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
Not submitted by Hungary for foreign-language Oscar consideration (instead, the country opted for the little-known Abandoned, which failed to earn a nomination), the languid but unsettling Harmonies is a collaboration between filmmakers Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky. They compose the 145-minute, black-and-white film—loosely based on László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance—out of just 39 long takes, adding to the tension of a story set in a Communist-era Hungarian village gripped by a crisis.
| Buy on |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|