The 96th Academy Awards is set to air an hour earlier this weekend (on Sunday, March 10), which means you have even less time to wait to find out which movie from the Best Picture Oscar nominees will take the winning title.
Out of all the new movies of the year, we've been hearing that the frontrunners are likely to be Golden Globe favorites, according to the trade press at least, Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon. Of course, Barbie has a shot too, although in the face of Oppenheimer's incredible 13 Oscar nominations, we're not sure we'd be putting our money on Greta Gerwig's movie even though it's one of our very favorites.
Majority of the 2024 Best Picture Oscar nominees are already available to watch on the best streaming services, so if you haven't yet seen all of them then you can find out where to watch them in the list below. In most cases, a lot of the movies are available for purchase or rental as well.
American Fiction
- US: Now available to stream on MGM Plus
- UK: Now available to stream on Prime Video
- Australia: Now available to stream on Prime Video
This is right at the top of my must-see list: it's about a frustrated novelist and professor who writes a savage satire of stereotypically "Black" fiction, only for his stereotypes to be taken seriously and praised to the heavens as an important new work of Black literature. It's been nominated in five categories including Best Actor for Jeffrey Wright and Best Supporting Actor for Sterling K Brown.
Anatomy of a Fall
- US: Rent/buy on Prime Video / Apple TV Plus
- UK: Rent/buy on Prime Video / Apple TV Plus
- Australia: Premiered in cinemas on January 25
Winner of the Palme d'Or, this psychological thriller follows a celebrated writer whose life and career are turned upside down when her husband falls to his death from their chalet high in the French Alps. Her blind son is the only witness, and what begins as an apparently straightforward murder investigation soon becomes much deeper and darker.
Barbie
- US: Now streaming on Max
- UK: Rent/buy on Prime Video / Sky
- Australia: Rent/buy on Apple TV Plus / Prime Video
"Do you guys ever think about dying?". Sadly snubbed by the Golden Globes –although the furore over that overshadowed nominations for Latina, Native American and queer women – Barbie was a bubblegum blast that also sneaked some cutting observations about patriarchal culture into its highly entertaining adventure.
The Holdovers
- US: Now streaming on Peacock
- UK: Premiered in cinemas on January 19
- Australia: Premiered in cinemas on January 11
Paul Giamatti is a grumpy history teacher in a remote prep school. Forced to stay there over the holidays with a troubled student and a grieving cook, the 70s-set movie has been described as a "masterclass in melancholy" and another great film by Sideways director Alexander Payne. It's first and foremost a comedy but it's often as wise as it's witty.
Killers of the Flower Moon
- US: Now streaming on Apple TV Plus
- UK: Now streaming on Apple TV Plus
- Australia: Now streaming on Apple TV Plus
Scorsese's epic follows the horrific murders of Osage Nation members and the subsequent cover-up in a bleak, brutal and brilliant film that's part western, part crime drama, part howl of rage. A strong ensemble cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone; Gladstone won the Golden Globe for best female actor, the first actress of Blackfeet and Nimiipuu heritage to win the prestigious award.
Maestro
- US: Now streaming on Netflix
- UK: Now streaming on Netflix
- Australia: Now streaming on Netflix
Based on the real-life relationship between composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia Monetealegre, Maestro was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was named one of the top 10 films of 2023 by the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute.
Oppenheimer
- US: Now streaming on Peacock
- UK: Rent/buy on Prime Video / Apple TV Plus
- Australia: Rent/buy on Prime Video / Apple TV Plus
Bomb go boom! Man go sad! Christopher Nolan's atomic age epic is a bit more nuanced than that, of course, and it tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer's creation of the atomic bomb at the Manhattan Project during World War II. It's a Christopher Nolan film with all the spectacle and hard to hear dialog that entails.
Past Lives
- US: Now streaming on Paramount Plus and Fubo TV
- UK: Now streaming on Netflix
- Australia: Rent/buy from Prime Video / Apple TV Plus
Past Lives follows former childhood sweethearts Nora and Hae Sung as they're reunited in New York for one fateful week, and it's had the critics sobbing into their handkerchiefs. It's a film about longing and regret and that whole being human thing, and according to the London Review of Books it's "lucid and precise, intimately devoted to its strange lyrical sorrow".
Poor Things
- US: Now streaming on Hulu
- UK: Now streaming on Disney Plus
- Australia: Now streaming on Disney Plus
Adapted from the book by Alasdair Gray, Poor Things stars Emma Stone in a bizarre, funny and very, very strange take on the Frankenstein story that jumps genres and timelines to deliver one of the most unique and unusual movies in this year's shortlist.
The Zone of Interest
- US: Premiered in cinemas on December 15, 2023
- UK: Premiered in cinemas on February 2, 2024
- Australia: Premiered in cinemas on February 22, 2024
Based on the novel by Martin Amis, this deeply disturbing film shows the family life of Rudolf Höss, a mid-ranking SS officer who works on the other side of his garden wall. His workplace is the Auschwitz death camp but we never see inside it; instead, the camera remains on the family home side of the wall, where children play and gunshots ring out in the distance.
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