The Snubs and Surprises of the 2025 Oscar Nominations

The most unpredictable awards season in recent memory came to a head Thursday morning with the 2025 Oscar nominations. Early categories like Supporting Actor and Adapted Screenplay mostly went chalk, but elsewhere, the Academy put its stamp on the race, promoting otherwise unheralded contenders to the front of the line and leaving out a few hopefuls who’d looked secure since September. Let’s meet after hours in a secluded stairway in the Vatican and discuss the most notable snubs and surprises.

Welcome to the race, I’m Still Here.

As the countless Brazilians who flooded the Academy’s YouTube page can attest, Walter Salles’s family drama had the morning’s most unexpectedly strong showing. Things started predictably, with a nomination for Best International Film. Then, the Supporting Actress and Original Screenplay races featured key misses from other female-led contenders, a signal that Fernanda Torres might be the one to emerge from this year’s Best Actress cage match. When Torres was indeed announced in the fifth actress spot, Brazilians celebrated. They thought their morning had peaked, but the best news was yet to come, when I’m Still Here snagged a seat in the Best Picture ten. To say this was unexpected would be an understatement. Though the film had attracted a passionate following after the fall festivals, it had not been nominated for a top prize at any other precursor. Some credit must go to the Golden Globes, which gave I’m Still Here a late surge of momentum by handing Torres the Best Actress in a Drama trophy. But it’s also the latest sign of an ever-more-international Academy: Just as Bong Joon Ho instructed, voters have overcome the one-inch barrier of subtitles, which makes a Portuguese-language period piece just as Oscar-friendly as a Hollywood production.

Sebastian Stan trumped Daniel Craig.

I confess that, after the election, I thought The Apprentice was kaput. With the real Donald Trump still very much in our lives, why would voters cast a ballot for the fictional version? Turns out, I had it the wrong way around. Once nervous media outlets declined to book Sebastian Stan for their roundtables, the actor was able to turn his campaign into a cause — a vote for Stan became a vote against corporate America lining up behind the president-elect. Stan still split votes throughout the precursors with his own, arguably better performance in the black comedy A Different Man — which earned a Makeup & Hairstyling nod this morning — but that only helped him stay in the conversation. (When he won the Golden Globe for A Different Man, the actor was careful to link both films in his acceptance speech.) Stan was also able to ride the reverse-coattails of co-star Jeremy Strong, who became a mainstay of the Supporting Actor race. All this gave the Marvel veteran more juice than Daniel Craig, who campaigned hard for his turn as a William S. Burroughs stand-in in Queer, but whose film was too esoteric to find favor with the Academy.

Monica Barbaro got into Supporting Actress …

A Complete Unknown stormed through the guild nominations like a rolling … boulder, so it was reasonable to expect a strong showing at the Oscars for the Dylan biopic. Still, Monica Barbaro was not guaranteed to show up in the Supporting Actress category: Though her performance as Joan Baez had been nominated at SAG, other precursors passed her over, and with a voting body that now tends to prefer veterans (see Conclave’s Isabella Rossellini), the Top Gun: Maverick actress could have been hamstrung by a lower career profile. This just shows the power of no expectations. Barbaro rode the Complete Unknown train as far as she could, becoming the morning’s most pleasant surprise. Voters surely appreciated the miraculous way Barbaro nailed Baez’s inimitable soprano, which proves the No. 1 rule of Oscar punditry: Never bet against a transformation, especially one that comes with a vocal component.

… While Jamie Lee Curtis did not.

In news that had many pundits breathing a sigh of relief, Jamie Lee Curtis was not in fact nominated for her Bonnie Tyler–aided turn in The Last Showgirl. Until about two weeks ago, Curtis missing would not have been especially surprising. The Last Showgirl is a low-budget indie that’s barely 80 minutes long (fully half of which is wordless shots of the characters posing in front of the Las Vegas skyline), and a muted reception at TIFF put it off most pundits’ radars. But then Curtis scored SAG and BAFTA nods, leading many to wonder if she was in line for a classic halo nomination, the kind of “just because” honors the Oscars sometimes bestow on recent winners. Nope. As with Hustlers, this tale of a fading burlesque cabaret was not up to the Academy’s highbrow standards, as Curtis joined star Pamela Anderson on the sidelines. But, honestly, two SAG noms and zero Oscars feels precisely right for a movie like The Last Showgirl.

