It’s an inevitable fact that, when you’re an award show honoring the best of film, people will often focus just as much as what you left out than what you invited into the pantheon. As long as the Oscars have existed (or at least, as long as they’ve been televised), people have griped over bad calls for Best Picture or acting winners that don’t hold up to the ravages of time. But for every movie like “Citizen Kane” that gets nominated but doesn’t quite manage to take home the trophy, there’s the films that get a big fat goose egg in terms of nominations all together.

There are plenty of those this Oscars season, which saw a lot of the top films dominate nominations (“Emilia Perez” leads with an impressive 13 nods) and left a lot of hopefuls out in the cold. It doesn’t help that this year, deemed a “weaker” one months before awards season really started, didn’t have much in the way of clear frontrunners in the way that “Oppenheimer” was clearly poised to dominate last season. As a result, there were a lot of spaces open, and a lot of horses in the race — and not all the horses made it.

Just look at the Best Actress category, which proved infamously unsteady throughout the race with plenty of big name films hoping to land a nod within it. Marianne Jean-Baptiste for “Hard Truths” and Nicole Kidman for “Babygirl” both seemed like potential nominees in the category, only for neither deserving performance to get in — and for both films to be shut out entirely.

Then their are the films that very well could have been an Oscars contender in another year, or if the circumstances of their release were different, or if they just managed to catch more momentum. “Juror #2,” and “Challengers” are the type of smart major Hollywood productions that, in another period, would have done well with the Academy. But with releases that were too quiet or too early in the year, they never had a chance to get a foothold in the race.

With the 2024 Oscar nominees announced, it’s time to look at all the movies the Academy didn’t recognize. These 25 films may not be mentioned at the ceremony on March 2, but they’ll live regardless, because — as has been made clear time and time again — the Oscars aren’t the end-all-be-all to determine a movie gets remembered. Read on for the best films of 2024 that went unrecognized, listed in alphabetical order.

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