Snubbed: The films and actors that should win these Oscars

So here we go. Instead of telling you who I think will take home the gold statuettes – there are 1,000 pieces for that – I have chosen my own winners for films and talents in each major category, with the proviso that none have been nominated by the Academy in said category this year.

Let’s be clear – this is not a furious article about Oscar snubs either. I just want to get away from the same four films we’ve been talking about for the last three months and hopefully emphasise that 2025 was in fact an extraordinarily fruitful year for excellent cinema.  

Best Actor

Joel Edgerton, Train Dreams

The Australian first piqued my interest when he appeared in David Michod’s family gangster drama Animal Kingdom back in 2010. Like compatriots Eric Bana and Ben Mendelsohn, Hollywood has never really understood what to do with him. They seem to think that if you’re a good actor you ought to play the villain in order to bolster the milquetoast lead.

Here, Edgerton is finally given a central role and gives a lesson in how much you can achieve with stillness and quiet and just being a receptive presence. An astonishing performance, except for the fact the word performance feels a misnomer so true is this film.

Actual favourite to win the Oscar: Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme

Best Actress

Imogen Poots, The Chronology of Water 

The English actress gives a searing performance as Lidia Yuknavitch, a sexual abuse survivor with an apetite for drugs and booze in Kristen Stewart’s striking directorial debut. It is a ferocious piece of work which asks for no pity and defies audience expectation.

Poots goes through the wringer, from an Olympic hopeful swimmer to a writer inspired by teacher Ken Kesey, to becoming very much her own version of herself.

Actual favourite: Jessie Buckley, Hamnet

Best Supporting Actor

Abel Ferrara, Marty Supreme

Having recently published his amazing memoir Scene (listen to the audiobook, I beg you), Ferrara turns up and steals Josh Safdie’s film form under Timmy’s feet. Every scene he’s in, he’s fantastic. Gruff, sympathetic then terrifying.

I was once Ferraraed while interviewing him in Taormina, Sicily. The Driller Killer director told me to stop breaking his balls and ask my questions. I’d committed the sin of asking how he was. 

Actual favourite: Sean Penn, One Battle After Another 

Best Supporting Actress

Hind Rajab, The Voice of Hind Rajab Let me immediately say, Hind Rajab is not an actress; this is not a performance and she is not supporting the film. She was a five-year-old girl, murdered by Israeli forces hours after they had already killed several members of her family. They also murdered her would-be rescuers as well in a cynical two-tap tactic. Her voice is the most powerful indictment of the war in Gaza.

You can argue about the morality of including her real voice in the film, and you can even think it tasteless that I put it here, but there are moments in the cinema when you don’t give a fuck about taste because they’ve effected you viscerally: at your core. 

Actual favourite: Amy Madigan, Weapons 

Best Casting 

Bugonia, Jennifer Venditi

You might think this is a bit of an easy one. Yorgos Lanthimos just hits speed dial and already he has his two leads, Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone, cast. But I wanted to give a shout out to Bugonia for casting a neurodiverse actor, Aiden Delbis,  in the role of a neurodiverse character, Plemons’ autistic cousin, Don. 

Delbis gives a witty and touching performance and fair play to the casting director, Jennifer Venditi for spotting Delbis’ appeal.

Actual favourite: Sinners

Suggested Reading

Yellow Letters, the perfect winner of an imperfect Berlin film festival

John Bleasdale

Best Score

The Testament of Ann Lee, Daniel Blumberg

This musical history of the Shakers, the sex-free version of the Quakers, has something of the Grange Hill end-of-term play to it, but the music that underpins the madness of the enterprise is beautiful and the the use of song and dance to evoke religious fervor and ecstasy is sublime, suggesting that the suppressed fornication finds its outlet in the dry humping of the dance routines.

There’s definitely a take it or leave it aspect to the proceedings but if you’re filled by the spirit of the Lord and the vibrant ecky thump of Amanda Seyfried’s performance, this is an original and inspiring piece of work.

Actual favourite: Sinners

Best Cinematography

Die My Love, Seamus McGarvey 

Lynne Ramsey’s films have always been visually striking and her latest, a Jennifer Lawrence and Richard Pattinson-led tale of female disintegration is brilliantly photographed by Seamus McGarvey who previously worked on Ramsey’s We Need to Talk about Kevin and more recently on Joe Wright’s excellent Mussolini TV series M: Son of the Century.

The camerawork has a tactile quality, so that you feel Lawrence’s state of mind as well as seeing through her eyes.

Actual favourite: One Battle After Another 

Best Documentary

Orwell 2+2=5, Raoul Peck

Haitian filmmaker and writer Roaul Peck has developed an MO by which he makes documentaries with his subjects rather than about them. No talking heads, no experts. The text of the film is made up entirely of material written by George Orwell, just as his James Baldwin and Ernerst Cole docs featured their work.

The relevance of Orwell is paid lip service so frequently that it’s almost a shock all over again to hear his own words and realize not only his relevance to today but his urgency.

Actual favourite: The Perfect Neighbor

Best Original Screenplay

Splitsville 

Comedy team Michael Angelo Corvino and Kyle Marvin have already established their comedy credentials with the superb 2019 film The Climb, but here they step it up with a relationship and buddy comedy that features whip-smart dialogue, wonderful ensemble (Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona are perhaps too beautiful for these schlubs but they’re fantastic comediennes) and a fight scene which just will not stop.

Comedy is often relegated to the bottom of the cinematic pile, an offramp for Saturday Night Live stars or a tie-in for some uncinematic IP, but here we go back to the golden age of film comedy. Why can’t we have more of this? 

Actual favourite: Sinners

Best International Feature Film 

Resurrection, Bi Gan

This is an epic about cinema that has to be experienced to be believed: a film to be watched with eyes wide shut. In the future, death has been defeated and everyone lives in a limbo of semi-consciousness but there are dreamers who risk their own immortality.

Through a series of cinematic periods and styles, from silent movies to gangster films, romance to science fiction, the film is partly projected on the screen and partly wormed into your mind. Indescribable, beautiful looking and sounding and profound, this is one of those films you realise is a masterpiece as you’re watching it. It even has a moment in the middle designed for the viewer to go to sleep. Cinematic genius.  

Actual favourite: Sentimental Value

Best Direction

Oliver Laxe, Sirat 

I’ve seen this film three times in the cinema. The first was at its Cannes premiere and it blew me away. The other two times I had the opportunity to marvel at the utter cinematic bravura and intelligence on display as well as observing the packed audiences in each screening as they reacted. 

I’m not going to say to what. In fact, I’m not going to say anything else about Sirat. It’s in cinemas in the UK right now. If you haven’t seen it, run.

Actual favourite: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another

Best Picture

A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow

In its ongoing mission to destroy cinema, Netflix created the most compelling theatrical film of the year and dumped it on its streaming service. Bigelow’s film is a formally ambitious procedural – she’s the great director of capturing the fascination of people doing things.

Rebecca Fergusson, Jared Leto, Tracy Letts, Jason Clarke and Idris Elba populate the triangle of power as an intercontinental missile with a nuclear warhead is launched towards the mainland of the United States. The lack of preparedness is not confined to the layers of military and government but also to us as an audience who have complacently relegated Mutually Assured Destruction to the 1980s, along with jazz-aerobics and big hair.

But as conflict proliferates in the Middle East and France announces it is going to increase its nuclear stockpile for the first time since the early 1990s for pure shits and giggles, Bigelow’s film is looking ever more terrifying with each passing moment. 

Actual favourite: One Battle After Another