25 best movies that never won an Academy Award

25 best movies that never won an Oscar

BEVERLY HILLS, CA - FEBRUARY 03: Director Greta Gerwig (R) accepts the Nomination Medallion for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for 'Lady Bird' from actor Saoirse Ronan onstage during the 70th Annual Directors Guild Of America Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on February 3, 2018 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images for DGA) /

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10. Fight Club

David Fincher may be the most underrated working director in Hollywood, at least when it comes to awards-season accolades. His movies are always fascinating and entertaining, and yet he’s never won an Oscar and has only been nominated twice. He should’ve won a Best Director statue in 2011 for The Social Network, but that’s a conversation for another day.

By the time Fight Club was released in 1999, Fincher was already an established director having cut his teeth on Alien 3, Se7en (hold that thought) and The Game. So this wasn’t a case of a fresh face bursting onto the scene with a bold movie containing one of the greatest twists in film history. The Academy not showing Fight Club the respect it had earned was gross negligence, plain and simple.

The only nomination Fight Club received for the 2000 Oscars was for Sound Effects Editing, which it lost to The Matrix. As we’ve already discussed, that was the year American Beauty was an unstoppable behemoth. But that still doesn’t make Fincher and Edward Norton not even being nominated for Best Director and Best Actor any easier to swallow.

Do you want to know how slighted Fight Club truly was that year? It couldn’t even win the MTV Movie Award for Best Fight, for which Edward Norton was nominated “for fighting against himself.” That’s an almost unheard of level of disrespect for a film this universally lauded.

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