Film critics – myself included – love to bemoan the death of high-quality cinema in the age of streaming, pointing to mediocre Best Picture Oscar nominees as evidence that the production of great (or even good) films is on the wane.

But perhaps things are changing. Are people sick of being inundated with short videos on TikTok and Youtube, and once again hankering for a cinematic experience? The quality of this year’s nominees suggests they are.

For the first time in a while, most of the nominated films are excellent – and nearly all of them are watchable.

Read more: The Oscars aren’t a meritocracy – there’s a complex formula for winning

My top pick: Sentimental Value

Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is my pick for the Best Picture Oscar. It’s the kind of meticulously crafted film in which the naturalism seems effortless.

The narrative follows acclaimed filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), a quintessential Euro-auteur, who comes back into the lives of his estranged daughters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) following their mother’s death.

Gustav is making a new film, and wants his daughter Nora – an acclaimed theatre actress who has her own demons to battle (stage fright among them) – to star in it.

Nora assumes it’s a cynical manoeuvre for funding on her father’s part and refuses. So Gustav casts American star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) instead, who is immediately out of her depth.

The drama unfolds around the family home in Oslo, interweaving narratives of the home’s history across generations with the tensions plaguing its current inhabitants.

Sentimental Value has a strikingly lyrical quality. Some may say it’s overdone, but every element is so perfectly executed that it doesn’t come across as pretentious or laboured. It is, in many respects, thoroughly sentimental – yet never feels like it’s performing this as some kind of effect.

Despite its considerable formal and narrative complexity, it plays in a starkly simple fashion, thanks to the light touch of Trier, coupled with stunning cinematography by Kasper Tuxen Andersen.

The lead performances by Reinsve, Lilleaas and Skarsgård are extraordinarily convincing and, perhaps more surprisingly, Fanning is awesome as the uncomfortable American trying to please the European artiste.

Sentimental Value brilliantly weaves a sense of European social and cultural history with carefully observed character moments, becoming, by the end, a kind of treatise on the affirmative potential of art to transcend and transform interpersonal barriers.

Despite the difficulties of life, the detritus of broken promises and hearts, and the disappointments minor and not so minor, we can still come........

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