Another Oscar Challenge

We had the last two films of the Oscar Challenge to get through this past week. This year has been more Challenge than Oscar for us, so we approached this last stretch with some trepidation.

The Oscar Challenge is a task that we set for ourselves off the back of our love for movies and stretching our watching arc. It started in 2017. Then we only watched the Best Picture nominations. It has since evolved. Every year we commit to watch all films that are nominated in the categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress.

This year the nominations were announced on Thursday, 22 January. The 98th Academy Awards are to be held on Sunday evening 15 March. We had thirteen films to get through, some of which we had already seen.

The ten Best Picture nominations for 2026 are: Bugonia, F1, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value, Sinners, The Secret Agent and Train Dreams. The additional movies came from Ethan Hawke’s Best Actor nomination for Blue Moon and the Best Actress nominations for Kate Hudson in Song, Sung Blue and Rose Byrne for If I had Legs I’d Kick You.

We had already watched F1 and Frankenstein. We had eleven movies to watch in just under two months. Not too bad.

Not too good

Not too good either. We never know what we are going to get and sometimes wonder at how the movies are selected. On the list were movies with boom-bash-American-crash stories, narratives that had vampires, the odd alien and some particularly unlikeable lead characters.

We sat through long, skin crawling soliloquies from a particularly unsympathetic self centred, chain smoking lush. We watched a woman on the verge of burnout behave so badly that we could not like her character. We were pushed to the edge of irritation by an overly ambitious, self-serving squirt.

The media reviews were sparkling and the praise high. These are Oscar nominations, after all. We just could not see it. Where the critics saw comedy, we saw unsettled behaviour; where they experienced charisma, we felt sleaze. Where some saw posey and lacking we saw sincere, heartfelt and full.

“What are we watching here?” asked Matthew in exasperation as we stared at Rose Byrne’s character in If I had Legs I’d Kick You acting like a rebellious teenager.

“It’s a hard watch,” Chantal agreed.

“I’ll listen to it in the background while I do something else,” said Matthew.

It was a hard watch. We got through it, though, both of us with half an ear.

It was us

Of course there were some nominated films that we did enjoy: Train Dreams, Hamnet, F1, Frankenstein, Sentimental Value and Song, Sung Blue. Just under half of all the movies we had to watch. We wondered whether we were being unnecessarily critical of this year’s batch, so we looked at the previous years’ lists.

Baring last year, which was possibly a worse Oscar year than this one, the other years’ films had been mostly enjoyable with only one or two that we did not appreciate. It wasn’t us.

Well actually it was us. We didn’t have the stomach or the patience to sit through self indulgent characterisations. or overly narrow cultural renditions. It could have been how we were feeling, maybe tired after a long day. It could have been our intolerance of more negativity in a world already full of it. Whatever it was, these films did not resonate with us.

Pieces of art

That’s life, not everyone is the same. Not everyone likes the same things. It’s what makes us diverse and different. Even though we did not particularly enjoy those movies, they did get us thinking. They were the topics of conversation on our walks and at the breakfast table. We dissected the narratives, the motivations and portrayals of the characters.

These films were well made pieces of art, whether we liked them or not. Art in its different forms calls us to stop and ask questions. It asks us to reflect on what we have experienced. Art can push us to consider our values and beliefs. It can even press us to change our views.

Sometimes we see common themes surface across the nominations, or areas of focus. At times meaning is made of the narratives in response to what is happening in the world at that time. We have seen the flavour of foreign films move from the Far east to Central and Southern America.

We have witnessed the inclusion of directors who are women and people of colour and the push back when these are absent. The Oscars are a mirror of the culture and predilections of the Western world in general and the USA in particular. It’s historical, mythological and slightly mad.

This is one of the reasons why we take on the Oscar Challenge every year. We get to experience movies that we probably would never choose to watch. In the process it stretches our viewing capacity and prods our tolerance levels. It offers us the opportunity to see the world differently.

We saw the beautiful retelling of a classic. We sat with the quiet pain of a man suffering excruciating grief in a rapidly changing world. We were exhilarated by the speed of fast cars and faster talkers. Our hearts were tugged by timeless lyrics of an evergreen star.

If it was up to us, we would award the finespun story of terrible loss turned into theatre as our Oscar winner. A wondrous work that would make Shakespeare proud. Hamnet was the shining jewel of our Oscar Challenge. Will it win? Probably not.

Until next time.

Yours in feeling,
Chantal & Matthew

22 Sets Without Dropping One. Then She Dropped the Final.

Aryna Sabalenka lost the 2025 Australian Open final and said she’d fix her mental game. She came back in 2026 having won 22 consecutive sets. She led 3-0 in the decider and lost five of the next six games to lose the championship. After the match she said her mentality throughout the final was “much better than last year.” If the mental game improved and the collapse still happened, the thing that collapsed isn’t mental.

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Credits for this issue — Images: 5th Place