10 Great 2024 Movies Snubbed For Best Picture

After a few untimely delays due to the Los Angeles wildfires, the nominations for the 97th Academy Awards were finally unveiled a few weeks ago on Jan. 23, with “Emilia Pérez” leading the pack with 13 nods overall including one for Best Motion Picture of the Year. Just so you know where things stand, this year’s field is rounded out by “Anora”, “The Brutalist”, “A Complete Unknown”, “Conclave”, “Dune: Part Two”, “I’m Still Here”, “Nickel Boys”, “The Substance”, and “Wicked”.

Even with the recent expansion from five to 10 slots, not a year goes by that the nominations manage to please everyone. As usual, there’s been much online quibbling over the conspicuous absence of a fair number of Oscar hopefuls that were once considered sure bets to make the cut. For better or worse, we fully expect this season’s wildly unpredictable race to continue to be a topic of discussion heading into the March 2 awards ceremony, with Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner grabbing the pole position and pulling away as the presumed frontrunner after a strong showing at the PGA awards.

In the meantime, however, we thought it’d be a fun exercise to round up a list of 2024 movies, from splashy festival standouts to underseen gems, that fell down the pecking order and couldn’t hold on to their spots as hoped. Some of this year’s most glaring omissions spent the entire campaign trail on the fringes of the Best Picture race, whereas others listed down below never had the commercial appeal and marketing push required to make a serious bid for Oscar contention in the first place. They may have ended up on the outside looking in, but in our hearts, they’re all winners.

1. Challengers

Italian-born provocateur Luca Guadagnino entered the home stretch of the awards season with a one-two punch of buzzy rabble-rousers in “Challengers” and “Queer” that instantly became lightning rods of contention and once seemed on the precipice of nominations. Sadly, the former’s early-spring release window meant it never stood a chance of staying fresh in the voters’ minds when the time came to hand the nominations out, while the best actor field was simply too crowded to make room for Daniel Craig’s career-best work as literary author William S. Burroughs stand-in in the latter.

A Best Picture nod wasn’t exactly a given, but the fact that “Challengers” somehow went unrecognized in all departments despite a strong showing at the Globes (including a much-deserved win for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ original score) had many of us scratching our heads. Zendaya is technically still in the mix in this year’s Best Picture race thanks to “Dune: Part Two”, but there’s no better showcase for the perennial A-lister’ onscreen charisma than this steamy ménage à trois, which finds her character — a former tennis prodigy turned pro trainer — struggling to choose between the two US Open contenders vying for her attention (Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist).

The days of yore when grown-up, racy erotic thrillers like “Fatal Attraction” muscled their way into the Best Picture race may be long gone, but “Challengers” near $100 million box office haul suggests moviegoers are still champing at the bit to get back to theaters to indulge in their most basic instincts.

2. A Real Pain

For months, most prognosticators have pegged Kieran Culkin as the presumed frontrunner in the best supporting actor category for his scenery-chewing turn as Benji Kaplan, a sharp-tongued Jewish-American man who flies across the pond with his estranged cousin to visit Poland and explore their Jewish heritage in honor of their late grandmother.

Sure, pundits have feuded over whether Culkin should have campaigned in the supporting slate to begin with, considering he’s unquestionably every bit a lead as Jesse Eisenberg. Be that as it may, barring a late surge by Edward Norton (“A Complete Unknown”) and his former Succession co-star Jeremy Strong (“The Apprentice”), the category feels now like an open and shut case after he cleaned up at the Globes.

However, the industry’s overwhelming enthusiasm for Culkin’s performance didn’t carry over to the Oscars’ Best Picture race, with this buzzy Sundance road-trip movie ending up on the outside looking in after being on the bubble all throughout the awards circuit. Eisenberg himself couldn’t break through the clutter in a historically competitive directing lineup, though at least he didn’t get shut out of the Best Original Screenplay race. The movie surely deserved better, if only for having the decency to wrap up in a brisk 89 minutes — mind you, that’s more than two full hours shorter than “The Brutalist”.

3. Hard Truths

All due respect to Demi Moore, Mikey Madison, and Fernanda Torres, but if there’s an actress who deserved to get her flowers for single-handedly carrying a film on her shoulders this year, that’s Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

Despite being showered in praise at TIFF for her emotionally raw, gutting turn in “Hard Truths”, the veteran actress and frequent Mike Leigh collaborator’s name was nevertheless conspicuously absent from the Oscar acting slate. However, the enduring power of her fearless, wounded, and singular performance as Pansy — an embittered British Jamaican housewife and self-loathing human dynamo who channels her chronic depression into violent outbursts of angst — won’t be fading anytime soon. In typical Leigh fashion, “Hard Truths” is an unassuming, slice-of-life movie that is less concerned with providing clear-cut resolutions and ham-fisted platitudes than finding genuine empathy and compassion in its dysfunctional yet relatable working-class characters.

You can see why the Academy would overlook an unglamorous, dialogue-heavy drama with no bankable movie stars. But was it too much to ask for it to edge out “Emilia Pérez”?

4. All We Imagine as Light

Widely considered to be one of the toasts of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it rightfully received the coveted Grand Prix, Payal Kapadia’s bittersweet sophomore feature seemed too good to pass up as India’s official Oscar submission for Best International Feature Film. In a surprising turn, that honor instead went to Kiran Rao’s “Laapataa Ladies”, leaving one of last year’s best-reviewed critical darlings completely iced out of a race it arguably deserves to win outright.

A big push was made for “All We Imagine as Light”, a tender, melancholy, and carefully observed character study that splits its focus on two nurses (Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha) living in Mumbai, to follow in Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” footsteps and break into the Best Picture and directing shortlists despite being snubbed by its own national selection committee. But after being on the bubble heading into the January 23 announcements, the film faced an uphill battle and couldn’t translate its stellar critical reception and positive word of mouth into a serious bid for Oscar contention.

Its exclusion feels like a slap in the face, but as lesser movies that did manage to squeak by in the Best Picture category inevitably start to fade over time, there’s little doubt in our minds that this understated gem will age like fine wine and only grow in stature for years to come.

5. Hundreds of Beavers

I could give you hundreds of reasons (pun intended) why Mike Cheslik’s microbudget cult sensation is every bit as awards-worthy as your average costume drama or prestige biopic. Had this actually made it onto the Best Picture lineup, it’d have been the funniest movie to do so since 1987s “Moonstruck” and a rare moment of redemption for an Academy that bafflingly ignored the likes of “Some Like It Hot”, “Raising Arizona”, and “Being John Malkovich”.

But let’s be real — expecting the Academy membership to even entertain the idea of throwing its weight behind a $150,000 silent slapstick comedy about a 19th-century applejack maker (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) battling actors in bargain-bin beaver costumes was always something of a pipe dream.

It may not be anyone’s idea of high art and hardly award-season catnip, but if reviving a long-extinct subgenre like the silent slapstick comedy in the year of our lord 2025 isn’t enough to sway voters, I don’t know what is. Gun to my head, it’d struggle to name a movie release in recent memory that delivered as much unadulterated joy and full-on belly-laugh moments as this nostalgic call back to classic Buster Keaton and Looney Tunes hijinks — a madcap rollercoaster ride shot over four years in Wisconsin that fully commits to its ridiculous premise and has more fresh ideas than this year’s crop of nominees put together. If the world was just, it’d swooped in for a shocking but very welcome upset.