Hard Truths and Challengers were completely shut out.

Last year, the Academy’s tastes mostly overlapped with the tastes of online cinephiles, give or take a Barbie. Not so much this year. First, Challengers — the film I’ve received the most questions about from regular moviegoers, asking why it wasn’t in the awards conversation — was left out of Score, Original Screenplay, and even Original Song, seemingly too edgy or too commercial for the Academy’s conservative taste. (As Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross might have put it: No no no no no no no no no no.) This was followed by another shutout for Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, despite influential critics’ groups rallying around the Best Actress campaign of star Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Some fans may blame the film’s distributor, Bleecker Street, which has underwhelmed at the Oscars in the past; others may blame voters who were not in the mood to watch a character study of a mentally ill British woman picking fights with everyone she meets. Either way, Letterboxd will be rioting tonight.

What does the director’s branch have against Edward Berger?

Twice now Edward Berger has directed a film that receives major Oscar attention, and twice now Edward Berger himself has missed the cut in Best Director. At least with All Quiet on the Western Front two years ago, the explanation was that the German was a new face on the scene. What was the excuse for snubbing his work on Conclave, the kind of craft-heavy, visually appealing filmmaking the Academy often favors? I suspect we may be seeing a little cliquishness on the part of this branch, which draws from both Hollywood and the international-film-festival scene. A European who attended NYU and then made his name in German TV, Berger may simply not be “in the club” for the Academy’s snobbiest branch.

A Real Pain and Sing Sing missed Best Picture.

We tend to speak of the increasingly global Academy as a progressive development, and for the most part, that’s true. Films like The Substance and I’m Still Here would not have been Best Picture nominees a decade ago, and their entrance is a net positive. Still, that means fewer spots to go around for the films that used to be Oscar mainstays: U.S. indies like A Real Pain and Sing Sing, each of which deal with distinctly American themes. Though both were nominated for their acting and writing, the pair missed out at top honors, replaced by their international brethren. This may be a blessing in disguise for A Real Pain’s Kieran Culkin, who is on the verge of sweeping every Supporting Acting prize in existence, as the Best Picture snub helps his campaign retain at least a little underdog charm.

Nickel Boys was left out of its strongest category.

While we’re celebrating the good news, one acclaimed American art-house film did get off the Best Picture bubble: Nickel Boys, which also earned an Adapted Screenplay nod. However, the Oscars continued a precedent set at the precursors, as the film’s most innovative element — its immersive first-person cinematography — was not nominated by the Academy’s branch. Clearly, there was love for Nickel Boys in the Academy as a whole, but I’m stumped by what the cinematographers aren’t seeing here.

Flow got double-nominated.

The same week The Brutalist became mired in an AI controversy, the low-budget animated film Flow — which was created by a small team of Latvians working with open-source software — cemented its status as this year’s little movie that could. Not only did it pull off the expected Animated Feature nom, it snuck into the International Film five as well. (All the better that the Academy renamed the former Foreign-Language Film category, as the wordless Flow is not in any language.) Thankfully, Flow will remain a dark horse for the trophy, as the assumed animation front-runner, The Wild Robot, was also recognized for its Score and Sound.

We still have no idea who the Best Picture front-runner is.

After everything that happened this morning, the race for the ultimate Oscar remains as up in the air as it’s been all year. Emilia Pérez led the field in total nominations with 13, one shy of tying the all-time record, but couldn’t pull Selena Gomez into Supporting Actress. Conclave missed Director, while A Complete Unknown missed Editing. Anora and The Brutalist got in everywhere they were expected to but nowhere they weren’t. The Academy has done its bit, now it’s back to the precursor ceremonies to see which contender, if any, can begin to pull away from the competition.

Related

• The 2025 Oscar Nominations