The Oscars nominations for 2025 have been announced, and – as expected – Emilia Pérez has swept the board.
Netflix’s divisive musical crime drama has received 13 nominations, falling shy of the record set by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997) and La La Land (2016).
The Brutalist and Wicked followed close behind, with 10 nominations apiece – but there were, as ever, some unexpected mentions as well as the usual egregious omissions.
Below, we run through the eight biggest snubs and surprises.
A different man indeed
Sebastian Stan’s nomination for Best Actor was, in fact, part snub, part surprise. The actor had indeed been tipped to pick up his first ever nod at this year’s awards, but for Aaron Schimberg’s surreal drama-comedy A Different Man – not for The Apprentice, which is what has transpired. Not that Stan minds, I’m sure. In the latter, he plays Donald Trump, giving a depressingly convincing performance as the future US president opposite Jeremy Strong, whose sleazy portrayal of Roy Cohn has earned him a spot in the Best Supporting Actor category alongside his Succession castmate Kieran Culkin.
It’s a Wash(ington)
A film-stealing supporting performance from a two-time Oscar winner, in one of the year’s biggest films? It seemed almost an inevitability. But Washington’s villainous turn in Gladiator II was passed over by the Academy, with Yura Borisov (Anora), Edward Norton (A Complete Unknown), Guy Pearce (The Brutalist) and Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice) all making the cut ahead of him. Washington can probably console himself with the knowledge that it wouldn’t have mattered all that much anyway: barring a catastrophic PR snafu between now and Oscar night, Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain) is all but guaranteed to win the prize.
Selena No-mez...
Selena Gomez has been picking up a fair bit of traction for her supporting turn as the wife of a transgender crime boss in Emilia Pérez – but her performance didn’t make the cut for the Academy’s nominees list. It’s probably fair enough, in the scheme of things: there are plenty out there who think Emilia Pérez is a pretty terrible film, and plenty more still who don’t like Gomez’s performance in it. But it’s nonetheless a noteworthy snub, one that prevented Emilia Pérez from matching the record for the most nominations ever for a single film (14).
...but Fel-yes-ity Jones
In recent weeks, it felt like Felicity Jones’s quietly impressive work in The Brutalist was in danger of getting snubbed; her campaign’s steam ran out of gas amid growing interest in Gomez and Jamie Lee Curtis (The Last Showgirl). And while she might not appear until late into The Brutalist’s epic running time, Jones deserved placement, too – especially when Isabella Rossellini is getting recognised despite barely being in Conclave. Fortunately, Academy voters agreed, rightly opting to omit both Gomez and Curtis, ultimately favouring Jones’s career-best turn in Brady Corbet’s sweeping epic.
Lights out
If the Academy was actually nominating the greatest films of the year for Best Picture, a space should have been reserved for All We Imagine As Light. It’s perhaps apt that Payal Kapadia’s gentle tale about finding a place to belong was snubbed at the 2025 Oscars. More fool voters: the Indian director’s drama, depicting Mumbai in ways rarely seen before, just might be a masterpiece. All We Imagine As Light scooped a big prize at Cannes, with Kapadia herself receiving a Best Director nod at the Golden Globes. But the Academy failing to come through for her will forever be a blight on its record.
Double-fault
It was always going to be an uphill battle for Challengers at the Oscars, but one of the few categories that Luca Guadagnino’s steamy tennis film was expected to compete in was Best Original Score. Written by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, whose previous work includes The Social Network and 2021’s winner Soul, the sexy, sweaty music went heavy on electro and techno – thudding basslines hitting as hard as a Federer serve. The music is playful and fun, upending what we’ve come to expect from a so-called epic film score – evidently not enough to earn it a nomination, however.
Sue-cess for The Substance
Extreme body-horror film The Substance, which prompted cinema walkouts last year, is a surprising pick for the Oscars, given their previous adversity to the horror genre. By being nominated for Best Picture, it becomes just the eighth horror movie to earn such an accolade, joining The Exorcist, Jaws, The Sixth Sense, The Silence of the Lambs, Black Swan and Get Out in the prestigious club. Demi Moore, 62, received her first ever Oscar nomination for her lead role in the film, as a faded Hollywood idol who takes a black-market drug to rejuvenate her career. Margaret Qualley, though, who plays Moore’s younger doppelganger, did not receive a nomination.
Hard times for Hard Truths
Back in 1996, Marianne Jean-Baptiste became the first Black British woman to be nominated for an Academy Award when she was recognised for her supporting role in Mike Leigh’s drama Secrets & Lies. This year, she reunited with Leigh to play the lead role of Pansy Deacon in Hard Truths, a darkly comic film about a depressed, pessimistic woman’s relationship with her more upbeat sister. She had been widely tipped to return to the Oscars, with New York magazine raving about her perfomance in a piece headlined: “For the Love of God, Give This Woman an Oscar Nomination.” Sadly, it was not to be. Just as Pansy would have predicted, no doubt.
