2024 Oscar Nominations: The Snubs and Surprises

Yes, Barbie gets two slots.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Warner Bros. and Claire Folger/Orion Releasing

With so many acclaimed contenders in the race, the 2024 Oscar nominations were always going to feature some heartbreaking snubs. There were simply not enough spots for every worthy film and performance to get in. But while Tuesday’s picks included plenty for cinephiles to shout about — more like Justine Tri-yay! — they also left a few fan favorites out in the cold. Let’s take a trip through the portal that separates our world from the Academy’s and explore the most notable snubs and surprises.

What a strange morning for America Ferrera. When Ferrera received an unexpected supporting-actress nod, everyone watching naturally assumed she’d ridden the coattails of Barbie’s twin stars, Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig. But as it often does, the Editing category foretold a different story. Barbie missing there was the first bum note for the summer comedy, then things got worse. When Best Actress and Best Director were read, Robbie and Gerwig were nowhere to be found. Plenty of pundits speculated each of these three things might happen individually, but almost nobody predicted they would all happen. What’s the explanation? My sense is that directors dinged Gerwig for making what they saw as a $145 million toy commercial, actors are unkind to broad comedic performances like Robbie’s, and the Supporting Actress field was extremely thin this year. While Barbie still picked up eight total nominations, its Best Picture candidacy is looking as beat-up and bedraggled as Weird Barbie. Its best hope now is that those eye-catching snubs manage to turn the film into an Argo-style cause.

The online film community tends to treat Nyad as an urban legend, a movie that exists only to earn Guild nominations and cannot be seen by untrained eyes. (In real life, it’s been available to anyone with a Netflix subscription since early November.) However, all the factors that made the sports biopic so appealing on paper — it’s an inspirational tale of a middle-aged woman overcoming adversity, starring two beloved actresses who have long track records with the Academy — were enough to overcome the middling reviews and controversy around the real Diana Nyad. Just like Ferrera, Jodie Foster benefitted from a weak Supporting Actress year to cruise through the precursors, and her performance as a salt-of-the-earth swim coach was winning enough to pull Annette Bening into the Best Actress field, the rare case of a lead drafting in on the wake of a supporting contender. At least with Flamin’ Hot scoring an Original Song nod, Nyad was not the only credulous biopic of a figure who might have stretched the truth.

After a warmly received debut in December, January hit May December like a slap in the face. Todd Haynes’s melodrama blanked at SAG and BAFTA, dooming its chances of becoming Haynes’s first-ever Best Picture nominee. Since the Academy can be more cinephile-friendly in its picks than the precursors, fans held out hope for a stray acting nod or two. Sadly, it was not to be. Charles Melton, the one-time CW star who was among the season’s breakouts, was left out of Supporting Actor, a casualty of the Academy’s longtime bias against hunks. Past winner Julianne Moore couldn’t crack Supporting Actress either. Was May December throttled by the real-life figure who inspired the story’s speaking out against it? Did actors hate a film that implied they were all sociopaths? Or, as has often happened with Haynes, was the film simply too intellectually removed for branches that prefer big, bleeding hearts? At least the cool kids in the Writing branch awarded Samy Burch a well-deserved Original Screenplay nod.

A silver lining to Melton’s snub is that his seat was taken by a performance most viewers can get behind. Sterling K. Brown sneaking into Supporting Actor for American Fiction wasn’t a complete surprise, as his dynamite turn as Jeffrey Wright’s ne’er-do-well brother made the grade at SAG and Critics’ Choice. But this was still a relatively brief, mostly comedic performance, which is never a sure thing with the Academy. Still, just like Mark Wahlberg in The Departed, he packed enough of a punch to get in. (In retrospect, I should have known he had the juice after American Fiction’s TIFF premiere, where you couldn’t hear half the dialogue in Brown’s scenes, so hard was the audience laughing at every line.) It helps that, unlike Melton, Brown is a known quantity with a long résumé and that he was repping a film that voters dug quite a bit, also handing Fiction an unexpected Score nom.

