10 films, stars and directors snubbed for the 2025 Oscars

Each and every year at around this time, websites such as Shortlist run through the movers and the shakers in the Oscar nominations game.

But while we’re always happy to talk about the films and stars that have rightly been nominated, it’s not what gets us the most animated. It’s the snubs and the shocking omissions that elicit the biggest response.

Nothing raises the hackles of a cultural commentator like a brilliant production, performance, or contribution being overlooked. And trust us when we say that the 97th Academy Awards features some absolute doozies.

A sense of proportionality and propriety prevents us from referring to the following omissions as ‘outrageous’. We’re not that kind of website (honestly). Let’s just say that the following Oscar snubs run the gamut from ‘puzzling’ to ‘downright inexplicable’.

Which of these jilted entities gets your goat?

1. Denis Villeneuve for Best Director (Dune: Part Two)

Perhaps the fact that Dune: Part II is a direct sequel to the 2021 original, which scooped up six Academy Awards, has counted against it. That’s all we can think of, because Dune: Part II is a stunning piece of work. While it leans into the epic scale and sandy vistas of the first film, Villeneuve still finds the opportunity to innovate in the sequel’s starkly monochrome Giedi Prime sequence found towards the end of the film. It’s like no black and white footage you’ve ever seen.

2. Challengers for Best Original Score

We’d suggest that the Challengers Oscars campaign may have been diluted by director Luca Guadagnino having a second film out this past year, but as you’ll see elsewhere on this list, Queer has been completely overlooked, too. Challengers is perhaps a little too sexy and frothy for the Academy’s tastes. However, it at least deserved a shout for its original score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Much like the movie’s three lead characters, it’s totally banging.

3. Queer for Best anything

After years of sterling non-Bond work (and yes, sterling Bond-work too), it felt like this could be the year in which Daniel Craig finally got some love from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Especially as he has given the performance of his career in a film from respected director Luca Guadagnino, from a Justin Kuritzke screenplay based on a William S. Burroughs novella. And yet here we are on the eve of the Oscars, and Queer hasn’t received so much as a sniff.

4. Edward Berger for Best Director (Conclave)

Having received nine nominations and four awards for his previous film, All Quiet on the Western Front, Swiss-Austrian director Edward Berger might have fancied his chances at a Best Director nod with this stylish and buzzy religious thriller. As it is, he’ll have to be content with Conclave being in the running for the Best Picture award, alongside an impressive seven other nominations not related to his directorship. Third time’s a charm, eh Edward?

5. Nickel Boys for Best Cinematography & Director

It’s a testament to Nickel Boys’s quality that it can feel hard done by in only receiving nominations for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Based on an acclaimed novel by Colson Whitehead, it boasts stunning cinematography and some genuinely innovative direction. Each shot is taken from the first person perspective of its two young protagonists as they struggle to survive an abusive, racially segregated US reform school during the ’60s. Director and co-writer RaMell Ross manages to make this hard-hitting story feel particularly personal.

6. Marianne Jean-Baptiste for Best Actress (Hard Truths)

An awful lot of big names missed out on a Best Actress nomination this year (see Nicole Kidman elsewhere on this list), but it’s arguable that none of them should feel as aggrieved about their omission as Marianne Jean-Baptiste. The English actress’s spiky performance in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths has already won her significant recognition on the awards circuit. It deserved to see her at least considered some 29 years after she made the shortlist for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies.

7. Nicole Kidman for Best Actress (Baby Girl)

The combined no-show for Challengers and Baby Girl makes this a decidedly unsexy year for the Oscars. Baby Girl’s is an altogether more uncomfortable and taboo-breaking brand of raunchiness, as Nicole Kidman’s older executive embarks on a deeply inappropriate affair with a much younger intern (played by England’s own Harris Dickinson). Kidman’s boldly committed performance deserved more validation, and given that she’s only won the one Oscar across her illustrious career, she’s about due another.

8. Denzel Washington for Best Supporting Actor (Gladiator II)

Let’s be brutally honest here: Gladiator II is not a great movie. It certainly gets nowhere near the golden age-evoking majesty of the original. Despite all this, Denzel Washington’s supporting performance is an unequivocal highlight, bringing a level of heavyweight scene-chewing that the movie sorely needs. His scheming former slave Macrinus is undoubtedly the brightest and most interesting character in the film, keeping the audience guessing as to his true allegiances and motivation until the final act.

9. A Real Pain for Best Picture

A Real Pain is clearly the flavour of the month, with Kieran Culkin a shoe-in for Best Supporting Actor and Jess Eisenberg in with a shout for Best Original Screenplay. So why hasn’t it made the nominations list for Best Picture? Is it too low key and indie for the Academy voters’ glitzy tastes? Are there political considerations at play given its delicate theme of two Jewish cousins on a European Holocaust tour? We have no idea, but we do know that there are at least three flat out inferior films among the final selection.

10. Kneecap for Best International Feature Film

With a stunning run of awards season nominations and wins, from Sundance right through to the BAFTAs (and plenty in between), it’s rather confounding that this Irish language movie isn’t in contention for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. The central Belfast hip-hop group’s rabble rousing ways and strongly voiced political opinions (including over the thorny topic of Palestine) might just have scared off a jittery Academy. Still, it’s been a great campaign for the boys.

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