The 2026 Oscar nominations have been announced. The Best Picture nominees include big studio hits (One Battle After Another, F1), prestige dramas (Hamnet, Train Dreams, Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent), and genre movies (Bugonia, Frankenstein, Sinners).
If I had to guess, I’d say One Battle After Another will take home the gold, which is fair: it was an important movie for Hollywood. And I’m all but certain that none of the genre movies will take it, since the Academy has long been reluctant to give the Best Picture award to anything in the sci-fi, fantasy, or horror genres. And that sucks, because there have been plenty of fantastic sci-fi movies over the years that fully deserved the honor. Instead, they were snubbed.
2001: A Space Odyssey should have won over Oliver! in 1969
I’m sorry, Oliver, I’m afraid I can’t let you have that Oscar
2001: A Space Odyssey was one of those movies that no one seemed to understand at the time of its release. Today it’s considered a towering classic of science fiction. Stanley Kubrick’s direction is top-notch, and the story about an artificial intelligence turning against its human creators feels more relevant than ever.
The Academy gave the Best Picture award to the musical Oliver!, based on Charles Dickens’ book Oliver Twist, a much safer choice. 2001 wasn’t even nominated in the category.
Star Wars should have won over Annie Hall in 1978
May the Force be with anyone but Woody Allen
Star Wars is one of the few movies on this list that actually was nominated for Best Picture, but it lost to Woody Allen’s quirky comedy Annie Hall. Annie Hall is still a good movie, but it’s kind of tainted by association with Allen, who has endured many scandals in the decades since. Meanwhile, Star Wars is the movie that birthed modern cinema as we know it, ushering in the age of the special effects-driven blockbuster. Movies like Avatar, odd though that franchise is, don’t happen without it. It’s the most influential movie on this list and definitely deserved the Best Picture award.
There’s also a good argument that The Empire Strikes Back deserved to win over Ordinary People in 1981, but let’s keep it to one entry per franchise.
Alien over Kramer v Kramer in 1980
In space, no one can hear you cry about your parents’ divorce
Kramer v Kramer is a solid family drama that provided a young Meryl Streep with her first big breakout role, so it deserves to be remembered…but Alien deserves it more. Ridley Scott’s iconic sci-fi horror film remains chilling to this day. And it’s still producing sequels and prequels…even if they don’t always measure up to the original.
You could also argue that the sequel movie, Aliens, deserved to win Best Picture over Platoon in 1987, but that’s a closer call.
The Matrix over American Beauty in 2000
The red Oscar or the blue Oscar
The Matrix was a phenomenon when it came out in 1999, a cyberpunk vision of a future where robots used human beings as batteries and most of us were unknowingly trapped in a digital prison of their creation. For a population getting used to the early internet, it was mind-blowing. The action scenes were so memorable that they still get parodied today.
But The Matrix wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture, losing out to the slice-of-life suburban drama American Beauty, starring disgraced actor Kevin Spacey. This is another example where one of these movies definitely aged better than the other.
The animated sci-fi classic The Iron Giant also came out that year, and it would have been a respectable Best Picture winner. It also wasn’t nominated.
WALL-E over Slumdog Millionaire in 2009
This Pixar all-timer went unrewarded
Speaking of animated sci-fi classics, WALL-E remains one of Pixar’s best films, a charming story about a lone robot left on a trash-filled Earth long after the humans have fled into space. There are long stretches of WALL-E that basically play out like a silent movie, and yet they’re done so well that people came out to see it in droves.
Once again, WALL-E wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture (neither was Cloverfield, another influential sci-fi film from that year). The award went to Slumdog Millionaire, which is a solid enough film, but as Best Picture winners go, quite slight.
Inception over The King’s Speech in 2011
Christopher Nolan gets no respect, part 1
Director Christopher Nolan was on fire around this time, releasing Inception a couple of years after his superhero smash hit The Dark Knight. People were obsessed with this twisty tale about a team of thieves charged with implanting an idea in the subconscious mind of a powerful businessman. The movie pulls off its very lofty ambitions.
The King’s Speech, meanwhile, is a competently made but predictable biopic about a British royal. Once again, the Academy doesn’t like to step outside its comfort zone unless it has to, and it didn’t feel it had to for Inception.
Interstellar over Birdman in 2015
Christopher Nolan gets no respect, part 2
Nolan was snubbed again a few years later for Interstellar, a sci-fi drama about astronauts searching for a new home for humanity after the Earth is blighted by famine. Unlike Inception, Interstellar wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture, which went to the off-kilter character study BİRDMAN or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).
Birdman isn’t an awful movie, but it is pretty pretentious; that title alone tells you a lot. Christopher Nolan would eventually get his Best Picture Oscar in 2024 for Oppenheimer, the Academy being way more comfortable giving out awards for biopics.
Fury Road over Spotlight in 2016
War Boys vs journalists
I loved Spotlight, about a team of journalists uncovering sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church, so I wasn’t upset that it won. But I was IN love with Mad Max: Fury Road, which I think is the best action movie of the century so far. Even the Academy admitted how awesome it was by nominating it for Best Picture, but they couldn’t quite bring themselves to give it the top award. They should have.
Dune: Part Two over Anora in 2025
The most recent sci-fi defeat
The most recent Oscars prove that the Academy’s aversion to sci-fi is still up and running, as they passed up an opportunity to give a Best Picture award to Dune: Part Two — Denis Villeneuve’s epic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi book — in favor of Anora, a small-scale drama about a young sex worker (Mikey Madison) who briefly marries the son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn). Anora is a decent movie, but it’s kind of crazy that it won out over something as spectacular as Dune: Part Two.
Exceptions that prove the rule
There have been the odd great sci-fi films honored with the Best Picture Oscar, like The Shape of Water in 2018 or Everything Everywhere All At Once in 2023. But they’re the exceptions. Mostly, genre films still have an uphill battle to fight when it comes to major awards recognition.
The 98th Academy Awards will air on ABC and Hulu on March 15, hosted by Conan O’Brien.
