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4) The Grand Budapest Hotel

So here it is. Wes Anderson is one of my favorite directors, and yet here he is in fourth place on my list. How is this possible? It by no means indicates that I didn’t love The Grand Budapest Hotel, because I did. And I actually have vacillated several times between swapping this film and Boyhood. I found GBH to be funny, bittersweet, and a joy to look at. It’s also probably about my fifth favorite Wes Anderson film, behind The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Moonrise Kingdom. I’m really, really glad that Anderson’s work is finally getting some love. I’m just a little taken aback that The Grand Budapest Hotel is the film that made it happen. Even so, I’m excited to watch this film, which features what I think is Ralph Fiennes’ finest work, over and over again.

5) Selma

Selma was hard to watch. It’s also a brilliant bit of filmmaking. I particularly admire that Ava DuVarnay chose to focus on a very specific episode from Martin Luther King Jr.’s life rather than try to do justice to his life in a long, overblown biopic. David Oyelowo gives one of the best performances of the year, and Carmen Ejogo is a revelation as Coretta Scott King. I appreciate that the film had to be brutal and unflinching in its observations, but watching such brutality and cruelty in humanity is tough to handle. I believe that Selma is an important film that deserved more attention than it received, though I’m not sure it’s one that I’d ever want to watch again. Under any circumstance, every film from #1 through #5 was in my top 10 movies of 2014, so as far as I’m concerned, there aren’t many ways the Academy can go wrong this weekend.

6) The Imitation Game

Even though I don’t love The Imitation Game, I’d be okay with it winning the top prize on Sunday night. I think it has some terrific performances (Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode and Mark Strong are all memorable), but that it’s a fairly straightforward, uninspired telling of a story that probably would be more interesting to me in book format.

7) The Theory of Everything

While I really enjoy Felicity Jones in this movie, I found it to be an over-long, manipulative, paint-by-numbers biopic. Maybe part of the problem is the fact that the film purports to be about Stephen Hawking, but is really more focused on his wife, Jane. I was interested in Jane’s story, but Hawking is such a fascinating figure of science that it feels like there is so much that is missing from the story. The Theory of Everything is perfectly okay, and I wouldn’t be angry if it won or anything, but it’s not a very worthy candidate.

8) American Sniper

I hated this movie. In 2014, I generally shielded myself from watching terrible stuff. Thus, I missed things like Transformers 4, Hercules, and the like. Now, I want to make clear that I’m a huge supporter of veterans and active members of the military. I closely follow groups like IAVA and have an intense interest in making sure that the men and women who have served our country receive the respect and care they deserve.
I don’t count myself among the people who believe that American Sniper glorifies war. In fact, I’d argue that it does not. However, I don’t believe that the film offered anything new or worthwhile to say about the Iraq War or the plight of the men and women who served there. In fact, I was actually bothered by the fact that “the enemy” was consistently portrayed as evil, with no real nuance or grey area to be seen. I’ve read since watching the film that Clint Eastwood intended it to be almost a modern western, straight down to the film featuring black hats versus white hats. If that was his intent, Eastwood did in fact succeed, but I simply don’t find something as fresh (and ongoing) as the war in the Middle East to be deserving of that kind of genre interpretation. Also, I believe that there is probably a pretty interesting film that could be made about Chris Kyle. American Sniper is not that movie.

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