Award season is well underway en route to the Oscars on March 15, and the race for Best Picture has taken shape. Nominations were announced last month, with the lion’s share of attention going to presumptive favorites One Battle After Another and Sinners, the latter of which easily set a record for most nominations ever with 16. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s darkly comedic action-thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio still seems poised to take home the top prize of the evening, though the annual awards will honor a deep slate of films from 2025, full of surprises like F1 and critical darlings like Guillermo del Toro‘s Frankenstein. Ahead of cinema’s biggest night, however, John Cena singled out one Best Picture contender in particular to hype up.

“Congratulations to @KamalaFilms and @netflix on all the success and accolades for Train Dreams,” the Peacemaker star wrote on X on Monday. Notably, Kamala Films is the banner of Marissa McMahon, the wife of fellow former wrestler and WWE executive Shane McMahon, and the western period drama marked its biggest undertaking to date. McMahon is among the team named in the film’s Best Picture nomination, one of three Academy Awards it’s up for alongside Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Song. Cena is far from the only one honoring Netflix’s undertaking, though, as it owns a Certified Fresh 95% from critics and 89% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes.

In addition to McMahon, the team behind Train Dreams is headlined by Clint Bentley, who directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Greg Kwedar. Coming off their also Academy Award-nominated Sing Sing in 2023, the duo adapted the 2011 novella of the same name by Denis Johnson, following the moving story of railroad laborer and logger Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) as he navigates profound loss. Coming of age while shaping America’s railway empire in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, he tries to build a life with his wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones), and their young daughter while his work takes him further and further from home. When everything takes an unexpected and tragic turn, the very wilderness Grainier once felled suddenly takes on a new meaning and helps him find solace amid his grief.

Who Else Was Involved in ‘Train Dreams’?

For just his second feature, Bentley had a star-studded cast to work with. After directing Colman Domingo to his second Oscar nomination in Sing Sing, his stars for Train Dreams included Edgerton and Jones, alongside Nathaniel Arcand, Clifton Collins Jr., John Diehl, Paul Schneider, Kerry Condon, and William H. Macy. Even with the higher-profile cast and the shift to bringing to life the past of the American West and its environmental majesty, the budget remained low at a reported $10 million, though. In a conversation with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, Edgerton spoke to how the smaller-scale story was able to resonate with so many, Cena included, thanks to its focus on exploring its deeply human cast of characters above all else:

“I feel like little movies are like Rocky Balboa at the beginning of the first Rocky movie. You just want a shot. You want a shot at reaching an audience. You want a shot at nestling in with the bigger things. But I do believe that a movie like this succeeds because of the kind of human relationships, and that even on the biggest-scale movies, the bigger the budget, the imperative is always that the characters and the human beings resonate with audiences. Because no matter how big the spectacle is, maybe the pressure is even higher to make sure that the human story within it has a significant kind of pull for audiences.”

Train Dreams is now streaming on Netflix. Stay tuned here at Collider for more on the Oscars race as awards season continues.