The Academy isn’t just a couple of guys who watch every movie released within a year. It’s a collective of over 10,500 global film industry artists and leaders, so there’s bound to be wildly varied opinions on what is and what isn’t nomination-worthy. What one person considers great, another might find pandering and vice versa. That’s why in the nearly 100 years the Academy has been in existence, they’ve messed up as many times as they’ve gotten it right. The amount of iconic directors who were overlooked, big screen superstars who were ignored, and all-time classics that received no love is so big, they form an unofficial group called the “Snub Club.” Honorary members include Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, The Shawshank Redemption, Charlie Chaplin, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Glen Close, Saving Private Ryan and many, many others. After the list of 2024 nominees was revealed, The Snub Club received two new members: Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie for Barbie. The internet was so incensed by their lack of nominations that it completely dominated the conversation. While shocking, it’s not that surprising considering the strength of that year. They weren’t snubbed, there was just a glut of talented directors and actresses that year. This list will highlight true snubs that should’ve gotten a nom (and probably should’ve won) but didn’t.
These are the 100 Biggest Oscar Acting Snubs of All Time.
90. Leila Hatami | A Separation (2011)
It’s been proven time and time again, that it isn’t the quality of the story that separates a good storyteller from a bad one, but how they choose to tell it that does. This story could’ve been told a million different ways by a million different writers but it’s how Asghar Farhadi chose to tell it that makes all the difference in the world. A variation of this film’s plot can be found in a ton of Lifetime movies and dime store paperbacks, which proves that a master can turn what is essentially a standard potboiler thriller wrapped up in a marriage drama, into one of the best films ever made. A married couple (played by Leila Hatami and Peyman Maadi) are contemplating getting a divorce because of her insistence that they move to another country due to the sudden unsafeness of Iran and his reluctance which is born from the need to look after his father, who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s and needs constant supervision. Neither wants a divorce but neither wants to compromise their respective priorities either, so they’re stuck at a stale mate with their daughter in the middle. On top of that, an incident occurs involving a potential murder and a lie to prove one’s innocence that might sever the fragile ties keeping them all together. It’s a brilliantly told custody battle/murder investigation that ranks among the best of foreign cinema due not just to Farhadi’s impeccable direction but by the two lead performances. Hatami and Maadi are both excellent in their respected roles but I think Hatami gets the slight edge over the other. She has to do more of the emotional heavy lifting and she does so without breaking a sweat.
89. Clint Eastwood | Unforgiven (1992)
Eastwood has been in the industry for nearly 70 years. His Hollywood career is so old that, if it was a person, it’d be eligible for AARP benefits a decade ago. He has one of the longest, most fruitful careers any actor has ever had. He’s been in so many critically acclaimed classics, that most actors would kill just to have a fraction of his films in their oeuvre. Although the bulk of his roles are either cops, soldiers, or cowboys, Eastwood brings a level of badass stoicism and authenticity to everything he does that makes it impossible to write him off as one note. Like Wolverine, he’s the best at what he does and ironically, the best he’s ever been is in Unforgiven, a role remarkably similar to Wolverine in Logan. He plays an aging cowboy in the film whose killing days are far behind him. He no longer wants to be a part of the murderous old West but the past isn’t done with him. He’s pulled out of self-imposed exile to help a friend with one last job. Bullets, bloodshed, bodies, and an unforgettable monologue follow. It’s a role unlike any he’s ever given before and serves as an amazing swan song to a career filled with Western antiheroes.
88. Tilda Swinton | We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
Of the two great performances in We Need to Talk About Kevin, you’d think I’d go with Ezra Miller since he’s so good that he, as the title suggests, forces you to talk about his performance after the film is done. He might be the most singularly evil person ever depicted on screen. Since the film is told out of chronological order, we’re constantly bouncing between pre-massacre Kevin and post-massacre Kevin. The latter is a man reveling in the newfound stardom that unfortunately comes to every high school shooter or serial killer and the former is everything that leads up to it, which is to say: a demented child who delights in tormenting his mother. From about the age of four up until the day of the incident, Kevin is a complete and total monster. He’s not a charming psychopath, he’s not a sympathetic boy with mental problems, he’s absolute evil. It’s like he’s playing an insidious game with his mother but she doesn’t know the rules and every time she loses, she gets punished. She loses at least twenty times a day, every day for sixteen years, with the ultimate irony being that even after he’s out of her life, the true torment begins. And it’s for this reason that I’m picking Swinton, not Miller, for the bigger snub. Miller is a stand-out, no doubt but Swinton has to carry more of the weight of the film. She deals with evil every day and then has to deal with the aftermath of his evil forever. It’s a haunting performance that will stick with you long after the credits roll.
