Staff Inquiry: Biggest 2025 Oscars Snubs

The 97th Academy Awards are an odd mix of left-field critical darlings and huge movies. The likes of Wicked and Dune: Part Two are contending with The Brutalist, Anora, and The Substance, the latter of which is probably the weirdest movie ever nominated for Best Picture. But while there’s some likable stuff about the 2025 Oscars, the 2025 Oscars snubs include critical darlings we all thought would sneak into the list of nominees.

Every year, the Oscars have a major problem with inclusion. And we don’t just mean including more women and creatives of color — the Oscars have only nominated 35 films total across 19 feature film categories. Some of those — we’re looking at you, Emilia Pérez — have way too many nominations and have effectively shut out worthier titles from the competition. Some of the biggest snubs of the year were artistic triumphs that lost out on awards love because they couldn’t go toe-to-toe with Netflix’s marketing machine or other major FYC campaigns. These are the biggest snubs of the 2025 Oscars, according to Film Inquiry contributors.

Challengers — Best Picture, Best Actress & Best Score

All told, this year’s Academy Awards slate includes a lot to be happy about: The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s extravagantly anatomical, dizzyingly gory primal scream against the entertainment industry’s parodic feminine beauty standards, snagged five nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director; the Best Picture contenders include several notable independent and arthouse features, from Brady Corbet’s lushly philosophical 70mm epic The Brutalist to RaMell Ross’ openly experimental, first-person POV narrative debut, Nickel Boys, to Sean Baker’s brash Brooklyn redux of Pretty Woman, Anora. But even as the slate has in some ways widened, it also falls oddly short.

Of all the Oscars snubs from 2025, Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s steamy tennis melodrama, is one of the most perplexing (perhaps with the exception of Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s busting-at-the-seams, career-best performance as the neurotic powerhouse Pansy in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths). This decades-spanning tale of sex, ambition, and interdependency showcases Zendaya better than any of her big-screen roles to date as she wraps her “two little white boys” around her finger, on the court and off. She’s mesmerising, at turns ferocious and cold as ice. Particularly in a script whose breakneck pace and reliance on hectic time jumps risks running the production off the rails, it’s her performance that keeps the story (more or less) grounded, compelling, and rooted in some kind of deeply sweaty psychological truth. Perhaps even more pressing than this glaring omission from the Best Actress category, what other recent film can boast a score that became a staple at dance clubs, inspiring tennis-themed raves for months? Its throbbing electronic rhythms (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross), suitable for memes as well as doubles (triples?), makes Challengers a more-than-worthy nominee and, in my opinion, hands down winner, in this category. Come on!!!  –Payton McCarty-Simas

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga — Best Picture, Best Director & Best Supporting Actor

The Oscars feel like a special, more privileged kind of rage bait. Egregious oversights inevitably exist every year, as is the nature of the beast, and so getting profoundly upset at an institution that was originally established to bust up unions between production workers feels a bit silly and redundant. But I cannot consciously forgive the number of people who flat-out ignored Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Arriving nearly a decade after George Miller emerged from a previous, even longer hibernation to blow the doors off of what action cinema can do with 2015’s rightly championed Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa takes us back to the origin story of its title heroine — originally played by Charlize Theron, now played by Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy, both excellent — for an expansive, more deliberate feat of epic worldbuilding. If Fury Road was a relentless, hyperkinetic thrill ride, Furiosa slows things down considerably to explore a richer, more cathartic tale of revenge, one that spans across years in the Wasteland. Miller channels his inner Leone to craft his own Once Upon a Time in the West, abounding his vision with gorgeous vistas, spectacular showdowns, and a coterie of flavorfully realized characters, all bearing incredible monikers to boot (Praetorian Jack! Vuvalini General! The Octoboss!). Performances are lively as well, finding Chris Hemsworth stealing the show as Lord Dementus, a dangerous buffoon who’d happily kill you with a smile. And Miller hasn’t lost his touch when it comes to vehicular mayhem, either; an exhilarating centerpiece involving an assault on the heavily armored War Rig makes a case for the series’ best. Furiosa is glorious in all the right ways, capably going toe-to-toe with its predecessor to stand tall as one of the best pictures of 2024. Remember her name.  –Jake Tropila

Conclave — Best Director

All the outrage seems to be focused on Denis Villeneuve being overlooked, so instead I’ll focus on Edward Berger. While un-flashy, Conclave features an engrossing atmosphere and incredible performances. With simple visual choices, Berger mines genuine tension from solitary shots of Ralph Fiennes contemplating. Every choice is purposeful, every shot essential. And Berger’s directing gave Ralph Fiennes one of the best performances of his career without relying on big crowd-pleasing highlight reel moments.

In an Oscars season that tended to reward subtler character-based directorial work (except you, Emilia Pérez, go away), it’s baffling to see Berger’s omission. After All Quiet On the Western Front, Berger certainly had the Oscar voters’ attention. Yet despite Conclave arguably outdoing his previous work, there’s confoundingly little attention on the director for his work here. This film could have been written off by audiences, especially non-religious ones. Berger made them care. He made audiences buy into the gravitas of selecting one of the world’s leading ideological figures. But apparently, he did it so subtly that Oscar voters completely ignored him.  –Tej Narayanan

The Outrun — Best Actress

Saoirse Ronan was robbed. After years of being an Oscars darling, nominated in 2015, 2017, and 2019, with no wins under her belt, Ronan finally started getting more adult roles. Her career evolved into projects like Blitz, which is her first role as a mother, and The Outrun, in which she plays a recovering alcoholic dealing with family strife and her own winding road to recovery. Under the excellent direction of Nora Fingscheidt, the role is Ronan’s toughest to date, requiring the actor to play the same person at two extremes — the depths of alcohol dependency and the hopeful isolation of recovery — across over a decade. The role at once shows us a new side of Ronan while also bridging the gap from her younger teenage roles to her dramatically rich second act.

