Oscar nominations 2025: Biggest Academy Award snubs, surprises and reality checks | Canada Voices

While every new year brings a new crisis for the Academy Awards, 2025 just might represent Hollywood’s biggest test since … well, just a few years ago, when the pandemic threw everything out of whack. But this time, the mood is just as dire, if not more in-your-face, as the nominations for the 97th Oscars were revealed as the L.A. air is still choked with smoke, thick layers of ash covering so much of the town. And now everyone is expected to forget their concerns and celebrate? It is an immensely tough pivot, but ultimately a necessary one. If ever there was a “show must go on” moment, this is it.

However the film industry comes together to celebrate its achievements March 2, though, this year’s Academy Awards won’t be delivering anything approaching like the Barbenheimer-like level of mass cultural excitement from last time around. While the box-office hit Wicked ended up scoring 10 nominations Thursday morning, including Best Picture, every single other Best Pic nominee can only boast relatively small slivers of cultural awareness. But that is what award ceremonies like the Oscars are for, after all – to highlight deserving work that might have otherwise completely bypassed so many curious moviegoers.

So while such widely celebrated titles as The Brutalist and Anora secured their expected nods, there were still a number of surprises that reveal more about the current state of Hollywood than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences might prefer to admit. Here are the best, worst, and strangest moments from the 2025 Oscar nominations.

Netflix’s Narcos 2.0

While Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez has been drowning in buzz ever since this past spring, when its world premiere at Cannes startled critics into hyperbolic overdrive (on both ends of the spectrum), it is still surprising that such an outrageous proposition – a musical about a cartel boss seeking redemption in Mexico after undergoing a sex change, sung in Spanish but directed by a Frenchman – has became the most nominated non-English-language film in Oscar history, with 11 noms. To say nothing of breaking records for Netflix, which just might finally snag that Best Picture Oscar the streaming giant has been coveting ever since it started remaking Hollywood in its image.

Brother against brother

While Kieran Culkin getting the Best Supporting Actor nomination for the dramedy A Real Pain was the one surefire lock of the season, it is slightly surprising (in a good way) to see his one-time Succession brother Jeremy Strong also get into the category for his portrayal of crooked lawyer Roy Cohn in the Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice. May the best Waystar Royco sibling win.

Dune done wrong

If Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two had kept its original release date of November 2023, it might have triumphed at last year’s Academy Awards, sweeping the land. But thanks to the dual Hollywood strikes, Warner Bros. moved the movie to the spring of 2024, where it overperformed at the box office, but seems to have been wiped from the long-term memory of many Academy voters, especially when it comes to the director of the entire thing, Canadian Denis Villeneuve. Which means that the biggest, best epic of last year will enter the Oscars ring with a handful of nominations, including Best Picture, but not nearly as many as it deserves. Perhaps we can give Villeneuve an honorary Canadian Screen Award or something to compensate?

Canadian tariffs in action?

Speaking of Canada: Is Donald Trump a secret member of the Academy? That might be one way to explain the absence of Matthew Rankin’s sublime Canadian comedy Universal Language from making the final cut of the Best International Feature category after reaching the short list. If the Winnipeg-set film, whose characters mostly speak in a mixture of Farsi and French, had secured the nomination, Universal Language would have been the first Canadian film in that category’s mix since 2012, when War Witch (Rebelle) scored a nod. (Director Kim Nguyen’s film ultimately lost to Michael Haneke’s Amour, submitted by Austria.)

Real life, real controversy

Even the fairy-tale world of Hollywood cannot escape the politics of the real world, especially when it comes to the Best Documentary Feature Film category. To the surprise of many in the doc community, the acclaimed Palestinian-Israeli doc No Other Land, made by a collective of four filmmakers describing the ongoing conflict in the West Bank, made the cut, even though it has struggled mightily to find a proper theatrical distributor. Whether the film ultimately triumphs or not, expect there to be no shortage of yet even more uncomfortable but necessary conversations as the awards circuit winds its way to Oscar night.

Challenge denied

There might not be a single film from 2024 whose mood, its very essence, was so dependent on its score. And yet Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s electrifying music for the tennis love-triangle drama Challengers was swatted away by Academy voters, who apparently found more intrigue elsewhere. Although, to be fair, the scores in nominees The Brutalist and Conclave are essential to those films’ success. The Wild Robot, Emilia Perez and Wicked? Eh, sure.

Hard truths indeed

Despite giving what has been widely declared by critics as the performance of the year – and her career – British actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste was brushed aside by the Academy for her work in Mike Leigh’s tremendous drama Hard Truths. Perhaps Jean-Baptiste’s ferocious work as a hard-edged mother who delights in isolating all those around her made the Academy just too uncomfortable. But Canadian audiences can discover just how big a mistake that is once the film opens in select theatres this Friday.

No light at the end of this tunnel

Director Payal Kapadia’s widely acclaimed Mumbai-set drama All We Imagine as Light was already ignored by India’s official film commission, which neglected to submit the film as that country’s official submission for the Oscars’ Best International Film category. Yet there was more than a little hope that the Cannes-certified title might still have squeaked in with a few nominations. Instead, the Academy cast total and complete darkness on that dream, shutting the film out.

Substantial win

After her gracious, genuine and ultrasmooth acceptance speech at this month’s Golden Globes, it seemed as if the entirety of Hollywood was in love with the idea of a Demi Moore comeback. But there was also a mood in the air that her film The Substance, in which Moore plays a once-loved actress who confronts the exceptional ugliness of the industry head-on, was just too disgustingly gross an offer for the more mainstream members of the Academy to accept. After all, it does end (spoiler alert for a months-old movie) with a black-tie Hollywood audience covered in buckets of blood and viscera. Turns out that the Academy loves some good old-fashioned irony, and nominated the film for a surprising five nominations, including Moore, Best Director for Coralie Fargeat, and Best Picture.

Sung praises

The kind of movie that makes history just by existing, the prison-set drama Sing Sing deserves all the love it has received on the awards circuit this past fall – no easy feat given the challenging nature of the material (in which actors mix with real-life former inmates to depict the goings-on of a jailhouse rehabilitation program focused on theatre) and the fact that the movie has been trying to maintain steady momentum since its TIFF debut way back in the fall of 2023. So here’s to the film getting nominated for Best Actor (the transcendent Colman Domingo), Best Original Song, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Cruel September

Back in the fall (um, September to be exact), some Oscar pundits were going all in on the historical drama September 5 gaining a Best Picture nomination, or perhaps stealing the entire show away. Yet the film, which dramatizes the 1972 Munich massacre from the perspective of the ABC Sports news crew that was covering the Olympics, only managed to score one nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

I declare a mistrial

Despite the best attempts of Warner Bros. to bury Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial effort – and, given the man’s 94-year-old age, possibly his last – Juror No. 2 found wide favour with critics during its short theatrical run late last year. And ever since it’s made its streaming debut (on Max in the U.S., Crave in Canada), the legal thriller starring Nicholas Hoult has made quick, hearty fans. Which makes its failure to net even a single nomination all that much more dispiriting for the hard core Clint-heads out there. While Warner Bros. might feel vindicated, I’m sure the studio remains, in Eastwood’s eyes, unforgiven.