87. Bill Murray | Groundhog Day (1993)
Along with horror, comedy is the red-headed stepchild of the award season. The Academy so rarely gives an Oscar to comedy, it’s always a shock when it happens. People to this day still think that Marisa Tomei’s Oscar win for My Cousin Vinny was a mistake. That the presenter read the wrong card or that it was fixed. That might be why only five or so comedic performances have walked away with the little gold man since they’re afraid of being accused of voter shenanigans. It’s a terrible theory but that’s the only thing I can think of to explain why they flat-out refuse to acknowledge the work of comedic actors. Especially considering everyone in the industry agrees that it’s much harder to make someone laugh than it is to make them cry. Bill Murray is one of the few who can do both and has done so consistently for the last 40 years. His best work is with Wes Anderson and his most iconic role is arguably in Ghostbusters but the best showcase of his talents is probably in Groundhog Day. Watching Murray slowly lose his grasp of reality while being stuck in a perpetual time loop, is as funny as it is endearing. It takes a comedic persona like he has to turn a nightmare that would be a horror movie for any other actor, into a laugh factory with heart. Throughout the course of the film, you get every shade of Bill Murray. You get the asshole curmudgeon, the unflappable zen master, the lunatic, the sad sack, and the credible romantic lead. While we’re watching the character evolve, we’re also watching Murray the actor evolve.
86. Johnny Depp | Ed Wood (1994)
Because of his close association with his frequent collaborator Tim Burton and his penchant for the odd and eccentric roles, Depp has gone from one of the most respected actors working, to an oddball who wears silly hats in the eyes of most moviegoers. A new Depp film is no longer the event it used to be because most don’t expect a great performance from him. I won’t go so far as to say his glory days are behind him but I will agree with those who’ve already written him off in the sense that I miss this era of Depp. He had a good 13-year run where he was arguably the most interesting actor working. At that time, he had numerous great roles but for my money, the best was in Ed Wood. Based on the notoriously awful director of movies such as Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood is Burton’s love letter to not only him and his works but to a Hollywood that no longer exists. It’s a movie about a group of talentless amateurs who follow Wood because of his passion for making movies and the extremes they go to to make garbage. It could’ve easily been a comedy that mocked them and their pointless endeavors but it works because it doesn’t. Everyone from the writers to the director clearly loves these characters and wants to see them succeed. And the way Depp plays it, you will too. He said in interviews that his characterization of Edward D. Wood Jr. was a mixture of “the blind optimism of Ronald Reagan, the enthusiasm of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, and the vocal cadence of Casey Kasem.” A weird assortment of influences but they somehow come together to make a character you can’t help but root for.
85. Adèle Haenel | Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Is one moment enough to earn someone an Oscar nom? Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Hudson both earned an Oscar from just a song and some have argued Michael Stuhlbarg should’ve gotten one from his monologue at the end of Call Me By Your Name but how many deserve one for simply a look? The last scene in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, where Haenel’s screaming with her eyes to get someone to look at her just one more time, is what cinema was made for. You could describe that same scene in a book or song but neither could capture the pain and desperation behind Haenel’s eyes. You know from the beginning of this film, that the love affair between these two women will only be temporary. Their love, like the fire from the title, has an expiration date. On an isolated island at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter (Noémie Merlant) is commissioned to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman (Adèle Haenel) but since the young woman is despondent over the marriage she never wanted, the painter has to paint the portrait in secret. The plan is for her to pretend to be her friend, get close enough to her to make her smile, and then use that image to create the portrait.
As you most likely guessed, the closer she gets and the harder she tries to make her smile, the stronger their bond gets until passion overcomes the both of them. Once they fall for each other, everything else falls away. Most films would’ve used her subterfuge as the third-act conflict but the film wisely drops it in favor of an affair on a ticking clock. In a handful of days, the young woman’s mother will be back to pick her up to move her to her future husband’s house, meaning the two will never see each other again. So the film makes every second as romantic as it is heartbreaking. Their love may be like a fire but the film itself is like a painting. It’s breathtakingly gorgeous to look at with some frames looking like they belong in Louvre. While not a sub-genre per se, studios need to retire the lesbian period piece costume drama because anything released after this will feel redundant.
84. Kim Hye-ja | Mother (2009)
No one makes hard-hitting cinema that punches you in the gut quite like South Korea. They’ve been churning out emotionally devastating masterworks for quite some time now and while he is by no means the king of this type of film, Bong Joon-ho has clearly proven he can nail any type of genre. His filmography is characterized by an emphasis on social and class themes, genre-mixing, black humor, and sudden tone shifts. All of which can be found in Mother. The film follows a mother who, after her intellectually disabled son is accused of the murder of a young girl, attempts to find the true killer to get her son freed. The way the story slowly unfolds and watching the extremes in which the mother figure will go to save her son, make this a must-see but it’s Kim Hye-ja’s performance that makes it a masterpiece. The love she has for her son is all-consuming. Almost like a cancer that’s slowly killing her. Since he’s mentally stunted, she knows he can’t take care of himself and that no one else can. Which makes her fiercely protective, almost to a dangerous degree. She puts herself into situations that get her into debt and even accuses a gangster of committing the murder, which puts a target on her back. She will stop at nothing to prove her son’s innocence, which makes the ending feel like a knife in the gut. I won’t reveal whether or not she succeeds but the dance she makes at the end is profoundly devastating. It’ll stay with you forever.
