This is a post from Sriya Potham, ACE Chicago Media Team Member and a student at Adlai Stevenson High School.

Movies have the potential to change peoples minds. For a lot of people, they have to see it to believe it. Remember how popular an Inconvenient Truth was, and how much change is sparked? Well, there are new, beautifully pictured environmental movies every year. With the Oscars happening soon, I thought that this would be the perfect time to name who I think should get the Oscar for this past yearʼs environmental movies.

And the Nominees are:

1. Idle Threat:

Ten billion gallons of gasoline are burned each year by idling vehicles with untold economic, health and environmental costs. This offbeat documentary focuses on one man’s battle to get New York City to enforce its anti-idling laws.

2. Vally of Saints:

Widely considered to be the crown jewel of Kashmir, Dal Lake is a sprawling aquatic community where erupting political violence often distracts from the natural beauty. Gulzar, a young, working-class boatman, plans to skip town with his best friend in search of a better life, but a weeklong military curfew derails their departure. Forced to wait it out, Gulzar takes a job assisting a pretty scientist named Asifa. As they navigate the floating landscape, collecting water samples for an environmental study, an unlikely relationship blossoms between the two. When Asifaʼs research reveals harmful pollutants, Gulzar realizes that the ecology of the lake and an entire way of life face an alarming threat, and everything in his own life begins to take on a new hue.

3. The Landfill:

Trash becomes energy at a small New York landfill, where people are thinking differently about garbage.

4. A Fierce Green Fire:

In the twenty-first century, the idea that we are all connected is almost a cliché, though it is little understood and rarely acted upon. One twentieth-century social movement understood this concept at its core. It is, in the eyes of many, the most important ever: the environmental movement. It seeks nothing less than saving the planet from its most destructive force—humanity.

5. Chasing Ice:

In this breathtakingly beautiful documentary, filmmaker Jeff Orlowski follows the indomitable photographer as he brings to life the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS)—a massive photography project that placed 30 cameras across three continents to gather visual evidence of the Earthʼs melting ice. Chasing Ice tells the story of a visionary artist who, in facing his own mortality, bequeaths the magic of photography and the adventure of the expedition to a new generation and captures the most visible sign of climate change on the planet today