The 90th Academy Awards are taking place on March 4 and this year nine films have been selected for the much coveted Best Picture category. Among which is "The Post", a political thriller about The Washington Post's involvement in the Pentagon Papers scandal.

Directed by Steven Spielberg, "The Post" was initially considered to be a for hire job as it was made due to the long post-production time on his other 2018 release, the geek fantasy "Ready Player One", however the timeliness of the material and the quality of the cast puts the film in line with his other true-life historical dramas such as "Schindler's List", "Munich" and "Bridge of Spies" which also starred Tom Hanks.

In his exceedingly positive review for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers said that “the movie [is] a rabble-rousing journalistic thriller filled with fierce commitment and fervent heart” and “'The Post' works as an explosively exciting journalistic procedural and as a vigorous investigation into how action defines character.” This is backed up by Moira Macdonald writing for The Seattle Times, who centers her review around Katharine Graham, the real life publisher of The Washington Post, who is portrayed in the movie by Meryl Streep. She believes "The Post", more so than being about the Pentagon Papers revelation is, “an exploration of what it meant then (and, perhaps, now) to be a woman thrust into power in an all-male world.”

Streep, an industry veteran who holds the record for most Academy Award nominations for Best Actress, received most of the individual praise, with Scott Marks of The San Diego Reader considering her to be the highlight of an otherwise bad movie, pithily summing it up with “Streep is superb. What else is new?” But for Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com, he thinks Streep’s performance is, if not new, then something that stands out compared to her usual performances: “Streep […] hasn’t given a performance this nuanced in a very long time—reminding one what she can do when she’s paired with the right collaborator.”

However, it hasn’t all been positive for Spielberg. The headline of Christopher Orr’s review for The Atlantic is blunt in describing the film as “well-crafted but utterly conventional” and the actual content repeatedly affirms that sentiment, entering on the fact that the core drama of the film isn’t really that dramatic at all: “On one side are Bradlee and virtually every other journalist in the newsroom; on the other are the business-side “suits”—the lawyers, the board members—with their tut-tutting concerns about the paper’s IPO” which stacks the desk too clearly, especially when viewed with the benefit of hindsight. Christian Lorentzen takes it further in his New Republic review that the film “substitutes righteousness for suspense, and legal and financial distresses for the paranoid dread that marks the classics of the genre.”

In one of the few outright negative reviews, after describing the film’s first act as “laborious”, The AV Club’s Ignatiy Vishnevetsky says that “Spielberg is too reverent to let these scenes zip along in the style of a journo-thriller and not angry enough to strike a note of paranoia.”

A recurring theme that runs through all the criticism is that The Post is a timely film that stands in opposition to US President Donald Trump and his repeated tarnishing of journalists as the bearers of “Fake news.” Owen Gleiberman said in Variety that “the whole movie, which pulses ahead like a detective yarn for news junkies, [is] one that crackles with present-day parallels” and that The Post has “a lesson that has rarely needed to be heard as much as it does today.” Michael Phillips in the Chicago Reader says “The movie itself is a blunt reminder that everything in this story concerning a craven, paranoid president’s loathing of an aggressive free press did not exactly vanish with the Nixon administration.” You can read into that what you will.

According to Oddschecker, "The Post" is only up for Best Picture and Best Actress and it has almost no chance with token 100/1 odds in both categories.