83. Elsie Fisher | Eighth Grade (2018)
This film depicts the life of a middle school girl with such pinpoint accuracy, that if you told me Bo Burnham was actually a thirteen-year-old girl masquerading as a thirtysomething-year-old man, I’d believe you. The protagonist at the center of Eighth Grade (Elsie Fisher) is so well-written, and so wonderfully developed that it’s hard to believe her story is fictitious. It has all the earmarks of an autobiography but that’s impossible since it deals with life in the age of social media which didn’t exist fifteen years ago. That and the fact that Burnham, as previously established, is not a little girl. Seeing as how he’s an ex-YouTuber, I get why he knows so much about the all-consuming nature of social media but how he knows so much about the teenage girl experience, I have no idea but whatever research he did for it paid off. It’s a brutally honest look at the youth of today that makes no judgments, avoids every cliche in the book and never criticizes or looks down on its subject. Every teenager in it (minus one creep) is handled fairly, there are no bullies that pick on the lead and there’s no prank or scandal that ruins her life. It’s just a film about an awkward teen trying to make it through high school. Which as anyone knows, is hard enough. But all that research would all be for naught if he didn’t nail the casting of Elsie and my God did he strike oil with Fisher. She’s so good in this, Burnham could’ve cut the bigger actors and shot it like a documentary and no one would’ve known she was an actor.
82. Benicio del Toro | Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
In Where the Buffalo Roam, Peter Boyle plays Carl Lazlo aka Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, the same role Del Toro plays in Fear in Loathing in Las Vegas and the performances are basically two sides of the same coin. Boyle is an unpredictable, dangerous lunatic who’s liable to do anything and del Toro is an unpredictable, dangerous lunatic who’s liable to do anything if he manages to sober up long enough. This isn’t to say he isn’t absolutely frightening every time he’s on screen, because he is, it means he’s only operating on 40% capacity at any given moment. Basically one is a wild man with full control over his mental facilities and the other isn’t. Both are equally terrifying. As much as I love Boyle’s performance, I think del Toro edges him out simply because he’s more fun to watch. He’s what happens when the id is no longer bound by morality or social constraints. He does whatever he wants at any given moment, which usually involves a lot of booze and a lot of hard drugs. Besides being a fun performance, it’s also a physically impressive one. While D’Onofrio, De Niro, and Leto have him beat in the amount of weight gained for a role, he still packed on a whopping 40 lbs pounds to play Dr. Gonzo and that’s insane. Imagine putting in that much commitment for a role only to lose the nom to Ed Harris in The Truman Show, a role that requires you to stand in a room and talk.
81. Ben Kingsley | Hugo (2011)
The majority of the picks on this list are great performances that were either the victim of bad timing, the Academy not recognizing the accomplishments of actors within a certain genre, or are simply a matter of personal opinion. Sir Ben Kingsley in Hugo getting overlooked in a year when Nick Nolte in Warrior was deemed good enough to be nominated, is a rare case of “what the fuck were they thinking?” Nolte is one of the great American actors. He brings a level of intensity and grit to his performances that few others can tap into but he’s not infallible. Warrior is a testosterone-filled melodrama, so its over-the-top emotional moments can be chalked up to being an accurate representation of that genre. Can’t blame a soap opera for having heightened drama, but Nolte’s performance alone makes this is a melodrama. He isn’t dialed into the tone and is giving a performance to match, he’s so over the top, he’s single-handedly changing the tone every time he’s on screen. If you think it’s great, then it is definitely Oscar-worthy. If you don’t, you most likely cringe every time he pops up because he ruins what could’ve been an otherwise perfect Rocky-esque sports drama. I’m definitely in the latter camp. I much prefer the subtle melancholy behind Kingsley’s eyes in Hugo. In fact, I love his performance so much, I really wish the movie was just about George Méliès and the birth of Cinema instead of a boy living in a Paris train station going on adventures with a girl. Did anyone watching Warrior go, “Man, this movie would be so much better if it was just about this old drunk quoting Moby Dick for 90 minutes”? I didn’t think so.
100-91 | 80-71
What do you think of the selection so far? Which Oscar snubs do you think are the most egregious? Maybe they will show up further on the list!
