The 23 Most Unforgivable Oscar Snubs of 2026

After The Brutalist earned 10 Oscar nominations a year ago, it hurts to see The Testament of Ann Lee—the Brutalist follow up from creative team Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet, this time directed by Fastvold—blanked at the Oscars. But the biggest snub of them all is for the performance that lead Amanda Seyfried gave. Ann Lee tells the story of a 1700s woman who channels several personal tragedies into her life as a religious and community leader, and, given that it focuses on the Shaking Quakers, or, the “Shakers,” it’s also a musical with some of the most hypnotic and striking music and dance sequences you’ll ever see. Seyfried disappears into the character—as she always does and always has since Mean Girls—and gives a truly incredible performance that puts the whole movie on her back.

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There was no shortage of recognition for One Battle After Another—it earned a huge 13 nominations—but it’s hard to argue that the movie would’ve been as successful without Chase Infiniti, whose relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio is the core of the movie. While Infiniti—making her film debut!—doesn’t enter the movie until about 40 minutes into its runtime, she drives the story from her very first scene in Sensei Sergio’s (Benicio del Toro) dojo. Infiniti brings a full range of emotion to her performance and also a physicality through the film’s many tense action sequences that’s totally legitimate. But perhaps most impressively, she holds her own with the movie’s many heavy hitters—including Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Regina Hall—in a manner that any seasoned veteran actor would be impressed by. She may not have gotten the nomination this time, but we suspect she’ll be back in the future.

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Bugonia has a presence at the Oscars this year, earning nominations for Best Picture and Best Actress (for Emma Stone) among others, but Jesse Plemons—who plays the movie’s slimy, dirty, conspiracy-minded driving force—missed out on what would’ve been a totally deserving nomination for Best Actor. Plemons has become one of the best in the world when he shows up in just about anything, but his Bugonia kidnapper was right in his bag; It’s the kind of thing he really excels at. We’re not worried though—he will certainly be back. Jesse Plemons’s time at the Oscars will come.

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Sinners earned a staggering 16 nominations at the Academy Awards, including nominations for cast members Michael B. Jordan (in Best Actor), Wunmi Mosaku (in Best Supporting Actress), and Delroy Lindo (in Best Supporting Actor). It’s hard to ask for much more than that, but Jack O’Connell’s turn as the Irish blood-sucking and movie-loving vampire Remmick was a really special villain (a streak he continued with his role in 28 Years Later and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple). O’Connell and Miles Caton (who was Sinners’s de facto protagonist) didn’t get the awards love, but their performances were just as great as anyone who landed a nomination.

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Now let’s have some fun. Ralph Fiennes’ was never anywhere near the awards conversation for his role as Dr. Kelson in 28 Years Later, but damn it, he should have been! This is an actor who elevates every single role he’s ever in, and coming off of the more stately (but still very fun) Conclave, he shows up in Danny Boyle‘s masterful post-apocalyptic film as a doctor who looks positively mad—his skin is red because it’s covered in iodine, folks—but turns out to be one of the most principled, compelling, and touching characters of the year. Look, it’s OK—we’re just going to have to make sure he gets his nomination next year for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple instead.

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While Wicked: For Good was certainly a step down from its predecessor, Ariana Grande remained fantastic in her role as Glinda. Luckily she was already Academy Award-nominated a year ago for this same role, but for the issues For Good had, her performance was not one of them—and the movie was at its best when she was featured. Luckily, now she gets to channel what she’s best at—a fantastic comedic physicality—into her next role, Focker-in-Law, out next year.

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Again, look—One Battle After Another got a ton of love. The movie is hardly being overlooked. But Regina Hall is one of the best we’ve got, and she’s been one of the best for a long time. She doesn’t have a ton of time on screen in One Battle After Another, but what she does have is an incredibly expressive face and voice—and it makes her character one of the most interesting and exciting in the whole movie. We can’t wait to see her next when she with 100% certainty will make us all crack up in Scary Movie 6, but hopefully she keeps finding roles like this that really show all she can do as an actor.

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25 years ago, Steven Soderbergh had one of the most impressive accomplishments a movie director ever had—he was nominated for the Best Director Oscar twice, for Erin Brockovich and Traffic, winning for the latter. These days, Soderbergh doesn’t engage too much in awards season fare, instead opting to make the kind of movies that he clearly finds interesting, unique, or just plain fun, and he had two of those come out in 2025. Presence, which put viewers in the first-person perspective of a ghost haunting a family in their new home, was extremely experimental and successful, while Black Bag marked a fun return to Soderbergh’s sleek Ocean’s Eleven-style roots. He’ll probably make his way back to the Oscars some day, but awards or not, he remains one of the most compelling filmmakers working today. His next movie, The Christophers, will hit theaters in April.

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Speaking of Black Bag. Let’s just be very quick on this one—everyone in that movie is impeccably dressed. Cate Blanchett looks fantastic throughout. Michael Fassbender rocks a turtleneck like no one’s business; I don’t even wear glasses, but after watching Black Bag, I kind of wanted to grab a pair of his Ray-Ban frames just for fashion purposes. And we give Costume Designer Ellen Mirojnick credit for that.

