Clockwise from bottom left: A24 (3), Focus Features, Neon, Sony Pictures Classics, STX Entertainment, Fox Searchlight (2), Netflix, Lionsgate, Universal Pictures, Roadside Attractions

By this point last year, everyone pretty much agreed that La La Land, a delightful, Hollywood-flattering musical, was the frontrunner to win Best Picture — whereas the passionately beloved Moonlight was too artsy, too gay, and too black to actually win. We all know how that turned out. This year, either out of penance, kismet, or some combination of the two, no single film — nor even a tight triad — has emerged as the Oscar favorite or favorites. The field is blissfully wide open.

Which is fine! Wildly speculative odds-making is part of the great fun of the Academy Awards. But if a movie's awards chances become the only conversation about it, then its genuine, ineffable pleasures risk transforming into the film geek equivalent of sports stats, dryly predicting that movie’s chances of winning the race to an Oscar. We stop talking about why the movie is good, and instead only obsess over why it could win.

So bear that all in mind when regarding this year's crop of movies at the center and periphery of the "awards conversation." These films have either won over audiences and critics in theaters, earned praise at the Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Telluride, Venice, Toronto, and New York film festivals, generated genuine buzz in advance press screenings, or garnered awards-y attention based purely on the prestige of the people making them without having screened for anyone else. Some of these movies may go on to win all kinds of awards, while others may be ignored entirely only to emerge years later as 2017's Groundhog Day or Harold and Maude. And they are all for your consideration as feature films unto themselves. —Adam B. Vary

Movies that have opened:

1. Get Out

Universal Pictures

Feature films generally have a hard time being responsive to current events, given the years-long process from inception to release. For whatever reason, that does not seem to be the case this year! The first of many examples is Get Out. Since it premiered in February, writer-director Jordan Peele's galvanizing social thriller has only grown more trenchant in the wake of the white supremacist marches at Charlottesville, and President Trump's criticism of NFL players protesting police shooting unarmed black men. (Not to mention a cheerless handful of other events, too.) It is rare for a film steeped in the tropes of horror movies to earn awards attention, let alone one that debuted at the start of the year, but Get Out's blistering timeliness — not to mention its superlative box office — should drive more examination its way. Consider that the last horror movie to win Best Picture, 1991's The Silence of the Lambs, also opened in February. —A.B.V.

Release date: Feb. 24

2. Wonder Woman

Clay Enos / Warner Bros. Pictures

There was a time when blockbuster movies that earned their massive popularity by capturing the country's imagination — movies like The Exorcist, Star Wars, Ghost, The Fugitive, and The Sixth Sense — also became major Oscar contenders. None of them, however, were superhero movies, one of the last genres to have never earned a Best Picture nomination. Which makes Warner Bros.' reported commitment to doing a full awards campaign for Wonder Woman even more unusual. But if there's anything the last few years have taught us, it's that past performance has less and less bearing on future outcomes at the Oscars. Wonder Woman also tapped into a powerful cultural need, not only breaking box office records but speaking directly to audiences hungry for a female hero driven by goodness and love. And as the industry works through an unprecedented conversation about sexual violence and harassment, Wonder Woman’s message could resonate even more. —A.B.V.

Release date: June 2

3. Beatriz at Dinner

Lacey Terrell / Roadside Attractions

In another movie that benefits enormously from the fraught times we live in, Salma Hayek plays the titular Beatriz, a masseuse and healer who ends up at a high-class, high-stakes dinner party celebrating a Trump-like real estate mogul played by John Lithgow. Because writer Mike White (School of Rock) and director Miguel Arteta (The Good Girl) keep the inevitable collision between these two characters grounded in realism (for most of the film, anyway), the movie ends up feeling like a chamber piece — you could easily see White adapting this for the stage. What lingers long after the film’s rather controversial ending are two of the most memorable performances of the year from Hayek and Lithgow, who deliver deft and nuanced work as two radically different souls forced to comprehend each other. —A.B.V.

Release date: June 9

4. The Big Sick

Nicole Rivelli / Amazon Studios and Lionsgate

The Big Sick was a word-of-mouth sensation over the summer. The romantic comedy is based on the real medical calamity that brought now-married screenwriters Kumail Nanjiani (who stars as a version of himself) and Emily V. Gordon (played by Zoe Kazan) together. With strong supporting performances from Holly Hunter and Ray Romano as Emily's parents, it provided the kind of "I laughed, I cried" gratification that studio films have largely abdicated in pursuit of franchise bombast. A smart awards campaign by Lionsgate — which had three Best Picture nominees last year in La La Land, Hacksaw Ridge, and Hell or High Water — could easily make this film a major nominee. —A.B.V.

Release date: June 23

5. Dunkirk

Warner Bros. Pictures

The British army's miraculous escape from the Nazi forces surrounding them at the small French seaside town of Dunkirk was one of the most critical moments of World War II. It's tailor-made to be retold straightforwardly as a classic Hollywood motion picture. Instead, writer-director Christopher Nolan marshaled just about every filmmaking technique in his arsenal to make, essentially, an art film about the event, using a time-fractured triptych of stories that studiously avoids traditional movie tropes like, you know, a central main character. The result is as stirring and astonishing as anything Nolan has made, and it has every chance of finally earning the god of movie geeks his first Oscar nomination for Best Director. —A.B.V.

