The 98th Academy Awards were held on Sunday, March 15th, and suffice it to say, this was an awards season to remember. 2025 was an absolute beast of a year for cinema geeks and casual movie-goers around the world. Here in Bowling Green, the local theater, the Capitol, held a three movie Best Picture nominee competition. The three films shown were Hamnet directed by Chloé Zhao, Bugonia directed by Yargos Lanthimos, and Sinners directed by Ryan Coogler. All three movies were great in their own right, but only one could get the coveted Best Picture award. Except none of them did. More on that later.

Hamnet follows the story of William Shakespeare, the famous playwright, and his wife, getting married and starting a family. As the Black Death epidemic sweeps through England, the two youngest children, who are twins, get sick with the plague. In one scene of the movie, the healthy twin, the boy Hamnet, symbolically tells his dying sister that he will take her place, that he will shoulder the sickness and be brave. In the morning, the daughter is alive, but Hamnet is not. The movie insinuates/outright says that Shakespeare wrote his famous play Hamlet, which is about a grieving son, in his paternal grief over the death of Hamnet. Most historians do not actually know how Hamnet died, only that he died during this time period, so the Bubonic plague death is fictional. Nor do they know if Shakespeare actually made it back just as Hamnet died. In real life, Shakespeare probably would have only gotten news of the death days after the funeral, given how news traveled in the late 1500s. This is one of many historical discrepancies in the film, as it is based on a book, which is a piece of historical fiction. I particularly loved how Jessie Buckley portrayed Agnes Shakespeare, perfectly showing the pain of a grieving mother. The end of this movie made me cry real tears, and she deserved the Best Actress award she got for the role.

Next up in the marathon was Bugonia, which was… something. I actually really liked this movie despite the really weird and dark premise it is based on. Technically, this movie is a remake of a Korean movie called Save The Green Planet!, which is generally agreed to be more violent and darker than Bugonia, which baffles me. I have not seen the original, but Bugonia is dark and violent enough for me. The film’s main plot follows a man named Teddy and his cousin Donnie abducting a really famous CEO of a corporation because Teddy believes she is an alien empress. The film centralizes Teddy’s reasoning around many things, but the thematic symbol of bees, which Teddy keeps on his property, comes back again and again. With Jesse Plemmons playing Teddy and Emma Stone playing the CEO Michelle Fuller, the cast is stacked. Stone was nominated for Best Actress but lost to Jessie Buckley. Though Stone’s performance was great, I do not believe it was the greatest in the movie. Jesse Plemmons as Teddy was the heart of the film. Though he is later revealed to be a bit of a psychopath and eventually dies, Teddy is the human element that people latch onto and can actually relate to. I firmly believe Plemmons should have been nominated for Best Actor, which he was not. Also, it turns out she is an alien. 

The last movie was Sinners, which was an absolute powerhouse of a movie. Michael B. Jordan plays two twins, Smoke and Stack, who are ex-runners for Al Capone and come back to start a juke joint in their hometown in Mississippi. A young pastor’s boy named Sammy has an insane ability to play the Blues, so he tags along because he has an old connection to the twins. Eventually, on the opening night of the joint, Sammy’s epic guitar skills lure vampires to the place. What results is probably one of the coolest final standoffs in a film. The witty humor and action and the celebration of all different minorities in the US, makes me love director Ryan Coogler even more than I already did. I interviewed a classmate, Jaxon Meriss (a freshman), on what he thought about it, and he told me he really liked how they celebrated the diversity of American culture, and how cool the vampires were. He believes that Michael B. Jordan, who won Best Actor, deserved it for his ability to play a dual role with two different personalities.

So there you have it, a great marathon of potential Best Picture winners. Except unfortunately, none of the three won. That honor went to One Battle After Another directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Well, we’ll get ‘em next year.