Wicked: For Good was one of the big snubs from this year's Oscar nominations.
Wicked: For Good was one of the big snubs from this year's Oscar nominations.
Ryan Coogler’s box-office-smashing vampire film Sinners broke yet another record when it landed 16 Oscar nominations – the most of any film in history, besting the 14-nod totals earned by 1950’s All About Eve, 1997’s Titanic and 2016’s La La Land.
The feat is especially remarkable given the perceived biasamong awards bodies against horror and genre flicks. But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences displayed a willingness to share the wealth this time around, doling out nominations to a wide array of films.
A few titles expected to dominate did exactly that: Paul Thomas Anderson’s action-packed thriller One Battle After Another trailed Sinners with 13 nominations; Josh Safdie’s table tennis caper Marty Supreme, Guillermo del Toro’s gothic fantasy Frankenstein and Joachim Trier’s family drama Sentimental Value each earned nine; and Chloe Zhao’s heart-wrenching adaptation of Hamnet landed eight. (It should be noted that Sinners and One Battle were both distributed by Warner Bros., a significant achievement for a studio on the brink of being acquired by Netflix.) Cast nominations boosted each total, as they triumphed over actors from movies such as Wicked: For Good, which was entirely snubbed.
Amy Madigan’s grassroots campaigning for Weapons paid off, as her supporting-actress nod joined a decent amount of recognition for smaller candidates. Tunisia’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, for instance, appeared in best international feature over South Korea’s No Other Choice, helmed by legendary director Park Chan-wook. The documentary category honoured Come See Me in the Good Light, a film about the late poet Andrea Gibson, alongside more widely seen titles such as The Perfect Neighbour and The Alabama Solution.
While there are a number of front-runners in each race – best actress is probably between Golden Globe winners Jessie Buckley for Hamnet and Rose Byrne for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, for instance – it feels like the other major races are anyone’s game. Will Sinners thrive at the March 15 ceremony, or might One Battle – which has won far more precursor awards for best picture – come for its crown? Will Coogler become the first Black film-maker to win best director? Is Marty Supreme star Timothée Chalamet about to be one of the youngest best-actor winners of all time, or will Blue Moon lead Ethan Hawke swipe the honour?
Here are our thoughts on some of the biggest snubs and surprises among nominations for the 98th Academy Awards, which will be hosted by returning comedian Conan O’Brien.
SNUB: Wicked comes down to earth
The Wicked franchise seems to have worn out its welcome – or else the Academy just decided that the 10 nominations the Broadway musical adaptation got last year were plenty. Wicked: For Good emerged with a shocking zero (zip! zilch!) nominations.
Ariana Grande, considered a strong contender for best supporting actress for her emotional turn as Glinda when the movie released around Thanksgiving, didn’t make the cut. Nor did her co-star Cynthia Erivo in lead actress, or either of the movie’s original songs, The Girl in the Bubble and No Place Like Home. Those Stephen Schwartz tunes were bested by ever-reliable Diane Warren and two slightly out-of-left-field entries: Sweet Dreams of Joy from Viva Verdi!, a documentary about opera singers in Milan, and the title track from Train Dreams – a Nick Cave song, so maybe that’s not much of a surprise.
When Wicked: For Good got blanked for production design and costume design, the two awards it won in 2025, its chances started looking bleak. Did director Jon M Chu and Universal Pictures make a mistake by breaking the film into two halves? From a box office perspective, no. But maybe it’s a sign that future Oscars aspirants should keep their movies to under five hours total. – Jada Yuan
Jonathan Bailey and Ariana Grande in Wicked: For Good.
SURPRISE: Kate Hudson breaks through
While Kate Hudson’s nomination for her role in Song Sung Blue isn’t unearned, it is a surprise that she landed a spot in the best-actress race over buzzier, more emotionally charged performances by Amanda Seyfried in The Testament of Ann Lee and Jennifer Lawrence in Die My Love.
In the musical biopic directed by Craig Brewer, Hudson plays a Wisconsin woman who joins her husband, portrayed by Hugh Jackman, in performing as the Neil Diamond tribute band Lightning & Thunder. The film works because of Hudson, who anchors every twist and turn in the narrative with nuanced emotion and heartfelt singing. (Her slightly husky voice is something to behold.)
But still, wow! The Academy has deemed this the moment to quit underestimating the former rom-com star. – Sonia Rao
Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman in Song Sung Blue.
SNUB: Category fraud (again)
Every year, actors commit what’s known as “category fraud”, also known as running in a supporting category even though you were clearly a co-lead (or vice versa). It helps avoid two actors from the same movie winding up in the same category and cancelling out each other’s votes, or gives someone a bit of an edge in what might be an easier race to win. The technique worked out great in 2025 for Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain and Zoe Saldana in Emilia Perez, both the juiciest parts of their respective movies, with plenty of screen time. But there seems to be a backlash.
