2025 Oscar nominations: Snubs and surprises include ‘A Real Pain,’ Edward Berger, Selena Gomez
The most competitive and unpredictable Oscar race in years hit a crescendo on Thursday with the 2025 Oscar nominations announcement, which left I’m Still Here, Nickel Boys, and Sebastian Stan as surprise nominees and A Real Pain, Edward Berger, and Selena Gomez as shocking snubs.
Ahead are the biggest snubs and surprises from the 2025 Oscar nominations.
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SNUB: Sing Sing for Best Picture
Few Best Picture contenders ping-ponged as much in recent weeks as Sing Sing. The quiet A24 drama has had passionate supporters touting its virtues since the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. But, anecdotally, visibility felt like a huge issue: Sing Sing barely made a dent in theaters when it was released last summer and never hit a streaming platform, two factors that contributed to the muted conversation online about the film compared to louder contenders like The Substance. So when Sing Sing missed its best ensemble bid at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, it felt like the curtain had dropped on its Best Picture hopes. However, the Sing Sing then rebounded at the BAFTA Awards, maxing out with three nominations from its three longlist placements — including an unexpected nomination for costar Clarence Maclin in Best Supporting Actor. That had many back on the Sing Sing hope train until the following day, when the film missed the field at the Producers Guild Awards. Ultimately, the guild misses were too much to overcome: Sing Sing missed the Best Picture lineup despite securing three other nominations, including Best Actor for Colman Domingo and Best Adapted Screenplay.
SURPRISE: Nickel Boys for Best Picture
Ever since its debut at the Telluride Film Festival, Nickel Boys has been compared to The Zone of Interest in terms of how it broke the traditional form of narrative storytelling to immerse the audience inside a human rights atrocity (the Holocaust in The Zone of Interest and the Jim Crow South in Nickel Boys). Well, like The Zone of Interest, Nickel Boys can call itself a Best Picture Oscar nominee. The Amazon MGM Studios release pulled off the surprise nomination on Thursday, landing among the field of 10 in place of A Real Pain and Sing Sing. Critics don’t always matter to the Oscars race. Still, it’s hard to deny the impact the most prominent groups – including the New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and National Society of Film Critics, each of which rewarded Nickel Boys with a significant award — had on the film’s fate, especially after it missed the lineup of Producers Guild Awards nominees last week.
SNUB: A Real Pain for Best Picture
As the Best Picture field started to clear out late last year — pour one out for former contenders like September 5 and Gladiator II — Searchlight’s A Real Pain became a popular Best Picture pick because it felt assured of an eventual Oscar win — Best Supporting Actor for frontrunner Kieran Culkin. However, despite nominations for Culkin and the film’s original screenplay by Jesse Eisenberg, A Real Pain failed to land in the Best Picture lineup. Perhaps the BAFTA Awards pointed to this snub hiding in plain sight: the prominent group ignored A Real Pain on several key longlists, including Best Film.
SURPRISE: I’m Still Here
Sony Pictures Classics strikes again. The distributor snuck into the Best Picture field with I’m Still Here, besting presumed contenders like Sing Sing and September 5. Credit the international contingent of Oscar voters with this pick: the film from Walter Salles, an international feature nominee, also scored an expected nomination for Fernanda Torres.
SNUB: Edward Berger for Best Director
What’s the deal with the directors’ branch and Berger? Two years ago, the Conclave filmmaker missed the Best Director field for All Quiet on the Western Front despite that film’s massive Oscars footprint and four eventual wins. This year, Berger failed to convert several major precursor nominations — including bids from the Directors Guild Awards and BAFTA Awards — into a corresponding Oscar nomination. Berger’s failure to earn his first-ever Oscar nomination likely concerns passion: Conclave is a consensus film without many detractors. However, that also made Berger vulnerable to someone with a more outward passion for their work, like Fargeat.
SURPRISE: James Mangold for Best Director
When Mangold hit the Directors Guild Awards for A Complete Unknown, the conventional wisdom was that he’d miss a corresponding Best Director nomination at the Oscars like fellow “mainstream” DGA nominees in recent years such as Greta Gerwig (Barbie) and Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick). But A Complete Unknown has surged at the right time — it’s arguably a top-five Oscar Best Picture contender after today’s nominations — and Mangold is a widely respected veteran who has worked alongside several top directors, including Steven Spielberg.
SNUB: Daniel Craig for Best Actor
When Craig hit the Screen Actors Guild Awards for Queer, the kind of challenging film that usually repels the mainstream tastes of SAG Awards voters, it felt like his Oscar nomination was all but assured. But Craig then missed the BAFTA Awards Best Actor field despite the alleged hometown edge and six Best Actors slots instead of five. Now, he’s without an Oscar nomination. Craig missed the cut on Thursday, presumably losing his spot to Sebastian Stan. It’s a bummer because Queer represents some of the best work of his career, but that he got this far with a movie that didn’t connect with Academy voters (it received no other nominations) speaks highly of Craig’s stature in the industry. Count him out at your own risk when he’s again back in the awards race.
SURPRISE: Sebastian Stan for Best Actor
For weeks, it felt like Stan was at war with himself when it came to securing an Oscar nomination. Anecdotally, the hardest working actor in the Best Actor race — there was seemingly not an interview or appearance Stan passed up — Stan had two acclaimed performances in the race in A Different Man and The Apprentice. However, while A Different Man had its fans (and landed an Oscar nomination for its makeup and hair), The Apprentice pulled ahead as the Stan performance of choice: stars like Edward Norton and Robert Downey Jr. praised the actor for his work as Donald Trump, and the film overperformed with BAFTA voters, landing nominations there for Stan, Jeremy Strong, and casting. Those BAFTA nominations served as a canary in the coal mine for Thursday’s results, with Stan landing his first-ever nomination (and Strong hitting the Best Supporting Actor field as well).
