The 2026 Oscar Nominations were announced last month, and as always, we’ll be screening many of the major nominees here at the library in the coming months. In the meantime, you can go on Kanopy and use your Livingston Library card to stream a number of notable earlier works by some of this year’s honorees.
Ryan Coogler is the writer/director of Sinners, which just set an Oscars record for most nominations by a single film with 16. But long before Coogler (Creed, Black Panther) became one of Hollywood’s hottest filmmakers, he made the short film Locks (2008) as a student at USC. The film, about a young man conflicted overwhether to cut his dreadlocks in solidarity with his cancer-stricken sister, won the Dana and Albert Broccoli Award for Filmmaking Excellence at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.
Sinners’ biggest competitor this year is Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, nominated for 13 awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Anderson has been nominated for ten Academy Awards for writing and/or directing throughout his career, including for There Will Be Blood (2007), in which a ruthless oil tycoon (Daniel Day-Lewis) feuds with an ambitious preacher (Paul Dano). While Anderson wasn’t nominated for 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love, an offbeat romantic comedy starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson, or 2012’s The Master, about the twisted relationship between a debonair cult leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a thuggish drifter (Joaquin Phoenix), both films are fascinatingly complex additions to the director’s stellar filmography.
One Battle After Another star Leonardo DiCaprio received his seventh career Oscar nod for his role as an ex-revolutionary racing to rescue his daughter (Chase Infiniti) from a psychotic military officer (Sean Penn). Two of DiCaprio’s previously-nominated performances– as a mentally disabled teen in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993, directed by Lasse Hallstrom), and as unscrupulous stockbroker Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013, directed by Martin Scorsese)– are currently streaming on Kanopy. Though not recognized by the Academy, DiCaprio’s performances as a charismatic con artist in Catch Me If You Can (2002, directed by Steven Spielberg), and as a resentful suburban husband in Revolutionary Road (2008, directed by Sam Mendes), were certainly deserving. Meanwhile, his co-star Sean Penn’s Oscar-nominated performance as a death row inmate in Dead Man Walking (directed by Tim Robbins, 1995) is worth remembering as well.
A dark horse in this year’s Best Picture race is Hamnet, a fictionalized account of how William Shakespeare turned unspeakable grief into transcendent art. Director Chloe Zhao, winner of the Best Director Oscar in 2021 for Nomadland, is nominated again this year for her work on the film. Kanopy is currently streaming Zhao’s first feature, Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), about Indigenous siblings coping with life on their South Dakota reservation. Hamnet star Jessie Buckley is the favorite to win Best Actress this year, and you can watch one of her earliest film roles in Michael Pearce’s Beast (2017), as a woman who falls for a mysterious outsider as a string of murders terrorizes her island home.
Also nominated for Best Picture this year is Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, a penetrating family drama about an accomplished filmmaker (Best Supporting Actor nominee Stellan Skarsgärd) trying to convince his estranged daughter (Best Actress nominee Renate Reinsve) to star in his next project. Trier and Reinsve’s previous collaboration was The Worst Person in the World (2021), a humorous but emotional story of an impulsive young woman navigating her thirties, which was nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Oscars in 2022. As for Skarsgärd, his role as a demanding professor in the Academy Award-winning Good Will Hunting (directed by Gus Van Sant, 1997) is pivotal to the film’s success.
Wagner Moura received a Best Actor nomination for leading an impeccable cast in Best Picture / Best International Film nominee The Secret Agent, a slow-burning political drama set in 1970s Brazil. Critics also praised Moura’s performance as a father seeking his runaway son in Father’s Chair (directed by Luciano Moura, 2013).
One of the most compelling real-life stories in modern cinema is that of Jafar Panahi. The director of Best International Film nominee It Was Just an Accident, about a mechanic who kidnaps a man suspected of being a sadistic prison guard, Panahi has been arrested, imprisoned, and banned from filmmaking throughout his career due to his defiance of the Iranian government. As a result, he has had to shoot many of his subversive prize-winning films in secret, including No Bears (2022), Jafar Panahi’s Taxi (2015), and This is Not a Film (2011).
Kate Hudson has been nominated this year for her heartfelt work in Song Sung Blue, based on the true story of a husband-and-wife Neil Diamond tribute band. It’s hard to believe it’s been over 25 years since she was nominated for her breakthrough performance as a rock n’ roll “band-aid” in Cameron Crowe’s 2000 bildungsroman Almost Famous.
Ethan Hawke grabbed his third career Oscar nod for his nuanced portrayal of songwriter Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon. His previous nomination was for another Linklater film, the experimental coming-of-age story Boyhood (2014). The Academy may not have rewarded his work Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007, directed by Sidney Lumet), but it’s a must-see for fans of crime thrillers.
Finally, my personal favorite performance of 2025 was Rose Byrne’s Best Actress-nominated turn as the overwhelmed mother of a sick child in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Also worth a look is her work opposite none other than Ethan Hawke in the romantic comedy Juliet, Naked (directed by Jesse Peretz, 2018).
–Joe, Adult Services & Acquisitions