LOS ANGELES — This was a year of big swings and I'm not just talking about Timothée Chalamet's ping-pong serve. The Academy Awards feel like they're in motion, too — a body less affixed to an idea of what a best picture contender is and more willing to race after talent from around the globe. But they can't all be winners.

Here's my ranking of the 10 nominees, from whiff to smash.

10. 'Hamnet'

Chloé Zhao's ye olde dysfunctional marriage weepie deserved a supporting actor nomination for 12-year-old Jacobi Jupe, who is so heartbreaking as William Shakespeare's brave son that he casts a spell over the movie. He turns on the waterworks; his parents Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley just come off soggy. As with Maggie O'Farrell's original novel, "Hamnet" soft-pedals the reveal that Mescal's pasty, ordinary-seeming father of three is the greatest wordsmith in English literature. Frankly, even after we find out, it's impossible to believe. Unlike "Shakespeare in Love," the script doesn't have Tom Stoppard punching up the dialogue. Audiences who endured the Miramax era have been browbeaten to believe that the best picture Oscar should go to a period piece that chokes out a sob from audiences. Get me to a nunnery, but I'm weary of presenting filmland's biggest honor to the kind of movie people rarely want to watch twice.

9. 'F1'

Nominating this popcorn trifle for best picture is silly, but at least it didn't get a screenplay nod for a script that's simply: See Brad Pitt go, go, go. Still, I'll admit that I recommended this rumbler to everyone who wanted an excuse to speed to the multiplex. (I elbowed my uncle, a hobbyist racer, to go see it a half-dozen times.) Not once in 'F1' does it feel like we're invested in Pitt's bizarrely constructed character, a throwback fossil with jokey Gen Z tattoos. The movie is fueled by pure star power and you can't fault Oscar voters for huffing its fumes.

8. 'Sentimental Value'

Director Joachim Trier's follow-up to 2021's "The Worst Person in the World" also feels like it's playing a dated version of the Oscar game. "Sentimental Value's" scenes of bittersweet family disconnection are well done, but I kept feeling like the movie really wanted to be a chippy satire about the movie business. Trier has so much to say about the modern film industry and what he sees as a soul-deep mismatch between art-house cinema and Netflix streaming that his own leading lady, the lanky, depressive Renate Reinsve, sidles off in the second half and isn't particularly missed. We're more taken by the scenes in which her father, Stellan Skarsgård's faded filmmaker Gustav, dusts off his moth-eaten charisma to charm Elle Fanning's Hollywood starlet into doing his new project. I'm aching to know which old director inspired Gustav (and whether they've seen the film).

7. 'Frankenstein'

Suturing Mary Shelley's novel to his own 21st century anti-technocrat ferocity, Guillermo del Toro cranked up his ambitions in every element from costumes to cinematography and thrillingly brought his favorite ghoul to life. (Only the CG wolves were a whiff.) Del Toro's "The Shape of Water" starred a boyfriend from the Black Lagoon who seduced voters into awarding it best picture and best director in 2018. "Frankenstein" is better. But I don't see Del Toro scaring up enough ballots to repeat that success.

6. 'The Secret Agent'

Kleber Mendonça Filho's Carnival-set drama about a watchful man (Wagner Moura) attempting to survive the 1970s Brazilian military dictatorship is so light on its feet that it's tough to hang on to. It's a serious story coated in slippery sunscreen. The threat of death and/or disappearance is real, even as the mood is dangerously groovy. This solid, slightly-overlong watch is best at capturing how time and trauma turn daily life into valuable history. Here, present-day students rewind old audio tapes to hear a band of underground revolutionaries risk their necks for a better tomorrow. From vintage polo shirts to retro radio reports, Filho faithfully recreates the era to prove that the bad times did happen. Having witnessed former President Jair Bolsonaro's attempted coup in 2022, he knows how easy it is to rewrite the past.

5. 'Marty Supreme'

What will come first: Josh Safdie wins an Oscar or someone has a heart attack watching one of his movies? The former preferably, but I hope he never stops jack-hammering on my nervous system. A salute to the madcap misadventures of a real life ping-pong hustler, "Marty Supreme" is an '80s movie in '50s clothing, an empathy-mangling satire where the quest for success comes at a high cost (and triggers buckets of cold sweat.) The ding on the movie is that Timothée Chalamet's self-centered striver isn't that different from Adam Sandler's diamond hawker in "Uncut Gems." They're both the toxic products of a winner-take-all society. But here, Safdie smartly ships his main character around the world to see how outsiders react to the mad energy of New York.

4. 'Train Dreams'

Lord knows how director Clint Bentley managed to shoot half of his American epic at magic hour but the result is, well, magical. At the dawn of the 20th century, a logger played by Joel Edgerton tromps through the woods cutting down timber that will build a country which is rapidly leaving him behind. The film vaults across eight decades, but tonally it's as still as a rabbit snare, letting the audience creep up to its theme of human obsolescence. When the trap snapped at the end, I shed a well-earned tear. Pity that "Train Dreams" will likely go as unheralded as Edgerton's humble laborer.

3. 'Bugonia'

Yorgos Lanthimos' sci-fi black comedy tickles the audience to wonder if Emma Stone's pharmaceutical CEO could really be an alien. Kidnapped by bumbling conspiracy theorists Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis, Michelle stares at her jailer calmly as she pitches them on letting her go. "Could we have a dialogue about this?" she says with a smile. This girl boss couldn't feel less human if antennae sprouted from her eyebrows. We're not rooting for her or her internet brain-rotted captors and ultimately, we leave the film barely rooting for humankind's survival. "Bugonia" looks too bleak to win best picture, but three decades from now, it might feel like it should have. (Same goes for Ari Aster's "Eddington," which deserves to be up here, too.) It's a pyramid of matches teetering on today's destabilizing reality — and Lanthimos likes to spark fires.

2. 'One Battle After Another'

Is "One Battle After Another" Paul Thomas Anderson's masterpiece? No, but this buoyant comedy-drama combines all of his storytelling talents: the ensemble world-building of "Boogie Nights," the shambolic misadventures of "Inherent Vice," the domestic inquisitions of "Magnolia" and the probing psychology of "The Master." Anderson's body of work is about the fight to make your mark in America — even when, like Leonardo DiCaprio's Bob Ferguson, you're more of a smudge of hashish. It's tempting to argue that "One Battle's" all-but-inevitable Oscar victory is a make-do for the half-dozen times Anderson should have won before. But then you cue up that first sequence in which Teyana Taylor's insurgent group, the French 75, liberates a concentration camp of Spanish-speaking immigrants, and "Battle" once again feels like the most vital film of the year.

1. 'Sinners'

What do vampires and Hollywood have in common? They're both thirsting for fresh blood. Finally freed from the preexisting Marvel and "Rocky" franchises, Ryan Coogler seized the opportunity to do something totally new with a sexy, gruesome bootlegger musical that drove a stake into the blockbuster blahs. "Sinners" is ambitious, perfectly crafted pop moviemaking that got pulses racing in the theater while burrowing earwormy ideas about music and liberation into your head. Right now, this town seems terrified that it no longer knows what audiences want. I suspect Coogler has an idea. Even if he doesn't win the big prize, give him the keys to the city.

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