Release date: July 21

6. Detroit

Francois Duhamel / Annapurna Pictures

Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal both won Oscars and wide acclaim for their gritty, gripping journalistic approach to the Iraq War in 2009's The Hurt Locker. But when they used those same techniques to depict the Detroit riots of 1967 — specifically how three black teenagers were killed by white police officers in the Algiers Motel — Bigelow and Boal were criticized for treating brutal, racialized violence as an opportunity for virtuosic filmmaking. Producer Megan Ellison used Detroit to launch her company Annapurna Pictures as a bona fide indie studio, and there are few people with better Oscar track records this decade than she has. Still, while Detroit is an expertly made and well-acted film about a terribly important subject, it is also a grueling experience to sit through, and Academy voters may simply choose not to. —A.B.V.

Release date: July 28

7. First They Killed My Father

Netflix

Here's another high-profile film about a real event that was slammed for its seemingly tone-deaf approach. In this case, a profile of Angelina Jolie in Vanity Fair suggested that the production for her fourth film as a director tricked young Cambodian children into taking money they thought was real, which Jolie said later was a "false and upsetting" mischaracterization of the audition process.

That controversy nearly overshadowed the film, which has earned Jolie by far the best reviews of her directorial career. BuzzFeed News' Alison Willmore praised her "experiential" approach to telling the story of the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia from the perspective of a child (Sareum Srey Moch). "The film is freed from having to explain the whys of what's happening," she wrote, "allowing it to be an act of sensory overload, a rush of unsettling images." First They Killed My Father even qualified as Cambodia's entry for Best Foreign Language Film.

Ironically, the biggest hurdle for this film's awards prospects may not end up being the casting controversy or its challenging subject matter, but the fact that it was released by Netflix, a disruptive force in the movie industry that the Academy has been reluctant to honor. (More on this later.) —A.B.V.

Release date: Sept. 15

8. Stronger

Roadside Attractions

For four consecutive years now, Jake Gyllenhaal has delivered go-for-broke performances — in 2013's Prisoners, 2014's Nightcrawler, 2015's Southpaw, and 2016's Nocturnal Animals — that impress and surprise, and ultimately get overlooked by the Academy. In his latest film, Stronger, Gyllenhaal plays Jeff Bauman, who lost his legs in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and he commits to depicting the waves of anguish and self-pity that buffeted Bauman as he struggled to recover. Whether the Academy will overlook Gyllenhaal once again remains to be seen, but voters (and audiences) should at least also take a long look at Tatiana Maslany's equally striking performance as Bauman's on-again, off-again girlfriend, Erin Hurley. —A.B.V.

Release date: Sept. 22

9. Battle of the Sexes

Melinda Sue Gordon / Fox Searchlight Pictures

Yet another weirdly relevant movie! This one is about the media circus around the exhibition tennis match between feminist pioneer Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and self-styled male chauvinist Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell). Directed by Little Miss Sunshine's Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, Battle of the Sexes is also a personal examination of King's sexual awakening with her hairdresser (Andrea Riseborough), as well as a portrait of how Riggs' gambling obsession and stiflingly wealthy wife (Elisabeth Shue) drove him to reclaim the spotlight by any means necessary. It's about a lot of things, this movie, which may be one of the reasons why its box office has been so tepid. But Stone and Carell's strong performances, and the film's impressive attention to detail, may win over Academy voters in not-so-straight sets. (I’m sorry.) —A.B.V.

Release date: Sept. 22

10. The Florida Project

Marc Schmidt / A24

Director Sean Baker's last film Tangerine was one of the genuine delights of 2015, bringing an eye-popping beauty to the often disregarded world of trans sex workers in Los Angeles. His follow-up, The Florida Project, also cowritten with Tangerine's Chris Bergoch, focuses a similarly stunning gaze on the down-and-out lives of Halley (Bria Vinaite), a young ex-con, and her 6-year-old daughter Moonee (Brooklynn Prince). They live week-to-week in a motel just miles from Disney World that's become the last rung before homelessness for many of its tenants. The motel’s manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe) becomes a kind of surrogate father figure for both Halley and Moonee, but the film’s lasting power comes from its clear-eyed understanding of how the wonder and recklessness of childhood can cut both ways. —A.B.V.

Release date: Oct. 6

11. Blade Runner 2049

Warner Bros. Pictures

For the second year in a row, director Denis Villeneuve has delivered a prestige sci-fi movie suffused with astonishing visuals and a hypnotic examination of the very nature of existence. Unlike Arrival, however, Blade Runner 2049 divided critics, some reveling in its outrageously stunning cinematography (courtesy of perpetual Oscar also-ran Roger Deakins), some frustrated by its glacial pace and skin-deep characters. All it takes to do well at the Oscars, however, is a core group of passionate voters — and given the film’s vast technical achievements, it is certainly likely to earn more than the two nominations the 1982 original did (Best Art Direction and Best Visual Effects). —A.B.V.

Release date: Oct. 6

12. Marshall

Barry Wetcher / Open Road Films