The Alternative 2024 Oscar Nominations

Oh, Oscar season. You come and go so fast. With the 96th Academy Awards only a few days away, the red carpet will be vacuumed, the next Best Picture winner will be crowned, and Bradley Cooper can give it a rest and maybe take a holiday. It’s been a fascinating awards year in cinema, between the battle of Barbenheimer, the rise of Lily Gladstone, and the Sandra Huller renaissance. Many categories feel like locks but, as William Goldman famously wrote of the ceremony, nobody knows anything.

With the Oscars come Oscar snubs. Every year, we get mad about the works that didn’t get nominated because, even in years where the Academy mostly gets it right, the stuff they do wrong feels glaring to the extreme. For the 2023 season, things were reasonably okay in the grand scheme of things. There’s no Green Book style stinker in the ensemble, and even in categories with big misses, competition feels sturdy. As always, however, it’s worth celebrating those works that didn’t make the shortlist and offering an alternative to the season.

Even in weak years, there are plenty of players who would have made excellent nominees yet were overlooked by voters for various reasons. They weren’t commercial hits, they tackled tricky subjects, they were strikingly indie in style, or they were just made by people who weren’t bearded white dudes in baseball caps. The goal of our alternative Oscar noms is to show how easy it is to fill out these major categories with works that weren’t nominated and how doing so would still offer a worthy ensemble of potential victors. Trust me, this is always far easier to compile than one would have predicted (and we had to make some tough cuts, even when we expanded certain categories to six nominees instead of five.) The Academy could make pricklier and less conservative choices. They just choose not to.

BEST PICTURE

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
All of Us Strangers
Asteroid City
A Thousand and One
Beau is Afraid
The Boy and the Heron
May December
Passages
Priscilla
The Taste of Things

BEST DIRECTOR

Greta Gerwig — Barbie
Todd Haynes — May December
Hayao Miyazaki — The Boy and the Heron
Ira Sachs — Passages
Celine Song — Past Lives
Molly Manning Walker — How to Have Sex

BEST ACTOR

Swann Arnaud — Anatomy of a Fall
Gael Garcia Bernal — Cassandro
Christian Friedel — The Zone of Interest
Franz Rogowski — Passages
Andrew Scott — All of Us Strangers
Teo Yoo — Past Lives

BEST ACTRESS

Greta Lee — Past Lives
Mia McKenna-Bruce — How to Have Sex
Natalie Portman — May December
Margot Robbie — Barbie
Cailee Spaeny — Priscilla
Teyana Taylor — A Thousand and One

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Jamie Bell — All of Us Strangers
Michael Cera — Barbie
Willem Dafoe — Poor Things
Milo Machado-Graner — Anatomy of a Fall
Charles Melton — May December
Ramy Youssef — Poor Things

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Erika Alexander — American Fiction
Anne Hathaway — Eileen
Sandra Huller — The Zone of Interest
Rachel McAdams — Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Julianne Moore — May December
Cara Jade Myers — Killers of the Flower Moon

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

A Thousand and One
All of Us Strangers
Bottoms
The Boy and the Heron
How to Have Sex
La Chimera

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Eileen
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Killers of the Flower Moon
Priscilla
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Barbie
Enys Men
Godland
The Iron Claw
The Zone of Interest

BEST SCORE

The Boy and the Heron
Master Gardener
Monster
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The Zone of Interest