The biggest surprises of this year's Oscar nominations

Louis Chilton lists the egregious snubs and unexpected nods

- Louis Chilton

The Oscar nominations for 2025 have been announced and – as expected – Emilia Perez has swept the board. Netflix’s divisive musical crime drama has received 13 nominations, falling shy of the record set by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997) and La La Land (2016).

The Brutalist and Wicked followed close behind, with 10 nominations apiece – but there were, as ever, some unexpected mentions as well as the usual egregious omissions.

Below, we run through the eight biggest snubs and surprises.

A different man indeed

Sebastian Stan’s nomination for Best Actor was, in fact, part snub, part surprise. The actor had indeed been tipped to pick up his first ever nod at this year’s awards, but for Aaron Schimberg’s surreal drama-comedy A Different Man – not for The Apprentice, which is what has transpired.

Not that Stan minds, I’m sure. In the latter, he plays Donald Trump, giving a depressingly convincing performance as the future US president opposite Jeremy Strong, whose sleazy portrayal of Roy Cohn has earned him a spot in the Best Supporting Actor category alongside his Succession castmate Kieran Culkin.

It’s a Wash(ington)

A film-stealing supporting performance from a two-time Oscar winner, in one of the year’s biggest films? It seemed almost an inevitability. But Washington’s villainous turn in Gladiator II was passed over by the Academy, with Yura Borisov (Anora), Edward Norton (A Complete Unknown), Guy Pearce (The Brutalist) and Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice) all making the cut ahead of him.

Washington can probably console himself with the knowledge that it wouldn’t have mattered all that much anyway: barring a catastrophic PR snafu between now and Oscar night, Kieran Culkin (