Once upon a time, this would have been the most predictable thing in the world. After Poor Things bowed at Venice, Ruffalo’s quiveringly comic cad was tipped as a potential supporting winner. As the season went on, though, Ruffalo struggled for precursor recognition, often losing out to his co-star Willem Dafoe, whose grotesque-yet-cuddly father figure seemed to be the more Academy-friendly part. But in the end, order was restored, as the acting branch determined that Ruffalo’s transformation, though more internal than Dafoe’s, was the one worth rewarding. Pasteis de nata for everyone!

There was only one spot in Adapted Screenplay available for radically rejiggered adaptations of books about the systematic eradication of a racial underclass, and in a surprising turn of events, it was Zone of Interest, not Killers of the Flower Moon, that got it. Not only had Team Killers made the adaptation process one of the central planks in their campaign, often telling the story of how the script was rewritten to include the Osage point-of-view, but Zone, a film with a loose dramatic structure and dialogue that plays as if it’s improvised, was not an obvious pick for screenplay recognition. That wasn’t the only major category where Killers was left out. Leonardo DiCaprio’s miss in Best Actor was not exactly a snub, since Leo had fallen short at SAG and BAFTA and seemed more interested in campaigning for Lily Gladstone. Still, if the film was truly strong enough to challenge for Best Picture, DiCaprio probably would have snuck in over Rustin’s Colman Domingo.

The Academy’s Documentary branch often enjoys sticking a shiv in the assumed Oscar front-runner, just to prove it can. This year’s victim was American Symphony, a heart-tugging portrait of musician Jon Batiste navigating newfound fame and his wife’s leukemia, which was backed by the Netflix machine and offered a potentially winning combination of artistry and emotion. But though the film was well-liked enough to score an Original Song nomination for Batiste, the Doc branch left it out in favor of a quintet of hard-hitting international offerings — presumably while shouting, “There’ll be no Octopus Teacher for you this year!”

France’s selection committee must feel snakebit. Back in the fall, the nation made the baffling choice not to submit Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall in Best International Feature, going instead with the culinary romance The Taste of Things. A few theories have sprung up to explain why exactly they did this. Perhaps they feared Anatomy, which features a significant amount of English, would be disqualified; perhaps they figured it was strong enough not to need their help and decided boosting Taste was a better use of resources. But now, like an overzealous chef trying to make a souffle, they’ve got egg on their face. Anatomy dominated the nominations, not just earning its expected Picture and Screenplay nods but also nabbing ones in Director, Actress, and Editing. Meanwhile, The Taste of Things didn’t even crack the Oscar five in International. Thus the country that has been nominated in this category more than any other, but hasn’t won since 1993, will go home empty-handed once again.

Live-Action Short is perennially one of the most dismal Oscar categories, but this season’s crop was primed to have plenty of star power, with Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl adaptation The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Pedro Almodóvar’s gay Western Strange Way of Life both in the mix. However, those Academy members who opted in to vote for the shorts categories agreed with critics that Strange Way of Life was far from the Spaniard’s best and left it out entirely. Anderson will go it alone as the only A-List ringer in the bunch, and if he does take the trophy, wouldn’t that be charmingly idiosyncratic in a perfectly Wes Anderson way?

In terrible news for my 6-year-old self, both The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem missed the cut in Best Animated Feature. Probably the right call regarding Mario, the first feature film I suspect to have been written by ChatGPT, but Turtles had a case for inclusion over its painterly visuals. Bummer, dude.

As someone who dreads having to write the same column every week for the next month and a half, I was hoping for some shocking disruption in the Best Picture ranks. That didn’t happen. After notable misses for most of the non-Nolan contenders, it’s still Oppenheimer versus everybody else in the Best Picture race. Unless SAG or the PGA throws us for a loop, the rest of the season seems set to be a slow and steady coronation for the atomic-bomb drama.