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Benicio del Toro was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his fantastic work in One Battle After Another, and very much could wind up winning the award (an award he previously won for his role in Traffic, and should have probably won again for his role in Sicario). But still, 2025 was an epic year for del Toro and it should have been recognized as such—he was amazing in the lead role of The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson’s latest. Jamie Foxx and Scarlett Johansson have been double Oscar nominees in the relatively recent past, and in a less busy year, maybe del Toro could’ve pulled it off too.

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Can I ask a simple question—What happened? Back when The Grand Budapest Hotel came out, it seemed like Wes Anderson had finally broken through to the zone of his fellow Anderson (Paul Thomas) and become one of those people who would just kind of get a bunch of Oscar nominations for every movie he did. The quality hasn’t gone down—2023’s Asteroid City was fantastic, and The Phoenician Scheme finds the one-of-a-kind filmmaker making a father-daughter espionage story like we haven’t seen before (of course, with his signature aesthetic included). As he gets older, the way he engages with his characters and their views on life is only getting more and more interesting (and including Michael Cera in The Phoenician Scheme‘s cast was also a stroke of long-awaited genius). Anderson may not be directly in the Oscar world anymore, but he remains a shining star in ours.

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We can keep this one simple—the score in Marty Supreme rules, and fuels the extremely high energy of the entire movie. Lopatin previously worked with Josh and Benny Safdie on Uncut Gems (among other projects), and his work on this movie’s music should have been nominated.

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It’s ironic that Joaquin Phoenix is an Academy Award-winner for his work playing an outcast loner in Joker, because, in my opinion, it’s when he starts getting into the zone as the serious freaks that he’s at his very best (talking about you, The Master, Beau is Afraid, and Her). The latest performance to add to this list is Phoenix’s turn as Sheriff Joe Cross in Ari Aster’s 2020-set period piece conspiracy black comedy thriller Eddington. Phoenix is at his funniest and most disturbed in this movie, turning what is initially a feud with Pedro Pascal’s local politician into a deep wormhole of paranoia and utter madness. It’s one of Phoenix’s best, most compelling, and most committed performances in a career that has been completely full of them.

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This one’s for the real sickos out there. Aster is never afraid to poke, prod, and dig for what he finds to be the funniest, twisted, and, in many ways, most truthful ways to tell his stories. That’s been true for all of his movies to date, and it’s really true in Eddington.

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While Marty Supreme has rightfully received lots of attention for Timothée Chalamet’s lead performance, it also was the home for two particularly excellent supporting performances as well. The first we want to point out is Odessa A’zion’s performance as Marty’s childhood friend, Rachel. A’zion has been working for a number of years now, but between Marty Supreme and HBO’s I Love LA, she proved to everyone that she’s got a real talent in raising her energy through the roof at any given moment. She gives a real throwback performance here in a movie that feels plucked out of a decade past.

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By design, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Kay Stone—quiet, subtle, and full of melancholy—is the total inverse of Odessa A’zion’s Rachel. The two women that we see in Marty’s life needed to have these distinctly different energies for the movie to work as well as it did, and they succeed greatly. It’s easy to forget how great an actress Paltrow is, given how often she’s out and about making news as her very funny real life self, but Marty Supreme is here to remind everyone that she is really, really fantastic. The way she channels Kay’s inner sadness in only a handful of scenes is really impressive work, and she plays extremely well with Chalamet.

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You might sense a theme on this list, but we’ll say it again: We’re here to make a case for the sickos. Weapons earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Amy Madigan in the Best Supporting Actress category, but Cregger has proved to be something of a spiritual successor to Jordan Peele as a wildly-talented horror-focused filmmaker with roots in sketch comedy (he originally rose to fame as a member of the group Whitest Kids U Know). In a world where horror is treated with a little more respect by the Academy, Cregger might’ve picked up a couple more nominations, because his script and direction on Weapons, a movie that follows the mysterious disappearance of a bunch of small town children, was excellent—and he’d done it only a couple years earlier with Barbarian too. We’re waiting patiently for Resident Evil, which will hit theaters next fall.

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No Other Choice got completely shut out at the Oscars, which is a huge disappointment—considering it was one of the best movies of the year. While we would’ve loved to see it get into the Best Picture or Best International Feature categories, we need to specifically point to Lee Byung-hun‘s tremendous lead performance. As a desperate man who comes up with a desperate plan to find himself work that he finds fulfilling, Lee gives a performance that’s dramatic, funny, and incredibly physical all at once. Not highlighting him is a major missed opportunity for the Academy to showcase one of the world’s most exiting actors and films.

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Much of the same: Park Chan-wook is one of the best directors on earth, and the Academy is missing out on a great opportunity to showcase him and his work. No Other Choice is incredible, and by nominating it (and him), you could’ve directed people to check out his past masterpieces like Oldboy, The Handmaiden, and Decision To Leave. Oh well.

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