ONCE YOU START getting dialed into the mystical time of year that movie buffs refer to only as “awards season,” it can feel like being sucked into a vortex that makes all the sense in the world to everyone who’s been sucked in, and almost none to those who remain on the outside.

Let me explain: when you’ve been following all of the conversation, discourse, and “precursor awards,” (meaning the combination of critical awards and nominations/wins given out by groups such as SAG, DGA, WGA, etc.) it becomes very clear what is being considered for awards, and what movies are, for whatever reason, not part of the conversation. In another year, for example, a summer crowd-pleasing blockbuster like Barbie wouldn’t immediately come to mind when it comes to the awards conversation, regardless of its extremely high quality. But after being part of one of the year’s biggest cultural moments—who could forget “

Barbenheimer“—we’ve arrived at a place where it’s here.

What’s more confusing would be explaining why certain brilliant movies wind up going largely or entirely ignore. Movies like Asteroid City, Past Lives, and How To Blow Up a Pipeline came out in the first half of 2024 and found themselves largely sitting out the awards season portion of the year. The Iron Claw, on the other hand, may have come up short solely because it wasn’t widely seen by pundits and audiences until the very end of the year, and by then, the awards seasons narratives and contenders had largely rounded into shape. Is this fair? Eh, not really. Is it kind of just the way this stuff always goes? Yup. It’s a flawed process, but for movie fans, it’s the only one we’ve really got.

So for the purpose of this article, we’re not necessarily saying that the entries on this list got “snubbed,” because it’s been pretty clear for a while what most of the Oscar nominations were going to be. Was there ever going to be a world where Pom Klementieff got a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning? No, there was not. But in a just world she would’ve been deserving, and we truly and honestly believe that.

Below, we give you our list of “Oscar Snubs”—some of which are legitimately shocking snubs, and others that just could’ve been nominated if this whole thing was just a little bit different.