The 5 Most Unforgivable Oscar Snubs of the Decade, According to Film Critics
The Academy Awards have always had a complicated relationship with being on the right side of history, and a newly circulated list is reigniting that debate in a big way. The account named what critics are calling the five most egregious Oscar snubs of the decade so far, spanning every category from score to international feature, and the conversation it has sparked is long overdue.
Topping the list is Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross missing out on Best Original Score for ‘Challengers’, and by most measures it remains the hardest snub to explain. The pair won the Golden Globe for their score, defeating four of the films that did end up receiving Oscar nominations, including ‘The Brutalist’, ‘Conclave’, ‘Emilia Pérez’, and ‘The Wild Robot’. The backlash was immediate, with both “best original score” and the film’s title trending on X the moment nominations were announced. The prevailing theory is that the Academy’s voters remain more comfortable with traditional orchestral compositions, drawing comparisons to the notorious snub of Daft Punk’s ‘Tron: Legacy’ score over a decade earlier.
At number two, Charles Melton’s absence from the Best Supporting Actor race for ‘May December’ remains a wound that still stings. Directed by Todd Haynes, the Netflix film follows Melton’s Joe Yoo, a man who has built a seemingly whole life with the woman who preyed on him when he was thirteen, and Melton’s work was widely acclaimed for the way it captured the stunted reality of a survivor who never fully processed his own abuse. He had won Best Supporting Actor at the Gothams and from the New York Film Critics Circle heading into the race, making his Academy shutout all the more baffling.
Denis Villeneuve landing at number three for ‘Dune: Part Two’ speaks to one of the most persistent blind spots in Academy history. Despite five Oscar nominations for the film including Best Picture, Villeneuve was absent from the Best Director category for the second consecutive time in the franchise, with Josh Brolin responding by declaring on Instagram that the situation “makes no sense” to him and threatening to quit acting over it. Critics have pointed to the film’s March release date as a key factor, arguing that recency bias effectively buried a masterpiece that had earned near-universal praise from the industry’s most respected names.
The list also calls out Zac Efron’s complete shutout for ‘The Iron Claw’ in the Best Actor category. His portrayal of Kevin Von Erich, a man slowly crushed under the weight of generational trauma and his father’s expectations, was widely regarded as a career-defining turn that rivaled the performances that did receive nominations that year. Many attributed the snub in part to a submission deadline issue, as the film opened to the general public on December 22nd, leaving precious little time for voters to see it before nominations closed.
Rounding out the list is Park Chan-wook’s ‘Decision to Leave’, which was entirely shut out of the Best International Feature category despite winning Best Director at Cannes. Park himself later admitted to IndieWire that it would be “hypocrisy to say that art is the only thing that matters,” acknowledging how significantly the snub affected his career trajectory in Hollywood. The omission reinforced a troubling pattern of the Academy overlooking South Korean cinema despite the genre’s enormous cultural and commercial footprint with American audiences.
Taken together, these five snubs paint a portrait of an institution still catching up to the films its audience is actually watching and feeling deeply. Whether it is genre bias, recency bias, or something harder to name, the conversation is far from over. Share your thoughts in the comments and let us know which of these snubs still hurts the most.