Grande, who’s arguably the lead of Wicked: For Good, didn’t repeat her supporting-actress nomination. Paul Mescal got left out of the love for Hamnet in a crowded supporting-actor race. (Stellan Skarsgard is still favoured to win best supporting actor, even though many have complained he’s the film’s male lead. He’s also 74, has never won an Oscar and is campaigning like crazy.) And Chase Infiniti, who lobbied for lead actress for One Battle, was the only one of the actors predicted to get nominated from that film to miss out. She had run in that category, rumour had it, largely so that Teyana Taylor (who got nominated) and Regina Hall (who didn’t) would have a chance in the supporting-actress race.
In the end, lead actress feels like all lead roles, and there’s not a whiff of fraud to be found in the supporting category, which includes the surprise nomination of Elle Fanning (who missed out last year for A Complete Unknown) alongside her Norwegian Sentimental Value co-star Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. – JY
Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes and Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare in Hament. Buckley shines as Bard’s wife in tale of grief inspiring great art while Mescal makes a wonderful Shakespeare for the 21st century.
SURPRISE: The rise of Secret Agent
It was a pleasantly shocking nomination in casting – the first new Oscars category in 25 years – that assured fans of The Secret Agent that the movie was going to do well. Brazilian director Kleber Mendonca Filho’s political thriller, set in 1977, about a man trying to find connection and live while on the run from the country’s military dictatorship, has the most fantastic array of faces, including a knockout performance from Tania Maria, a 79-year-old whom the New York Times credited with incredible “cigarette acting” and whose only other credit is another Mendonca Filho film.
The movie’s theme of a populace resisting authoritarians has resonated with Hollywood, which tends to lean liberal. Its star, Wagner Moura, is considered a strong contender for lead actor, even against a dominant Chalamet. And the film also picked up a best-picture nomination, which at least leaves it in a great position to win best international feature. – JY
The Secret Agent. Photo / Supplied
SURPRISE: Delroy Lindo gets his due
Delroy Lindo landed a nomination for best supporting actor, joining Sinners lead Michael B Jordan and supporting actress Wunmi Mosaku in being recognised by the Academy. While a number of critics singled out Lindo for his dynamic performance as a hard-drinking harmonica player who helps fend off bloodthirsty white vampires in 1930s Mississippi, he hasn’t appeared in most precursor races. This well-deserved nomination is a pleasant surprise, especially arriving a handful of years after Lindo was widely considered to be snubbed for his acclaimed performance in the 2020 Spike Lee joint Da 5 Bloods. - SR
Delroy Lindo, Michael B Jordan, Francine Maisler, Wunmi Mosaku, Miles Caton and Omar Benson Miller win the Critics Choice Award for best casting and ensemble for Sinners at the 31st Annual Critics Choice Awards. Photo / Getty Images
SNUB: No love for Park Chan-wook
What does a raging genius of a Korean film director need to do to be nominated around here? In No Other Choice, Park made a searing black comedy about unemployment – the laid-off protagonist, played by Lee Byung-hun, realises that the only way he’ll get a job is to “eliminate” his competition – with universal relatability. He’s never been nominated despite being idolised by del Toro, Quentin Tarantino and Lee (who remade his movie Oldboy).
Fans of the movie had high hopes he might squeeze into best director, but the Academy passed Park over even for international feature, just as they did in 2022 with the Hitchcock-inspired Decision to Leave and 2016 for his lush period drama The Handmaiden. Is he too gleeful about violence? Too perverse? Park’s snub means that his distributor, Neon, won’t have a historic clean sweep of the five international slots.
In good news, Neon’s film Sirat, from French-Spanish director Oliver Laxe, about EDM ravers in the Moroccan desert at what may be the end of the world, seems to have strong support. (It also got nominated for best sound.)
And the one spoiler to Neon’s reign is The Voice of Hind Rajab, which uses real voice recordings of a 6-year-old Gazan child’s distress to an emergency centre after Israeli forces killed her family members by furiously firing at their car – a film that’s perhaps too powerful to ignore. – JY
No Other Choice, directed by Park Chan-wook.
SURPRISE: Tons of love for F1
A blind spot among Oscar pundits seems to have been the populist appeal of an exhilarating movie about the global phenomenon ofFormula 1 car racing, starring Brad Pitt and readily available for streaming on Apple TV – which put its entire tech-infused marketing budget behind its only horse in this race. F1 came away with four nominations, including best picture, which is something of a coup given that it was mainly seen as a contender for the below-the-line categories it easily qualified for: film editing, sound and visual effects.
Getting into the best-picture line-up seems to have come at the expense of Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, the director’s incredible Palme d’Or winner based on his time as a jailed political dissident in Iran’s infamous Evin Prison. Panahi’s film had been dismayingly losing steam with the industry, and he also missed out on best director, but the film’s nominations for original screenplay and international feature allowed its fans to take a small breath of relief. – JY
When Golden Globes presenter Julia Roberts received a standing ovation simply for being Julia Roberts, she used the moment to highlight a lesser-known film-maker: Eva Victor, the writer-director and star of Sorry, Baby. Victor has earned a considerable amount of buzz for their comedic drama about recovering from trauma (which was inspired by their own sexual assault), including awards from the National Board of Review and nominations for the upcoming Film Independent Spirit Awards.
While the film was always a long shot in major categories, many hoped it would appear in the original screenplay category, which has traditionally been a place for indie screenwriters to shine. Alas, it did not. Onward. – SR
Sorry Baby. Photo / Supplied
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