CRITERION CLOSET
2026 Oscar Nominees
98th Academy Awards | March 15, 2026 | Confirmed Criterion Closet visits
With the 98th Academy Awards just days away (March 15, 2026), the film world is obsessing over wardrobe and speeches. But at Woolf+Lapin, we’re looking at something more intimate: the “Criterion Closet Picks.”
Of this year’s Academy Awards nominees and breakout stars, we have selected seven who have stepped into the legendary Criterion Closet—that cramped, holy-grail-filled room where the world’s best artists reveal the films that actually made them. If you want to know why Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein feels so haunting, or how Mary Bronstein crafted the most talked-about indie of the year, the answers could very well be on these shelves.
Guillermo del Toro
Best Director | Best Adapted Screenplay Frankenstein
Criterion Picks:
Charade (Stanley Donen), The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick), Crumb (Terry Zwigoff), The Magician (Ingmar Bergman), The 400 Blows (Truffaut), Paths of Glory (Kubrick).
The visit that started it all. Del Toro was the very first guest in the entire Criterion Closet Picks series in 2010, filmed on an iPhone. He has since returned for a second visit. His picks are a masterclass in art horror and the esoteric treated with great reverence for the medium.
First Visit
Josh Safdie
Best Director | Best Original Screenplay Marty Supreme
Criterion Picks:
Mike Leigh’s Meantime, Ermanno Olmi’s Il Posto, Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped plus a sprawling raid of grindhouse, Italian neo-realism, and New York underground cinema.
The Safdies arrived together for their visit. Josh and Benny can barely contain themselves; pulling titles off shelves mid-sentence and finishing each other’s thoughts. Their taste is restless and deeply serious about street-level realism. Josh is nominated solo this year for Marty Supreme.
Joint Visit with Benny | Benny Solo
Joachim Trier
Best Director | Best Original Screenplay Sentimental Value
Criterion Picks:
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader), Six Moral Tales (Eric Rohmer), Weekend (Godard), L’eclisse and Red Desert (Antonioni).
Trier is precise and impassioned; a filmmaker who speaks about influences with the clarity of someone who has actually absorbed them rather than listed them. His picks map perfectly onto his filmmaking: interior, romantic, formally rigorous. His current Best Director nomination for Sentimental Value makes this visit especially resonant.
Joachim’s Closet Criterion Picks
Mary Bronstein
Best Actress | If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Criterion Picks:
Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner), Merrily We Go to Hell (Dorothy Arzner), Frownland (Ronald Bronstein), Daddy Longlegs (Josh and Benny Safdie), Inland Empire (David Lynch), This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner), It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Stanley Kramer), Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978 (Chantal Akerman), Six Moral Tales (Eric Rohmer).
She is intense, and uncompromisingly feminist, treating the closet like a research library. She bypasses the “flashy” picks to advocate for feminist pioneers, specifically a pair of films by Dorothy Arzner (Dance, Girl, Dance and Merrily We Go to Hell). Speaking of her as the only female filmmaker in the studio system of the 30s and 40s. She pulls out Frownland where she met her husband Ronald Bronstein. She speaks with deep reverence about Chantal Akerman and David Lynch as her creative “idols,” explaining how Akerman’s sense of space and Lynch’s surreal dread inform her own directorial eye. And the seminal This is Spinal Tap as a comedy without jokes.
Bronstein’s Visit.
ACTORS
Ethan Hawke
Best Actor Blue Moon
Criterion Picks:
Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné), films of Wim Wenders, Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir), An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion)
Hawke has two Criterion Closet visits: one with longtime collaborator Jonathan Marc Sherman, and one with his daughter Maya Hawke ahead of their film Wildcat, which is the highest viewed video on Criterion’s channel. This father-daughter visit in particular is unusually warm.They bond over Children of Paradise and the films of Wim Wenders, with Ethan playing the role of the proud mentor and Maya bringing a fresh, modern perspective on titles like Frances Ha and 3 Women. The video is less about “collecting” and more about how film acts as a language between generations; Ethan credits these movies for shaping him as both a father and an artist. Where else will you find out Hawk went on his first date with Uma Thruman to see Cassavettes’s Husbands?
With Jonathan Marc Sherman
With Maya Hawke
Elle Fanning
Best Supporting Actress Sentimental Value
Criterion Picks:
3 Women (Robert Altman), The Red Shoes (Powell & Pressburger), Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks), Election (Alexander Payne).
Elle Fanning’s visit was timed to the NYFF 2025 premiere of Sentimental Value. During it, she specifically cites The Worst Person in the World as the film that made her want to work with Joachim Trier who then cast her in Sentimental Value, for which she is now Oscar-nominated. Her picks are eclectic and personal, leaning into films about women defined by their own desires rather than the plot around them.
Elle Fanning’s Criterion Visit
Stellan Skarsgård
Best Supporting Actor | Sentimental Value
Criterion Picks:
Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa), John Cassavetes: Five Films (Collector’s Set), La strada (Federico Fellini), Naked (Mike Leigh), particularly celebrating Katrin Cartlidge’s performance, City Lights (Charles Chaplin), Children of Paradise (Marcel Carné).
His visit, he likens to stepping into a fabulous goldmine of collective memory. He is in wonder regarding Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurais which he has showed to his kids as violence done properly. In his Criterion bag he puts, Fellini’s 8½, Mike Leigh’s Naked and of course the works of Cassavetes, which he considers the birth of Modern Cinema. He goes on to say he cries at the end of Chaplin’s City Lights every time he watches it.
Stellan Skarsgård’s visit
