The 2022 Oscar nominations have just been revealed , and from glitzy musicals to big-budget sci-fi to intimate Japanese drama, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have delivered a diverse range of nominees for the top prize of Best Picture.
Unlike in 2021 when just eight movies made the cut, this year the Academy have delivered 10 nominations. – and most of them can be watched from the comfort of your own home.
Below, we'll tell you how and where to watch each of the Oscar Best Picture nominees in 2022 across both the US and UK, across theaters, streaming services and on-demand platforms.
Belfast
What is it?
Directed by Kenneth Branagh and based on his own childhood, Belfast chronicles the life of and daily struggles of a working-class Northern Irish Protestant family.
Told from the perspective of nine-year-old Buddy, the film is set at the start of The Troubles, a development which leaves the family with a choice of whether to stay in Belfast or leave and start a new life in England
The film features music by Belfast native Van Morrison, including eight classic numbers and a new song he’s written for the movie.
How to watch it: It’s currently in theaters in the UK, but came out in November 2021 Stateside, so will have left most theaters by now. In the US, it's available to watch as a premium rental on platforms like Amazon Prime Video.
Dune
What is it?
Denis Villeneuve takes charge of this epic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci–fi drama.
It tells the story of Paul Atreides, the eldest son of a wealthy family, who becomes ruler of the planet Arrakis. After his father is murdered by rebels who stage a coup to take control of Arrakis, Paul vows to take his revenge.
How to watch it: The film is available for premium rental across a range of platforms in both the UK and US.
Don't Look Up
What is it?
Adam McKay writes and directs this starry comedy-drama, which follows two low-level astronomers who are forced to go on a media tour as they try to warn humankind of a planet-killing comet hurtling towards Earth.
How to watch it: This one is a Netflix original, and is available to watch now on the streamer.
Drive My Car
What is it?
An adaptation of novelist Haruki Murakami’s short story, this Japanese drama follows Yusuke, a renowned stage actor and director.
Still grieving after his wife’s unexpected death, Yusuke receives an offer to direct a play in Hiroshima. There, he begins to face the haunting mysteries his wife left behind.
How to watch it: For US readers, the film is still in theaters and you can find out where it's playing on the movie's official website . UK readers can go and see Drive My Car in select theaters now, and rent the film on the more art house-oriented rental platforms like BFI Player.
The Power Of The Dog
What is it?
Jane Campion helms this intense and troubling Western. It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil Burbank, a domineering but charismatic rancher, who wages a war of intimidation against his brother's new wife and her teenage son.
How to watch it: A Netflix original, this one is available to watch now worldwide.
West Side Story
What is it?
Steven Spielberg’s new take on the Broadway classic, the first film adaptation of which won the Best Picture Oscar back in 1962.
This new take stars Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler as star-crossed lovers Tony and Maria, who find themselves on opposite sides of a vicious gang war.
How to watch it: It’s been confirmed that the film will arrive on Disney+ on March 2, but it’s also still in a handful of theaters.
CODA
What is it?
A tender comedy/drama that follows the travails of Ruby, a hearing teenage girl who is the child of deaf adults.
The family runs a small fishing business in rural Massachusetts, which is in trouble financially. That poses a dilemma for Ruby, who has the chance to pursue her dream by going away to study music, but doesn’t want to leave her family.
How to watch it : CODA is available to watch now on Apple TV.
King Richard
What is it?
Will Smith leads the way in this affectionate biopic of Richard Williams, the father of tennis superstars Venus and Serena. The film documents Williams’ relentless drive to forge his daughters into world-class tennis players, and his struggle to get the sport’s gatekeepers to take notice of them.
How to watch it: In the US and UK, it’s available for premium rental across a range of platforms.
Licorice Pizza
What is it?
Paul Thomas Anderson directs this quirky coming-of-age drama.
Set in California in 1973, the film chronicles the unlikely friendship between 15-year-old Gary Valentine and 25-year-old Alana Kane, a photographer's assistant. As they grow up, the pair's lives seem strangely intertwined.
How to watch it: The film is still in its theatrical run in both the US and UK, so you can go and see it now.
Nightmare Alley
What is it?
Guillermo Del Toro oversees this vaudevillian horror, which is set in 1940s New York. It follows Stanton Carlisle, a down-on-his-luck carnival worker, who reinvents himself as a psychic act for the wealthy elite – a career move that has very dark consequences.
How to watch it: US viewers can enjoy Nightmare Alley on either HBO Max and Hulu , while UK viewers can still only see it in theaters at the moment.
How to watch The Tourist TV series online from anywhere
The Tourist TV series is the latest big budget drama from the BBC. Set in the Australian outback, it stars Jamie Dornan as the victim of a car crash who wakes up in a hospital in the middle of nowhere and finds he can't remember who he is. With high production values and the full series already online to binge, make sure you know how to watch The Tourist wherever you are.
Written by brothers Harry Williams and Jack Williams, who also created The Missing and Baptiste, The Tourist opens with Dornan getting chased off an outback road by a truck apparently looking to run down him and his little hatchback car.
Just when when he thinks he's escaped his faceless assailant in their over-sized vehicle, Dornan is t-boned to the point of amnesia and must spend the next 6 x 60-minute episodes trying to work out who he is before his past catches up with him.
Intrigued? You will be. There's no waiting around for the action to get going. Head over to iPlayer and binge the lot. Here's how to watch The Tourist even if you're not in the UK.
How to watch The Tourist FREE in the UK
How to watch The Tourist online from outside your country
If you’re abroad when The Tourist airs, you won't be able to watch the show as you normally would at home, thanks to annoying regional restrictions.
