Let’s rank the 2023 Oscar Best Picture nominees

(Clockwise from bottom left:) Triangle Of Sadness (Neon), Top Gun: Maverick (Courtesy Paramount Pictures), Everything Everywhere All At Once (Allyson Riggs), Elvis (Warner Bros.), Women Talking (Courtesy United Artists), Tár (Courtesy of Focus Features), The Banshees Of Inisherin (Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures), The Fabelmans (Merie Weismiller Wallace / Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment) Avatar: The Way Of Water (Walt Disney Studios), All Quiet On The Western Front (Reiner Bajo) Graphic: The A.V. Club

The 95th annual Academy Award nominations were announced earlier today and, like most years, the tale is told in numbers, including 11 (the amount of nominations bestowed upon Everything Everywhere All At Once and nine (the number of nods for The Banshees Of Inisherin and All Quiet On The Western Front). But there are other numbers that suggest, whether for creative or mercenary reasons, that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that hands out the Oscars, is ready to pump the brakes on its seemingly irreversible slide into irrelevance. The first number is 16.6 million, which is the number of viewers who watched last year’s slaphappy ceremony, the second-lowest since the Nielsen ratings service began tracking the show. As old-school Oscar lovers age out, the Academy, at long last, realized that their survival depends on enticing the TikTok generation and those between the coasts to tune into its glitzy gala.

And that leads us to the second crucial number: 1 billion. For the first time in Oscar history, two Best Picture nominees have grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, Avatar: The Way Of Water and Top Gun: Maverick. This is a promising sign that voters are finally using the extra five Best Picture slots added in 2009 for their intended purpose: to nominate big-budget blockbusters to get more people to care about who wins an Oscar. Of course, Way Of Water and Maverick helped resuscitate the theatrical moviegoing experience, which has been on life support since the beginning of the pandemic, so Hollywood can’t be faulted for rewarding them with a Best Picture nod.

Fear not, though, there are enough old guard voters to ensure that the Academy hasn’t totally succumbed to sequelitis. The 10 Best Picture nominees are collectively the most fair and comprehensive batch in years, ranging from the intellectual drama, Tár, to the one-percenter satire Triangle Of Sadness to Steven Spielberg’s remembrance from whence he came, The Fabelmans. So with T-minus 47 days until the March 12 ceremony on ABC, here are The A.V. Club’s rankings of all 10 Best Picture nominees for 2023. Spoiler alert: the Academy may deem them the best, but we may not…