The 97th Academy Awards have concluded, ending one of the wildest awards seasons in recent memory. Unlike the last four years, going into Oscar night, there was no real consensus as to who would take home the top prize, Best Picture. Even beyond the biggest award of the night, several categories like Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and several technical categories felt either like a coin toss between two contenders or wide open entirely. The last two years have seen Academy voters largely embrace one film with “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Oppenheimer” taking home seven Oscars, dominating each of their respective ceremonies. That would not be the case for this year, as no film came close to either winner’s total.
READ MORE: ‘Anora’ Wins Best Picture, Best Director & Best Actress Completing Its Fairy Tale Ending [Oscars Full Winners List]
Though there was a lack of uniformity from the Oscars, guilds, BAFTA, Golden Globes, and critics groups this season, it perfectly mirrored this past year of cinema. It was a challenging year to gauge, as 2024 releases seemed to struggle to capture the enthusiasm in films highlighted by the Academy just a year before. Multiple factors appeared to be at play as these years of releases were largely a result of the 2023 writers and actors strikes that shut down Hollywood, shelving a lot of more significant titles in the name of independent, smaller-scale cinema, mostly dominating the conversation. You must also factor in the current political climate post, the presidential election, and the recent Los Angeles fires that shut down and displaced many people in Hollywood.
Sure, films like “Dune: Part 2” and “Wicked” made it into the Best Picture lineup. Still, the race mainly consisted of five films dominating the awards discussions, “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” “Conclave,” “Emilia Pérez,” and “The Substance,” all of which are far from being the biggest hits commercially or critically of the year. This diversity in films spoke to how audiences and voters were looking for cinematic escapes in various types of films, but when it came to handing awards, none of them seemed to take firm control of the race. With this, it was an open race tonight, leaving doubt about everyone’s final Oscar predictions.
Only thirty-five feature films made up the list of nominees scattered across the categories at this year’s Oscars, the lowest total film count since 1991. Fantastic films like “All We Imagine as Light,” “Challengers,” “Dahomey,” “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” “Hard Truths,” “Hitman,” “I Saw the TV Glow,” “Queer,” and “The Room Next Door” were around the Oscar conversation this year at various ceremonies. Still, they all failed to land a single Oscar nomination. The snubbing of these films in any category is a real shame but not surprising given the factors on the year stated above; as the voting body grows within the Academy, as we’ve seen over the last couple of years, the chance for surprises dwindles in the nominees as studios and voters focus on only a select few projects they want to highlight.
With all of this in mind, there were a couple of surprises and snubs regarding the winners at the 97th Academy Awards telecast; some left us cheering as the winners ran up to the stage to accept their Oscars, while others left us heartbroken that they weren’t highlighted for their stellar work.
Demi Moore Goes Home Empty HandedOne supposes that letting Oscar trends die is a good thing, but this one is maybe slightly frustrating. For years, the Oscars would always give the Academy Award to the veteran. It was often a “make good” /”career achievement” award. Aka Al Pacino did not win an Oscar for many of his amazing performances in the ‘70s and ’80 and instead won for 1993’s “Scent of a Woman,” a performance that marked the beginning of his overly hammy phase, but the Academy wanted to reward Pacino for his career, hence the Oscar. This arguably started to change circa 2007, when Alan Arkin won Best Supporting Actor for “Little Miss Sunshine,” a quintessential “career achievement” award to finally reward the legendary actor, and then suddenly the Academy stopped this, maybe due to its demographics changing. But then is started to swing the opposite way. Great, deserving performances by veteran actors—Micheal Keaton in “Birdman,” and Angela Bassett in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”— were overlooked in favor of younger, up-and-coming actors. So, this trend—are voters more concerned with rating and giving awards to old people?—continued and while Mikey Madison was excellent in “Anora,” so was Demi Moore in “The Substance.” Horror bias probably didn’t help, but the fact is Madison will probably have many more chances to win and Moore? Well, truthfully, probably not, unfortunately.

Surprise: “Flow” Takes Down the Big Studios to Win Best Animated Film OscarYou’ve got to love a David vs. Goliath match, and that is what we had to happen in the Animated Feature category this Oscar season, as we saw juggernaut from DreamWorks’ “The Wild Robot” go up against the little film that could “Flow” from Janus Films. Going into Oscar night, “The Wild Robot” had won the prize at the Producers Guild of America for Best Animated Film, as well as the Critics Choice Award and seemed to be the favorite to win the prize because, within Oscar history, the big studios usually win this category if their film is not a sequel to a previous winner in the category (unless your movie is titled “Toy Story”). With just a Golden Globe win to its name from the televised awards, “Flow” seemed to have a slight chance of winning the category because of the passion for the film from the international voting body of the Academy, and based on the win tonight, that passion resulted in a win. The film’s win was historic for the film’s country of origin, Lativa, who had never won an Oscar before.

Snub: “Nickel Boys” Going Home Empty Handed, Especially in Adapted ScreenplayOne of the year’s best films was RaMell Ross‘ masterpiece “Nickel Boys,” which deserved more love from the Academy. Based on the renowned novel by Colson Whitehead, the film follows the bond between two young African-American men navigating the harrowing trials of a reform school in Florida. Shot all through the POV of the two boys in the story, we take a deeply emotional, personal look at the lives of these boys and throughout the rough American history that has been afflicted on African Americans. You are entirely put in Elwood and Turner’s shoes, creating a uniquely human experience. The script, co-written by Ross and Joslyn Barnes, is one of the most challenging adaptations in recent memory, and for this complex script to lose to a middle-of-the-road, airport novel thriller in “Conclave” feels like a mistake that didn’t age well the moment the envelope was opened on stage by Amy Poehler.

Surprise: “No Other Land” Wins Best Documentary, Despite No Studio DistributionGoing to Oscar night, the Best Documentary Feature category felt as if it was wide open, considering that the nominees by the Academy had not been winning many precursor awards during the season. The foregone conclusion seemed to be that “No Other Land,” the critical darling of the season, could take the prize given the film’s vital, timely subject matter surrounding the ongoing tragedy in Gaza. However, as the year went on, the nominations came out, and the Oscars were approaching. No studio picked up the film, and the film remained without distribution. This didn’t stop “No Other Land” from becoming the highest-grossing documentary of the year in just a few weeks, but no one knew what that meant for Oscars and the industry seeing the film, let alone voting for it. But once it won, it was made clear by the Academy that they saw and responded to the film, giving us a great winner for the category and an impactful speech that was one of the night’s highlights.

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Snub: Anyone Else Winning Best Supporting ActorOne of the two sweeps in the acting categories this year was Kieran Culkin for “A Real Pain,” while he is perfectly fine in the film, he is a lead performer submitting in supporting so he can win the Oscar. It is frustrating to see category fraud this blatant win awards, let alone against four other actors who deliver much better work than Culkin did. Whether it was Yura Borisov’s understated yet vital work in “Anora,” Edward Norton’s dead-on portrayal of folk legend Pete Seeger in “A Complete Unknown,” Guy Pearce’s commanding, dangerous presence in “The Brutalist,” or Jeremy Strong’s immersive performance as Roy Cohn in “The Apprentice,” this category deserved a better winner than what we got.

Snub: “A Complete Unknown” Gets Totally Shut OutDespite eight Oscar nominations in every major category aside from Best Actress, not to mention what seemed like a love-fest for Timothee Chalamet during the ceremony, James Mangold‘s excellent Bob Dylan film was totally shut out in every category. While a handsome, classical film clearly admired by the Academy, not even the of-the-moment buzz of Timmy C could make a difference in the end. Is this a poor place to say Elle Fanning should have been nominated too?