Luckily, there’s an easy solution. Downloading a VPN will allow you to stream it online no matter where you are. It's a simple bit of software that changes your IP address, meaning that you can access on-demand content or live TV just as if you were at home.
Use a VPN to watch The Tourist from anywhere
Using a VPN is as easy as one-two-three...
1. Download and install a VPN - as we say, our top choice is ExpressVPN .
2. Connect to the appropriate server location - open the VPN app, hit 'choose location' and select the appropriate location (a server in the UK in this case).
3. Go to the broadcaster's stream - head to BBC iPlayer and start watching The Tourist as if you were back at home.
How to watch The Tourist FREE in Australia
How to watch The Tourist on HBO Max in the US
More great new TV: how to watch The Girl Before online from anywhere
The Elden Ring system requirements are fine for a modern PC game, actually
Elden Ring publisher Bandai Namco finally revealed the system requirements for the highly anticipated game earlier today, and while some of the specs that the game is recommending might seem a bit odd - especially the memory requirement - there's really nothing to see here.
According to the minimum system requirements released by the developer, you're going to need 12GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 3GB or Radeon RX 580 and a Core i5-8400 or Ryzen 3 3300X CPU. If you're used to seeing most PC games requiring just 8GB of RAM, I've got some sour news for you: those days are probably over, especially in the world of AAA games like Elden Ring.
And if you want to know why those days are over, you really only need to look at the system specs of the new consoles. Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X have 16GB of system memory - even though that's shared between the CPU and the graphics card . And while the game is coming out on older platforms, you really only need to look at the nonsense that happened with Cyberpunk 2077 's launch to see why it's probably best not to base your expectations on the last-generation version of the game.
You really should have a 16GB gaming PC anyway
In the world of PC components, we're constantly going through up and down phases when it comes to RAM prices. A few years ago, RAM was going through a similar shortage to the best Nvidia and AMD graphics cards right now. Back then, a 16GB kit of DDR4 memory was extremely expensive, but those days are over.
Just looking at Newegg, where you can get a pretty solid kit of DDR4 memory with two 8GB DIMMs for around $60 in the US. When it comes to an upgrade, that's what you'd be spending on a new game anyways, and it's going to make your system much more capable of running new games as they come out.
There was a long time as well when we would totally recommend that folks just get an 8GB system, but that was in the early days of Windows 10. Ever since then, Microsoft's operating system has just become heavier. Even if Elden Ring only "required" 8GB of RAM, you'd still run into problems where Windows just decides to download and install a system update willy-nilly, and then your frame rate goes straight down the toilet.
It's not surprising, then, that most respectable prebuilt gaming PCs and gaming laptops these days are coming with 16GB of RAM as a standard. When it comes to playing the best PC games, 8GB of RAM is truly the new 4GB. I don't recommend it.
The graphics card requirements are literally cake
Sometimes it's a tough pill to swallow, but graphics cards start to show their age after a few years, especially after a major console generation comes out and starts to lift the most common configurations that developers make games for. And in the grand scheme of things, Elden Ring is much lighter when it comes to graphics card inflation than other recent games. If you need proof, just look at Dying Light 2 and its recommended RTX 3080 .
Elden Ring is recommending an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 for its minimum spec, and it's the 3GB version, not the more common 6GB version. A little bit of graphics card history for anyone that's not as much of a dweeb as I am: Nvidia caught a bit of controversy back in the day (the day being 2015) for releasing two versions of the GTX 1060.
The problem wasn't that there were two SKUs with different amounts of VRAM, the problem was that they were completely different GPUs. The 3GB GTX 1060 had fewer CUDA cores, which means that calling it a GTX 1060 in the first place was a bit misleading.
And that weaker version of the GTX 1060 is what's the minimum requirement. To put that in perspective, that was an entry-level graphics card seven years ago . There are surely people that are going to be left out in the cold with this game, but those people probably aren't able to play any AAA PC game that comes out anyways. And it's likely that if they're using a weaker GPU than that, they probably don't really care about being left out from an RPG that's already pretty niche to begin with.
Out of the top 20 GPUs in the latest Steam Hardware survey only two of them are weaker than the GTX 1060 3GB - the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti. And the GTX 1050 Ti isn't really that far off in performance from the GTX 1060, and should be able to get by in Elden Ring, even if you might have to lower the in-game resolution to 900p instead of the full 1080p.
As the technology that powers our favorite games gets more advanced, it's only natural that the hardware we need to play those games is also going to be more advanced. There are definitely developers that take that way too far and lazily optimize their games and just recommend ridiculous graphics cards to brute force the performance.
And besides, just look at Dark Souls 3
Discounting the disaster that was the original Dark Souls on PC, From Software actually has a pretty decent track record when it comes to accessible PC ports. Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro all run like a dream on PC, even though I do have a very specific problem with all of them (ultrawide support, anyone?).
But if you look at Dark Souls 3, it's recommending users to have at least an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970. That's basically the same level of performance give or take maybe 2-3%. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice basically has the same system requirements, too, which makes sense given that it's on the same engine.
But if there's one thing I know about Sekiro and Dark Souls 3, it's that both games run like an absolute dream on whatever hardware I test them on - I've even played Dark Souls 3 without a problem on an Ultrabook. When you take the relatively light system requirements of Elden Ring and then combine that with the developer's good history when it comes to PC ports in the last decade, the fear that this is going to be some hard-to-run mess really starts to disappear.
I will absolutely be running this game through my gauntlet of graphics cards when it comes out on February 25, and I can't wait to see how it runs on GPUs that are right at that minimum spec. So, like, stay tuned for that.