huge plus for the completionist approach.

Mamaw would agree that more often than not Biopics are "Bad Terminators" - hers included.

Con: Watched Some Terrible Movies, Especially the Shorts

Flip side: For every short I have loved, there is one I have hated and two I have been indifferent to. The Feature Docs can feel like a chore, but most of the time they're better representations of global culture than the International Feature category and pivotal in bringing important issues to light. This year's entries, for example, are about war in Gaza, war in Ukraine, a military coup, sexual assault, and the horrors Indigenous children faced in residential schools. These are all tough films to watch, but they are also vital, well-constructed documents packed with empathy and perspective. Brevity tends to rob the shorts of nuance and that means they sometimes come across as exploitative/self-serving misery porn. This year's batch was surprisingly good, but most years I dread the non-animated choices.

Shorts aren't the only offenders though. There are the award-baiting biopics (Hillbilly Elegy, House of Gucci, Being the Ricardos, Elvis, Blonde, Maestro, Rustin, and Golda, to name quite a few). There are the Netflix and Disney entries that bought their way in (The Midnight Sky, Mulan, several of the biopics previously mentioned). Oh, and let's not forget whatever credits sequence Dianne Warren is attached to this year! She's nominated year after year for forgettable songs in forgettable movies (Flamin' Hot? Four Good Days? Tell It Like a Woman?) and should probably be her own Con category. I'm begging you, AMPAS, please give her a competitive statue so the terror can stop. No category makes me want to quit more than Best Original Song.

I knew from the poster that TÁR would be an all-timer.

Pro: In General, I Know What I Like

I am not a confident person, which means I gotta take my self esteem boosts where I can get 'em. If that means going through a yearly gauntlet only to come out the other side thinking, "Yeah, I would have been right to pursue/skip that one..." then I'll take it! Younger me eagerly sought out bad movies. I still appreciate the trainwreck charms of movies like The Room or Troll 2, and the cookie-cutter Hallmark-types have become a staple of the holidays around here, but time is finite and I try to spend it, well, obviously not wisely, but in a general pursuit of quality filmmaking. There are of course surprises, as previously mentioned, but many of those I simply might have missed without nominations. The Nyads - movies I was sure I would hate but ended up adoring - are rare. 100-percenting the Oscar nominees reminds me I know me. And that's reassuring.

What's the opposite of this feeling? Read on to find out!

Con: This Will Not Help You Win Your Oscar Pool and No One Cares That You Did It

There was never any reason to believe this wouldn't be the case, but I am no better at guessing what will win now than I was back when I only watched the big contenders. Maybe others see an improvement when they do this, but I still average probably 16 correct guesses out of 23, which isn't all that great when so many feel like a lock months in advance or a coin toss between two nominees. Plus, surprise is as exciting as a correct prediction nine times out of ten. So if you're in it for the bragging rights, the effort may not pay off. Not that most people will care. In fact, the stares you'll get when you tell others how you're committing nights and weekends to this superfluous task will come in one of two flavors: Concern or Indifference. There are the Death Racers, who are passionate and supportive... But Reddit is full of niche communities that will rally around anything. For example, have you ever been to the Never Broke a Bone subreddit? It's a delightful place to visit, but do I really want to move there? 

Googling this fella's name is a risky move.

Pro: Makes the Season Less Passive

"Tedium and drudgery are good for the soul," Boober Fraggle famously grumbled. I, unfortunately, tend to agree. I've used the word chore once already, and I probably shouldn't use it again. But for someone like me, creating a... challenge... for yourself keeps things fresh. I've usually seen the majority of the contenders I want to see before nomination morning. Oscar prognostication is its own industry, so there's usually a general sense of what names we're about to see. There are fun, if not too far-fetched, surprises ("Nickel Boys for Best Picture!") and snubs ("But not for Cinematography??"), but unless they're still awaiting release in my area, my Oscar-specific watchlist is going to be short without all the picks I would have ignored. Making myself watch everything means that I stay busy until the end, and more than once I've cut it close. The season stays fresh because I'm still working up to it. Sure there's the Prestige Junkie podcast or Vulture's Movies Fantasy League and Joe Reid's accompanying newsletter each week to remind us that projections are always shifting, but if you want to feel like you're part of it, make yourself sweat a little.

An exception to example of the following.

Con: Ignorance Is Bliss Opportunity

When you haven't seen it, a winning film has potential. When you've seen everything, the Oscar ceremony becomes the crescendo. Best Picture gets called, the whole team rushes the stage, and unless something crazy happens, the dopamine drop is eminent. I've been left with an abrupt feeling of, "Huh, now what?" more than once in the past five years. It doesn't help that I usually procrastinate and end up rushing and am reminded as soon as it's over that I've invested heavily in something that ultimately has little to do with me and doesn't offer anything but another go 10 months from now... And that's ultimately the problem. The journey becomes the destination. When I was little, one of the major thrills of the Oscars was being introduced to an array of new movies via clips and speeches. To complete something is to reach the end. And that's not always as fun. Just ask anyone who finished Lost.

(Got 'em! Goin' out on an outdated zinger... Jeez.)

Me at the end of Awards Season.

Tallying the Results

So how does this all add up? To me, it feels like the Cons outweigh the Pros, which here in the home stretch I recognize do sometimes sound like veiled Cons. I'm nowhere close to "The Oscars belong in the In Memoriam section," but the award for Best Part-Time Obsession is probably going to someone else this year. I don't regret the time I've spent doing this, and I don't feel better or worse about the Academy Awards as a result. In fact, it occurs to me now how little the Oscars themselves factor into my assessment. Awards lists were foundational for me in my youth. I look forward to them every year. The telecast has always been my Super Bowl, and there's not much that could change that. I don't feel like the awards matter less because mediocre-to-bad movies make the list - or that Best Original Song is such a reliably uninspiring category. It's kind of humbling, actually. 2025 is atypical though: I'm more excited to see what Conan and his team do with the show than I am seeing who wins. But the host isn't usually someone this in my wheelhouse. Nevertheless, the Academy Awards will remain an important facet of my goofy little life.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: While certainly not a waste of time, I just don't think watching everything elevates the experience enough to justify the time spent. If we're being honest - not to get too real - this project has largely been a coping mechanism. I started this endeavor during the pandemic, hid behind it through some difficult times, and let it steal focus away from the mess our world is currently in. (Is the past couple days the reason I started writing this? MAYBE.) Somewhere along the way it became more of a crutch than anything else, and I should probably touch grass/go do something more productive for a while. Also, A-List is bumping the limit up to four movies a week and I might be going back to school this year. If both those things happen, this issue will see itself out. Yes, I should stop regardless. But that is how I always feel at this point. We might get to January 2026 and find the ratio of watched to not is too good to pass up. Whatever happens, I can guarantee you this: I will never again watch a movie just because it garnered Dianne Warren another nomination. That version of me is dead.

Take care of each other. Enjoy the Oscars. Talk at you later.

-Matt