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
Writer-director Lulu Wang’s 2019 crowd-pleaser is an autobiographical dramedy (adapted from a This American Life story) starring Awkwafina in a rare (but widely praised) dramatic role as an American who returns to her family's home in China after learning that her grandmother had terminal lung cancer—a fact that the family is keeping a secret from the grandmother. Awkwafina received more best actress awards and nominations in late 2019 than all but three other women, only to get ignored by Academy voters. Similarly, the film as a whole, supporting star Zhao Shuzhen, and Wang's screenplay were all honored multiple times elsewhere but failed to score Oscar nominations.
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