The Oscars Will Always Choose ‘Hamnet’ Over ‘F1: The Movie.’ Your Church Should Too

I enjoy a good blockbuster. I’m not one of those people who think a movie has to be slow, subtitled, or confusing to be worthy of my time. Some of the greatest films ever made were made for mass audiences—Jaws. The Godfather. Schindler’s List.

Great art and wide appeal are not mutually exclusive.

But now it’s Oscars season, and with few exceptions, mass-market films don’t take home many Academy Awards. One of the reasons, in fact, for decreased interest in the Academy Awards is that so many of the films honored are movies so few people have seen.

This year’s Best Picture race gives us a clean, almost too-perfect case study in how Oscar voters think and, more importantly, who they think makes movies worth celebrating.

Look at the ten nominees:

Sinners
One Battle After Another
Hamnet
Marty Supreme
F1: The Movie
Frankenstein
The Secret Agent
Sentimental Value
Bugonia
Train Dreams

That is a genuinely interesting list. Most of those films are auteur-driven, strange, or both.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a Southern Gothic vampire film with 16 nominations. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another has 13. Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is about competitive ping-pong.

Each of these films carries the fingerprints of directors with distinct, undeniable visions.

Then there’s F1: The Movie.

And then there’s a typical Oscar movie, like Hamnet.

F1: The Movie is genuinely fun, technically impressive, and crowd-pleasing. It’s Brad Pitt doing what Brad Pitt does. It is fast cars going fast. As my friend Max said, it’s Top Gun: Maverick on a racetrack. The film made more money than any film in Pitt’s career.

Hamnet, on the other hand, is Chloé Zhao’s quiet, devastating adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about grief, Shakespeare, and the cost of genius. It is a film that will make you ugly-cry in the dark and keep you thinking about it for weeks.

The contrast between those two films—and how F1: The Movie differs from all the other nominees—is instructive. Only one of the ten films will win. And it’s not the one with the race cars. F1: The Movie will not win an Oscar, and no movie like it will ever win an Oscar.

Films like Hamnet are what the Oscars are for.

The Auteur Is Everything

Hollywood has always had a mythology around the singular, visionary filmmaker—the director as artist; the movie as an expression of one irreplaceable mind.

Chloé Zhao is exactly that kind of director. She won the Oscar for Nomadland, and even her stumble with Eternals didn’t shake her standing as someone who makes movies with something to say.

When Zhao makes a film, it feels like an act of intention. Every frame of Hamnet feels considered and deliberate. The Academy loves the kind of filmmaking that lets viewers feel a distinct human sensibility behind the camera. That’s what Oscar voters are drawn to. It’s not just a movie. It’s a vision.

Joseph Kosinski, who directed F1: The Movie, is an enormously talented craftsman. Watching it was one of the best theater experiences I’ve had in years. My wife, our two daughters, and I saw it in the theater three times.

But Kosinski is not an auteur in the way the Academy rewards. He’s a director of extraordinary technical achievement. That’s not a critique but an honest description.

F1: The Movie is the product of collaboration with Apple, the Formula One governing body, marketing teams, and a star with enough clout to reshape a script. Like the cars in the movie, the film is a machine that runs beautifully.

But the Oscars don’t often celebrate machines, even beautiful ones. They celebrate artists.

The Mass-Market Problem

There’s a tension at the heart of the Academy Awards. On one hand, the Oscars need ratings. They need casual moviegoers to care, which means occasionally nodding to the films people actually saw.

That’s why F1: The Movie is there at all. The field was expanded to 10 nominees precisely because the Academy learned its lesson when The Dark Knight, one of the most culturally significant films of its decade, didn’t get nominated. Nobody wants a repeat of that embarrassment.

But there’s a difference between getting nominated and being taken seriously as a winner. The Academy will let F1: The Movie sit at the table. It will not give it the prize.

Part of this is institutional. Most Oscar voters are industry professionals—writers, directors, cinematographers, actors, and editors. They are people who have dedicated their lives to cinema as an art form.

When they vote, they are not thinking about what the broadest audience enjoyed most. They’re thinking about what moved them, what challenged them, what showed them something they had not seen before.

A film like Hamnet speaks directly to that sensibility.  It is marked by a powerful performance from Jessie Buckley and a willingness to sit inside grief without resolving it. It trusts that the audience will keep up.

F1: The Movie, for all its wonders, does not. There’s nothing emotive or beautiful about it. It’s entertainment for entertainment’s sake, ice cream on a summer day.

The Deeper Question

The conversation around F1: The Movie’s nomination cuts to something important about what movies are for. If film is primarily an art form, then Hamnet wins this argument. If film is primarily popular entertainment—a communal experience, a shared joy—then F1: The Movie makes a compelling case.

Most of us believe both things simultaneously. We want movies to be great art, and we want them to be worth going to the theater to see.

The Oscars, for better or worse, have staked out a position. They are, at their core, a celebration of film as art.

Even when they get it wrong (see: Crash), even when they’re frustratingly predictable (here comes One Battle After Another), even when they pick the prestige period piece over the movie that actually made you feel something (I’m looking at you, The Shape of Water), they are aiming at art, not pop.

The Church Has an F1 Problem

Here’s where we need to turn the lens on ourselves, because the modern church has an F1 problem.

We have become obsessed with the splash. The production value. The reach. The metrics. How many people showed up, how many watched online, how many times the clip got shared. We want to be loud, relevant, and… *clears throat*… popular.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to reach people. In fact, it is part of our mission. But somewhere in the chase for mass appeal, many churches stopped being willing to go to the places that films like Hamnet go.

As a seminary professor once told me, “What you win them with is what you win them to.” Increasingly, church leaders believe Jesus, the gospel, and the invitation to new life are not enough; they are too much Hamnet, not enough F1.

Instead, we have opted for bells and whistles and sermon series that are little more than gimmicks, cosplay, and head fakes.

We believe people want F1 and not Hamnet. But ultimately, that won’t win us anything.

We must go, like Hamnet, where we are afraid to go—into the grief that doesn’t easily resolve; the doubt that sits in the room without being immediately answered; the parts of the human soul that are jagged and unfinished and desperate.

We must go into the space where the handsome hero does not win because of what we all already know is true: that just doesn’t happen. And even if it did, we are not the handsome hero.

Hamnet works because Chloé Zhao trusts her audience enough to take them somewhere real and leave them there for a while. That’s what preaching should do. That’s what worship should do. That’s what a genuine community of faith is supposed to do.

Churches and Christians are not in the business of manufacturing experiences. We are in the business of creating space for an authentic encounter.

The churches true seekers are hungry for aren’t the ones making the biggest splash. They’re the ones willing to go deep.

Substance over spectacle. Hamnet over F1, every time.