SNUB: Marianne Jean-Baptiste for Best Actress
No actress ensorcelled critics more this season than Jean-Baptiste, whose prickly and disciplined work in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths won the critics’ trifecta of Best Actress prizes (New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Society of Film Critics). But it wasn’t clear if Jean-Baptiste, a former Oscar nominee for Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, could crack the Best Actress field for the small-scale drama. Unfortunately, the last-minute push orchestrated by distributor Bleecker Street failed to push Jean-Baptiste into the Best Actress field. The actress hit several events in New York and Los Angeles before the California wildfires put an end to the traditional campaign season and had several prominent supporters and former Oscar nominees or winners in her corner, including Angela Bassett, Sam Rockwell, Mark Ruffalo, and Marisa Tomei.
SNUB: Angelina Jolie for Best Actress
By Thursday, when the Oscar nominations were announced, few expected Jolie to land her once-expected Best Actress nomination for Maria. Unfortunately, the global icon’s performance never captured the hearts and minds of critics or industry voters: Jolie was routinely snubbed by critics groups and missed several major precursor awards in recent weeks, including the BAFTA Awards and SAG Awards.
SNUB: Denzel Washington for Best Supporting Actor
See: Jolie, Angelina. Like the former Oscar winner, Washington was expected to receive his 10th acting Oscar nomination this year for Gladiator II. But despite his showy role in a significant hit, enthusiasm for Washington never really materialized, and he was caught outside the Best Supporting Actor race as passion picks like Jeremy Strong and Clarence Maclin presumably pulled No. 1 votes on the preferential ballot that Washington could not.
SURPRISE: Jeremy Strong for Best Supporting Actor
The No. 1 boy and former Emmy Award winner for Succession will join his Roy sibling Kieran Culkin in the Oscar race. Ever since The Apprentice debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, Strong has earned rapturous praise for finding empathy while playing Roy Cohn opposite Stan’s Trump, and industry voters noticed: Strong received nominations from the Screen Actors Guild Awards and BAFTA Awards en route to his first Oscar nomination.
SNUB: Clarence Maclin for Best Supporting Actor
After missing the Screen Actors Guild Awards nomination, Maclin seemed like he would miss the Oscar nomination as well. However, his campaign was saved by the BAFTA Awards, where he earned a Best Supporting Actor bid over Denzel Washington and Stanley Tucci, among other contenders, even though the British Film Academy didn’t widely embrace Sing Sing. So consider today’s omission a snub for his acting. Maclin is a nominee as part of the film’s screenplay nomination.
SNUB: Jamie Lee Curtis for Best Supporting Actress
The afterglow was dimmed. No one seriously considered Curtis’s flashy performance in The Last Showgirl for awards consideration before the BAFTA longlists put her in play on Jan. 3. Then, a week later, Curtis scored an unexpected Screen Actors Guild Awards nomination and then backed that up with an actual BAFTA Awards nomination days later. Curtis’s flex on the Best Supporting Actress race – particularly as her inclusion in the race presumably pushed out other contenders like Margaret Qualley — left social media users irate. But the stan armies just ended up borrowing worry: Curtis failed to secure the Oscar nomination on Thursday. In hindsight, it isn’t a shocker: The Last Showgirl was always a tiny film, and Curtis was likely caught in a numbers game against five contenders who starred in Best Picture nominees.
SNUB: Margaret Qualley for Best Supporting Actress
Maybe this is what the Academy thought The Substance meant by “respect the balance.” While Demi Moore secured her first-ever Oscar nomination for the body horror satire, her onscreen counterpart Qualley was snubbed. The writing was on the wall for this result for weeks: Despite racking up critics’ wins, Qualley never caught on with industry voters. She missed the Screen Actors Guild Awards and BAFTA Awards, the latter a shocker since The Substance was expected to overperform with the group after its 11 longlist bids (The Substance ultimately converted five of those mentions into actual BAFTA nominations). Qualley appeared in several acclaimed arthouse movies in 2024 — including Kinds of Kindness and Drive-Away Dolls — and her connections to the industry (her mother is Andie McDowell) make it seem likely she’ll call herself an Oscar nominee before long — just not this year.
SURPRISE: Monica Barbaro for Best Supporting Actress
The buzz out of the first screenings of A Complete Unknown was that Barbaro stole the movie as Joan Baez. However, until the Screen Actors Guild Awards nominations earlier this month, the actress was merely a darkhorse contender for an Oscar nomination — particularly after she missed the BAFTA longlists. But A Complete Unknown has moved like a freight train through January, building momentum with industry voters — it landed key nominations from the Screen Actors Guild, Writers Guild, Directors Guild, and Producers Guild. That helped the deserving Barbaro coattail into the race.
SNUB: Danielle Deadwyler for Best Supporting Actress
It’s been a while since many seriously considered Deadwyler for an Oscar nomination. But there was still hope the actress would land among the Best Supporting Actress nominees on Thursday for her acclaimed work in The Piano Lesson, particularly after Deadwyler hit with Screen Actors Guild voters. However, as happened in 2023 with Till, Deadwyler failed to convert early praise and critical acceptance into an Oscar nomination.
SNUB: Selena Gomez for Best Supporting Actress
The industry’s love for Emilia Perez has been apparent for months, but it never really extended to Gomez. The actress, whose performance in the film has earned great praise and some loud jeers, failed to land among the Best Supporting Actress nominees on Thursday even after hitting with BAFTA voters last week.
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