The American Film Institute — known to some as the organization that once broadcast TV specials for the Top 100 Movie Lists at the turn of the century — announced their 23rd Annual AFI Awards, a Top 10 List of the year’s best movies.
The institute doesn’t name a single film as Best of the Year; it simply lists a Top 10 alphabetically. It also limits its choices to American-made or produced films.
The AFI list has arguably become the most accurate predictor of the Best Picture Oscar. Of their Top 10 choices, 6 to 7 per year usually go on to be nominees for the Academy’s top prize. In addition, the AFI Top 10 has always included the eventual winner.
In other words: just look below and you’ll see the next Best Picture Oscar winner somewhere in that list.
The only slight historical exception: 2019’s Parasite, which wasn’t an American film and therefore ineligible for the AFI list, but it was still given the Institute’s Special Award that year.
Similarly this year, writer / director Martin McDonagh‘s Oscar contender The Banshees of Inisherin is an Irish-based production that received the AFI’s Special Award citation in lieu of being ineligible for their Top 10. It’s also considered an Oscar favorite in multiple categories.
Notable omissions? Anything from a streamer. That snubs a number of hopefuls, from multiple entries on Netflix (the critically-popular choices Glass Onion and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio) to Amazon’s Thirteen Lives from director Ron Howard and Will Smith‘s slave drama Emancipation. It’s the first time since 2016 that a streaming title has not been cited by the AFI.
Other possible awards season contenders absent from the list: Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, Marvel’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the civil rights biopic Till, and the Brendan Fraser comeback drama The Whale.
Here are the AFI choices for the 10 Best Movies of 2022 (listed in alphabetical order):
AFI Movies of the Year 2022
Avatar: The Way of Water
Elvis
Everything Everywhere All At Once
The Fabelmans
Nope
She Said
TÁR
Top Gun: Maverick
The Woman King
Women Talking
Special Award: The Banshees of Inisherin
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Click on links below for other major Critics Group Awards and Guild Nominees that have been announced so far for the 2022 / 23 season:
The 95th Academy Award Nominations
Producers Guild of America Nominees
Directors Guild of America Nominees
Screen Actors Guild Awards Nominees
Golden Globe Winners
Chicago Film Critics Association
Los Angeles Film Critics Association
National Board of Review
New York Film Critics Circle