The Best Movies Never Nominated for a Single Oscar
Last updated: January 24, 2023
Judging from the complaints that pour in each year, the Academy gets many things wrong—including, with surprising regularity, completely ignoring some of each year's most acclaimed films. In the gallery above, you can find the 30 highest-scoring films since 2000 that did not receive any Oscar nominations (in any category). They are ranked by Metascore, but all of these films scored or higher—suggesting massive critical acclaim.
Note that documentaries are excluded (since there are fewer opportunities for those films to receive nominations). Also excluded are movies that qualified for Emmys rather than Oscars (such as the Small Axe films).
Additional content by Keith Kimbell
Over the course of six-plus hours, Italian filmmaker Marco Tullio Giordana traces nearly 40 years in the life of an Italian family, beginning in the 1960s. The Best of Youth screened as a single film at Cannes in 2003, where it won the Un Certain Regard, but then was divided into two separate films for its theatrical release in both Italy and the United States. (An even longer version also aired in Italy as a TV miniseries.) Youth ultimately became the highest-scoring film of 2005, when it received an international release. But it never had a chance at an Oscar nomination after Italy opted not to make either part (or the entire film) its official submission for foreign-language consideration (each country only gets one per year)—a factor that will pop up on this list with some regularity.
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