25 best movies that never won an Oscar

History remembers these 25 movies more fondly than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences regarded them during their heyday.

In case you’re ever bored, there are a lot of great films out there. Some might even say that the number of popular and/or critically lauded movies from which to choose is insurmountable for the average movie lover to consume.

So it would stand to reason that some of these films that we take for granted as being “really good” never received their due upon their initial theatrical releases. Sometimes it takes a combination of time and a shifting of societal standards for a movie to receive the accolades it deserved all along.

The most tangible way to determine whether a film was received as it should have been or not when it first came out is to see how it did during that year’s awards season. Sometimes, when looking through the archives of Oscar winners and nominees, it’s easy to be shocked that a movie now considered to be the pinnacle of film-making didn’t win anything.

Just because a film is now considered a classic doesn’t mean the Academy Awards honored it accordingly at the time. Hundreds of films get released each year, and there are only 24 categories — and for some of these films released before the modern Oscars format was solidified, even fewer.

With the 2019 Academy Awards less than a month away, it’s a perfect opportunity to look back at some fantastic films that either went home completely empty-handed or, in some cases, weren’t nominated at all. Let’s get mad about these cinematic injustices together, shall we?

Note: Every movie on this list should have been nominated for Best Picture if it wasn’t. That’s the assumption in all these revisionist discussions.