The prestigious AFI Motion Pictures of the Year list is out. The American Film Institute annually honors 10 specially chosen films and television programs (see separate post for TV honorees), and it is a key indicator of which way the Oscar winds may be blowing as well because its list often comes close to matching the Academy’s. In both 2024 and 2023, AFI matched the Best Picture Oscar nominees with eight of the 10 films.
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Avatar: Fire and Ash, Bugonia, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Jay Kelly, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sinners, Train Dreams, and Wicked: For Good all made the cut. Additionally, the AFI voted a Special Award this year to Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident. Special awards are occasionally given to international films without an American footprint, but such foreign Oscar contenders this year as Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent were passed over.
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Among eligible American films missing the list this year are F1, A House of Dynamite, Nuremberg, Rental Family and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere.
Netflix leads the list among distributors with three entries: Frankenstein, Jay Kelly and Train Dreams. Universal, with Wicked: For Good and Bugonia and Hamnet from its specialty unit Focus Features, also took three spots.
“For more than a quarter of a century, AFI Awards has held the flag high for community without competition,” said Bob Gazzale, AFI President & CEO. “It is AFI’s honor to celebrate these creative ensembles as one, as together they have proved the power of art in challenging times.”
Honorees will be recognized on Friday, January 9, at the annual AFI Awards private luncheon at the Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills, always a hot ticket and an awards season highlight.
