At the beginning of each year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces the year’s nominations, and the mood splits fast.
One minute, fans celebrate the nominees for the best categories. Next, they start compiling their own lists of Oscar snubs when a movie that felt undeniable gets left outside the room.
The 98th Academy Awards nominations have already sparked loud debate among critics and audiences, and if you want the full rundown first, our 2026 Oscar Nominations breaks down who made the cut. From there, we look at this year’s biggest omissions and the historic losses that still sting decades later.
The Shocking Snubs of 2026
This season’s awards math looked decisive on paper. Sinners hit a record 16 nominations, while One Battle After Another landed 13, and the headlines kept circling around a previous record of 14 held by All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land. But the loudest debate wasn’t about who led the pack; it was about who got left out and which omissions felt impossible to defend.
The Blockbuster Miss
As a big-screen musical rooted in L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” universe, Wicked: For Good, looked like the kind of crowd-pleaser that still earns a prestige nod.
Instead, Best Picture went toward the emotional drama Hamnet, the sleek blockbuster F1, and buzzy, darker swings like Frankenstein and Marty Supreme.
That contrast is why the shutout stung: the Los Angeles Times reported the sequel landed zero nominations after the first film pulled in 10 (including Best Picture), and the miss came even though Wicked: For Good opened about 30% bigger domestically than Wicked (2024) and still entered the season with major awards expectations.
And it’s not hard to see the “Oscar bait” ingredients on-screen. The fantasy set pieces, bold production design, meticulous hairstyling, and spectacle-heavy flights are right there, and the @wickedmovie behind-the-scenes clip makes the wire work impossible to miss.
Even the soundtrack push leaned in, with the album billed to Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, pairing performance with original score moments and a headline song. But the shutout wasn’t limited to the movie itself or its soundtrack. The nominations also passed over the two performers who carried both the performances and the vocals.
The Acting Surprises
After Wicked: For Good got shut out across the board, the actor categories were where many readers expected at least a little damage control. Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba is the emotional engine of the story, a powerful young witch who gets misunderstood and pushed into the role of villain before she is ready.
Ariana Grande plays Glinda as her bright foil, and the casting gives the film its star power in every scene. She is polished, adored, and politically fluent, even when her loyalty starts to wobble.
People called it a major surprise that Erivo missed out on Actor in a Leading Role and Grande missed out on Actor in a Supporting Role, especially after both were nominated for the first Wicked. The outlet also notes that Erivo and Grande were in the mix earlier in the season at the Golden Globes, even though they ultimately lost there, and that Erivo had already missed at the Critics’ Choice Awards.
When you look at who made the Oscars actors list, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the competition comes into focus.
In Actor in a Leading Role, the best actor lineup features Ethan Hawke, while Lead Actress nominees range from Renate Reinsve to Kate Hudson and Emma Stone. Supporting slots went to Delroy Lindo, Sean Penn, Stellan Skarsgård, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. Lindo’s Hamnet mention also raised eyebrows, since Paul Mescal was the name many expected to hear.
The Genre Omission
Genre movies can pack the largest crowds and still find themselves outside the Academy’s attention zone. This year, that blind spot showed up fast in animation. AP News called Sony and Crunchyroll’s Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle a major oversight, noting that the Oscars have long overlooked anime even when it is hugely popular.
The film had made over $722 million worldwide and still did not land the kind of nomination many saw as a clear contender moment for the category.
The same chill hit international thrillers. American film critic Roger Ebert pointed to Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice as another head-scratcher, especially since it was Neon’s most financially successful international feature of the season in the US. The movie made the Oscars shortlist, but it still did not translate into a final nomination.
Meanwhile, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ nominee list still had room for animated titles like KPop Demon Hunters, Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, and Zootopia 2, plus high-intensity studio fare like The Lost Bus, Avatar: Fire and Ash, and Jurassic World Rebirth.
That raises the next question: which filmmakers seemed like locks to direct and still missed out?
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The Director Race
Directing is usually where the Academy rewards the vision behind the whole machine, so a true “Worst Snub” feels personal. Vogue put two names in that category this year.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein racked up nine nominations, including Best Picture, and he still showed up as a writer in Writing (Adapted Screenplay). Yet Directing was the one door that stayed shut.
Vogue also flagged Jafar Panahi, whose It Was Just an Accident landed nominations for International Feature Film and Writing (Original Screenplay), but not for Directing. Both directors were talked up in guild circles for months, which is why their absence from the final Directing lineup felt so hard to explain.
Per the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Directing nominees are Chloé Zhao for Hamnet, Ryan Coogler for Sinners, Josh Safdie for Marty Supreme, Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle after Another, and Joachim Trier for Sentimental Value.
Historic Heartbreak: The All-Time Biggest Snubs
Some Oscar losses sting for a season, then fade into trivia. Others turn into permanent scars in movie history, the kind people still argue about decades later. These are the snubs that reshaped careers, rewrote the Oscars’ reputation, and proved that time can be a harsher judge than any ballot.
Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock did not earn the “Master of Suspense” by accident. Britannica notes that the London-born director built a long career on uneasy psychology, visual precision, and a dark sense of humor that kept audiences leaning forward.
One of his cleanest showcases is Rear Window, where a wheelchair bound photographer turns voyeur, scans an entire apartment courtyard, and slowly convinces himself he has witnessed a murder.
The setup is simple, but Hitchcock’s cinematography makes it feel like a trap, with every window framed like a clue and every cut tightening the pressure.
That is why the Oscar history still stings. TIME points out that Hitchcock was nominated for the Directing category five times and never won the award for best director, even as his influence became impossible to ignore.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did honor him with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1968, and TIME recalls he accepted it with a famously short “Thank you very much indeed.” The next section shows he was not the only legend the Oscars left waiting.
The 1990s Disasters
If the 2026 snubs feel brutal, the 1990s were a whole decade of Oscar heartbreak. One of the loudest came in 1991, when Goodfellas was a Best Picture nominee but lost to Dances With Wolves.
TIME Entertainment argues voters leaned toward the sweeping, “serious” Western, and the Academy rewarded Kevin Costner’s first-time directing swing as much as the film itself. Dances With Wolves not only took Best Picture. It also won the Writing category for Adapted Screenplay, which shows how completely it dominated the ballot. Still, even that night could not ignore Joe Pesci’s work, since he won Supporting Actor.
Then came 1999. Saving Private Ryan was nominated for Best Picture, but Shakespeare in Love won. The Los Angeles Times captured the next-day fallout, with talk of Miramax’s aggressive campaign and “strong-arm tactics,” plus disputed reports about millions spent to win the room.
Next up, an even older upset that still haunts film history.
The “Citizen Kane” Paradox
Calling Citizen Kane one of the greatest films ever made has become almost automatic, which is what makes its Oscar loss feel so strange. The Guardian republished an 84-year-old review that praised Orson Welles’ debut as “probably the most exciting film that has come out of Hollywood for twenty-five years.”
The review highlights the dreamlike opening, its newsreel-style structure, and how it turns one man’s life into a mystery built around the word “Rosebud.”
Yet when the 14th Oscars rolled around in 1942, Citizen Kane lost Best Picture to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. TIME Entertainment explains why that happened has less to do with the movie’s quality and more to do with the enemies it made.
William Randolph Hearst, the media tycoon widely seen as Kane’s inspiration, used his newspapers to attack the movie, tried to suppress it, and pressured Hollywood to keep it out of theaters. Kane still earned nine nominations, but it only won the Writing category for the best Original Screenplay.
That is the paradox. A film now treated like untouchable canon first had to survive being punished in real time, which leads straight to the bigger question of why snubs happen at all.
Why Do Snubs Happen? The Academy’s Blind Spots
If Citizen Kane could be punished in real time and canonized later, it helps explain why snubs keep repeating. A lot of them come down to taste, and to the Academy’s voting makeup, specifically what it treats as “serious.”
The Guardian notes that sci-fi, fantasy, and horror often clean up in technical categories but struggle to break into the “Big Five.” This is often attributed to the Academy’s demographics.
While the Academy has made strides in diversity, as of 2024, the voting body remained approximately 66% male and 81% white. This historically older, more conservative demographic often equates “prestige” with traditional drama, leaving high-concept genre films like The Substance (2025) to fight for scraps in the craft categories.
Reuters made a similar point when it reported that The Substance became only the seventh horror film ever nominated for Best Picture, and that the category is usually rewarded in effects and other craft lanes.
Then there is campaign fatigue. RTE describes an expensive Oscar campaign machine where studios spend millions, buy “for your consideration” ads, and plan releases to stay fresh in voters’ minds.
Without sustained spending, a film can slip off voters’ informal shortlist, especially when bigger studios keep their titles everywhere at once. The International Documentary Association adds that smaller movies may need at least $100,000 just to be taken seriously, and some filmmakers admit they were “late to the game and a dollar short.”
When Snubs Outlive The Oscars
The funny thing about Oscar history is that the “losers” sometimes end up with the longer legacy.
Take Raging Bull, which lost Best Picture to Ordinary People. AFI later ranked it No. 4 on its list of the greatest American films, and the National Film Registry added it to the Library of Congress’s collection of US film heritage.
Then there’s Brokeback Mountain, which lost to Crash. It was added to the National Film Registry, and TIME described it as a cultural phenomenon that pushed LGBTQ stories deeper into the mainstream conversation.
And The Social Network now sits on the Registry’s list as well, while the Library of Congress lists The King’s Speech among films “not yet named” to the Registry.
In the end, the films that did not win are often the ones audiences keep returning to, and the ones history says we still deserve.