The film is full of moments that remind you that Saoirse Ronan is one of our greatest living actresses. The London-set sequences, when she’s wandering drunk through clubs and bars, require Ronan to master the precise choreography of acting drunk — her performance is pure controlled chaos. And when she’s on the island of Papa Westray, siloed off from the world in a small bothy hut, the character’s pensive hope has to power the film. Alcoholism dramas have gotten lots of Academy love in the past, including films like Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend and Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and usually addiction is rendered in grand dramatic outbursts and shouting characters at the end of their rope. Ronan does that too, but the beauty of The Outrun is that we also see her character, Rona, on the path to recovery. And those scenes of Ronan alone in a tiny house on a tiny island off the coast of Scotland are some of the most affecting in the movie — she’s powering the whole movie with her warmth, charisma, and the conflicts we know are raging inside of her, while a windstorm rages outside. Of all the 2025 Oscars snubs, it hurts to miss out on one of Ronan’s finest performances.  –Clement Tyler Obropta

Longlegs — Best Supporting Actor

While Sing Sing lost out on nominations for Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Clarence Maclin, perhaps one of the more unique surprises that the Academy Awards ignored was nominated Nicolas Cage for his ghoulish turn as the titular serial killer in Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs. Echoing Ted Levine’s snub for his complex role in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, Cage wove together layers of pain, threat, and trauma into his performance in this labyrinthine picture.

A difficult role that could have been hammy in the hands of a lesser actor, Cage opted for a tragicomical approach that was as much a piece of performance art as it was a restrained character study. The ingenious marketing for Longlegs cleverly avoided giving audiences a proper glimpse of Cage, which in some ways teased a performance similar to Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight. The interesting thing about Cage was that he brought a strange sadness to his monster; Longlegs is a victim of his own making, yet a conniving mastermind who was serving a darker power. Cage makes Longlegs not just formidable but a rather challenging entry in the pantheon of cinematic cult leaders. Cage doesn’t just chew the scenery — he transforms himself into a spectral presence that haunts the film, Maika Monroe’s protagonist, and us the audience. It’s a pity that members of the academy didn’t fall under his spell.  –Faisal Al-Jadir

All We Imagine as Light — Best International Film

All We Imagine as Light was never going to be nominated for Best International Film after India chose a different film (Laapataa Ladies) as its official submission. Still, I had hoped that — like Anatomy of a Fall, similarly snubbed by France last year — the Academy would recognize this intimate and affecting drama about life, love, and female friendship across other categories. The narrative feature debut of writer-director Payal Kapadia focuses on two women — played to perfection by Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha — who work together as nurses and live together as roommates. Kusruti’s character feels abandoned by the husband she barely knew before he left to work abroad; Prabha’s character is passionately in love with a Muslim boy despite her parents’ efforts to arrange a marriage for her. Unfolding amidst the teeming crowds and glittering lights of Mumbai — captured beautifully by cinematographer Ranabir Das — All We Imagine as Light deserves to be recognized as one of the year’s best films.  –Lee Jutton

Bonus: The Idea of You — Best Original Song

No category betrays the naked politics of the Oscars and the Academy’s poor taste like Best Original Song. This year, not one but two nominees come from Emilia Pérez. None of the songs are particularly interesting, and none of them are fun. Enter The Idea of You, a little-praised Amazon Prime romantic comedy that was released over the summer. It stars Anne Hathaway as Solène, a single mom who falls for pop star Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), who’s half her age. The movie is about as substantive and bubbly as a Monday morning mimosa and hits the same guilty pleasure sweet spot.

But the film’s chief achievement is its music. Movies about fictional pop stars, like Vox Lux and Trap, are always hard to make, since the pop stars need to be believably good and their songs earwormy enough to make you accept, for two hours, that they’re as huge as Harry Styles. Luckily, The Idea of You contains an arsenal of poppy hits that deserve recognition. The obvious nominee is the ballad “The Idea of You,” but the real gems of the film are the numbers “Dance Before We Walk” and “Closer.” Both songs, ostensibly by the fictional band August Moon led by Hayes, are light, vibrant, and fun — and most importantly, they serve the story. “Dance Before We Walk,” a song as catchy as “Drive It Like You Stole It” from 2016’s Sing Street, is an intoxicating upbeat number that cements August Moon as a teen pop sensation, but it’s also a song about ignoring your inhibitions, living dangerously, and embracing life. Perfect for a movie about a single mom and pop star who have complicated feelings about their love affair.

Of the two, though, I prefer “Closer” — at first glance a generic pop ballad about a girl, the song gains new dimensions when viewed through the lens of Hayes’ relationship with Solène. It’s basically a song about falling in love with an older woman: “I know that you’re a little bit older/ But baby, rest your head on my shoulder,” Hayes sings. The song is a flirtatious invitation but also a promise of physical intimacy, at once a harmless pop song and an ultimatum to Solène. The song also foreshadows Solène’s anxieties about the relationship. “I want to get closer to you” — but what if Hayes doesn’t like who he finds? “Girl, we could keep it goin’ the whole night” — but what happens in the morning? “I’d love to see you naked in the moonlight” — but is this relationship just about sexual attraction? For a light and breezy rom-com, there’s a lot more complexity to The Idea of You than it lets on. And of all the 2025 Oscars snubs, it feels extra bad to miss out on a few genuinely good songs.  –Clement Tyler Obropta