Most of the top contenders can be watched at home. Here’s a guide to help you get a jump on the field.
The nominees for the 93rd Academy Awards were announced Monday morning and the vast majority of them are available to watch right away, due to a combination of the pandemic prompting a shift toward home viewing, an abundance of streaming exclusives and the decision to delay the ceremony until late April. There are two prominent exceptions, however: “Judas and the Black Messiah,” a nominee for six awards, including best picture, premiered on HBO Max and theaters on the same day, but its streaming window expired Sunday night. Another multiple nominee, “The Father,” up for best picture and best actor for Anthony Hopkins, is currently in theaters only, but is scheduled to arrive on premium video on demand (PVOD) on March 26. Here’s a complete rundown of where to find all the major awards hopefuls. Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, adapted screenplay, cinematography and editing. How to watch: Stream it on Hulu. In her follow-up to “The Rider,” the director Chloe Zhao again ventures into the harsh, beautiful world of the American West, where another maverick faces an uncertain future. Left jobless and houseless after a mine closure, Fern (Frances McDormand) is a widow living out of her van, roaming the country while picking up odd jobs. She finds a community of sorts in other modern-day “nomads” who have made a place for themselves in the open country, where the possibilities of true freedom are checked by the anxiety of a hand-to-mouth existence. Read the New York Times review. Nominated for: Best picture, director, actor, supporting actress, cinematography, production design, score, sound, costume design, and makeup and hairstyling. How to watch: Stream it on Netflix. Based on a screenplay by his late father Jack, David Fincher’s sumptuous evocation of Hollywood’s Golden Age is principally about Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) and the tortured process of writing “Citizen Kane” for Orson Welles. But “Mank” opens up into a much more expansive survey of the studio system, the media and the California political scene in the ’30s and early ’40s, which include run-ins with power brokers like the MGM boss Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) and William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), the glowering inspiration for Charles Foster Kane. The movie also spends time with Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), an actress trailed by scandal. Read the New York Times review. Nominated for: Best picture, director, actor, supporting actress, original screenplay and score. How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu. Drawn from his own childhood experiences, Lee Issac Chung’s finely wrought drama starts with a Korean-American family moving to a plot of untilled land in rural Arkansas in the 1980s. With tensions already high between Jacob (Steven Yeun) and his wife, Monica (Yeri Han), who doesn’t share his optimism over the farm’s potential to yield a fortune in Korean vegetables, the two struggle to settle into a place where language and cultural barriers are high. Their children are a worry, too, particularly a young son (Alan Kim) with a heart condition and no easy access to a hospital. Read the New York Times review. Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, original screenplay and editing. How to watch: Buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. (It will be available to rent on the same sites Tuesday.) Bored barista by day, vengeful honey pot by night, Cassie (Carey Mulligan) feigns drunkenness in nightclubs and on dates as a way of trapping men eager to take advantage of vulnerable women. In her icy debut feature, the writer-director Emerald Fennell, who worked on the third season of “Killing Eve,” gradually digs into Cassie’s past as a med-school student, which ended abruptly after a traumatic incident. As she audaciously and methodically responds to this wrongdoing, Cassie enters into a relationship with a former classmate (Bo Burnham), but her experiences with predatory men makes it difficult for her to let down her guard. Read the New York Times review. Nominated for: Best picture, actor, supporting actor, original screenplay, sound and editing. How to watch: Stream it on Amazon Prime. With all the visceral force of its hero’s occupation, Darius Marder’s drama chronicles the decline of Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a punk-metal drummer who starts to lose his hearing, which threatens not only his livelihood but also his tenuous grip on sobriety.
