I’ve used this format to almost exclusively highlight good movies that are smaller or under the radar thus far. I’ve been waiting to write a negative one, but I just avoid bad movies for the most part. But this morning I got what I needed.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced their nominees for the Academy Awards this morning and boy have I got a bone to pick with them. I do want to preface this article with the fact that I don’t actually care about awards and rarely find them as a gauge for quality. However, it’s undeniable that they carry some level of prestige and are at worst at least worth discussing regardless of the merit I may associate with them. Secondly, I won’t act like I’ve seen every movie that was nominated or otherwise, but I’ve watched enough and I’m in the cinesphere enough that I think I’ve got a good enough gauge to comment on these. So here we go: my 4 biggest takeaways about the 2025 Oscar nominations. Don’t worry, it’s not all negative.

Point 1: Emilia Fucking Perez

So I’ll get this out of the way now: I have not watched this movie. And frankly, I don’t think I want to. The bits and pieces I have seen have hardly inspired me to go out of my way to watch this.

Let’s talk numbers first: this movie has a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes with an average of 6.9/10 rating. I won’t focus on the audience score, but it’s 32% and 2.1 out of 5 rating in case you were wondering. It’s not uncommon for Oscar-type movies to not score highly with audiences necessarily. However, 76% among reviewers with a sub 7/10 rating is hardly the type of film we should be expecting to garner the second most Oscar nominations ever with 13. 

I don’t think I would have cared if it got a couple of nominations here or there, but 13??? This movie is the most virtue-signalling move the Oscars have done in a while, and they’ve got a pretty lengthy list of that. It’s a pick me moment where they get to say “look at this international film with a cast of mostly women that’s got a transgender lead that we put on a pedestal.” This film has been heavily criticized by the trans community and is, if anything, an affront to the types of great stories we should be putting forth from the international community or about marginalized populations. 

This film doesn’t serve any of the diverse aspects it tries to hit while putting a flag in the ground for bigots to rally around to point their hate at. I’m not saying we need to care about that, but the biggest detraction from diversity is when it is at the cost of merit. And there are plenty of diverse films that do merit the spotlight, not just a mediocre, borderline offensive, by 2025 standards, film that has some eye-catching cast members that fill a quota. Surely, we can do better.

Point 2: Ignoring AI Intervention

I don’t want to make this a referendum on AI in general or even generative AI. I have my views on them (negative by the way) but that’s not the point for this conversation. 

Imagine being in a competition about creating something. Anything, really. Could be a cooking competition, a coding competition, a writing competition, or for the sake of this article, an acting competition. Everyone does their best and then there are awards handed out. Now imagine being told once you’re told the top candidates that one of the competitors used help from a robot to enhance their creation. Does that seem fair? Because that’s been deemed as completely ok by the Academy once they nominated Adrien Brody for the Brutalist as well as all the Emilia Perez acting nominations. 

It has been revealed that an AI speech-synthesis company worked on movies such as Better Man, The Brutalist as well as Emilia Perez, among others. The extent of the AI work done on the other films is not yet known but on The Brutalist, it has been revealed that Adrien Brody’s Hungarian accent wasn’t quite good enough and that the AI was used to enhance that accent to be more accurate. And here I was thinking that that’s literally the point of these awards – to judge the best work done by an actor. Yet apparently actors don’t actually have to be great? They can seemingly just get helped out by AI to make their performance better. For some reason, motion capture work for the Apes films that Andy Serkis should have been nominated for was not good enough, but this is.

If I was another actor in the categories where AI-modified performances were nominated, I would be far from amused seeing them being pitted against me. There is no shame in losing an award to a worthy competitor, but I sure as hell would not take it quietly if I lost to Adrien Brody on awards night. 

Point 3: Dwelling in the Past

It wouldn’t be right to say that the Oscars haven’t evolved. Changes have happened for sure. Most recently, following the debacle of “Oscars So White”, changes were brought in the voting body to increase the diversity of the voters. That was unequivocally a good thing. However, many of the tropes have been hard to shake.

There’s a reason every year we talk about certain movies as “Oscar bait.” It’s not necessarily a dig at those movies because often they are very good. I’d categorize Conclave or The Brutalist or A Complete Unknown all as Oscar bait. I loved Conclave so clearly I’m not against this type of movie. But it does show a bias that dramas or biopics or even musicals seem to have a headstart in terms of getting nominated.

Aren’t the Oscars supposed to be a celebration of cinema as a whole? Why do animated films have such a hard time getting nominated for Best Picture? How often do we see straight comedies as part of these conversations? I realize this year may not be the best example with The Substance being represented in multiple categories, but horror often gets the short end of the stick when many of the performances in those movies could go up against any drama.

I don’t know the answer to how to fix this. The Golden Globes made categories which sounded nice in theory but the execution is less than optimal. But it’s also not my job. I just wish that when celebrating film as a medium, there should be more representation of the breadth of great films that are out there rather than pigeonholing the awards to a couple of genres with token exceptions thrown in here and there.

Point 4: My Favourites

My favourite film of the year did not end up getting any love at the Oscars, but I still wanted to highlight some of the standouts from my movie-watching experience this past year that did make the cut. 

• Conclave is up there as one of my favourite movies of the year and I was delighted to see it get 8 nominations, all of them fully deserved. In fact, I’d argue it deserved more, but I’ll be happy with the ones it received. If you want my full thoughts on Conclave, you can see them here. 
• Kieran Culkin made a complex role feel effortless in A Real Pain and is fully deserving of his nomination. My full thoughts on that beautiful film are here.
• Flow being nominated twice really made my day. It was one of my favourite movie-watching experiences in 2024 and I hope it wins both categories it is nominated for. A lovely movie that I just can’t get enough of and I gushed about it here.
• I’m not the biggest Dune fan out there (who can beat that guy on Twitter?), but I thought especially in the categories of sound and visual effects, it fully merited those nominations. A little surprised Denis Villeneuve didn’t get a nod and a real shame that Hans Zimmer was disqualified.
• Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes getting a Visual Effects nod was also a pleasant surprise. It went under the radar in a big comeback year for blockbusters, but the technology was flawless as it has been since Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
• One omission for me that irked me was for Furiosa. I thought there were at least a few technical categories where it should have made an appearance, but oh well.

So those are my unfiltered thoughts about this year’s Oscar nominations. I hope to see the problematic aspects I pointed out not continue to be issues moving forward, but at the end of the day, the Oscars will do what they want. I will find my own movies that I love regardless, as should you.