When it comes to the Oscars, there’s always something to bellyache about. Forget the unworthy films the Academy deems worthy. (Paging Ms. Pérez, first name Emilia.) It’s what doesn’t get nominated that really ticks people off. Last January, even Hillary Clinton weighed in on the “snubbing” of Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig, star and writer-director, respectively, of Barbie. This year, grievances have been aired on behalf of Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, and Dune director Denis Villeneuve. None of the above heard their names called on Thursday morning when the nominations for the 2025 Oscars were unveiled.
Regretfully, we are not immune to this powerful urge to gripe. Goofy though it may be to expend any emotional energy on the Academy Awards, which have been getting it wrong (and ignoring exceptional films) since their inception, there’s one snub this year that feels particularly egregious — one omission that’s as annoying as it was easy to see coming. Command-F a full list of the 2025 nominations and say it with us in unison: Where, you gormless chumps, is the love for Challengers?
Luca Guadagnino’s playful drama about three young tennis champs tangled in a decade-spanning love triangle scored not a single nomination — no, not even for that propulsive, Golden Globe-winning original score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. No one seems particularly surprised by its total absence from the race. Oscar bloggers wrote the film off as a long shot months ago. Setting aside the question of whether predicting awards season actually shapes awards season, the writing was on the wall. And yet it still boggles the mind: Served a smart, sexy entertainment for grownups, thousands of Academy voters voted nay.
There are multiple categories for which Challengers could and should have competed. The script by Justin Kuritzkes is the year’s wittiest marvel of screenwriting — a chronologically intricate three-hander that develops its relationships across two dovetailing timelines, with dialogue that pings back and forth like a ball served and returned. Guadagnino directs the ever-living hell out of that blueprint, bringing a virtuosic kineticism to dialogue exchanges and tense championship matches alike; arguably no filmmaker this year tackled scenes with this much athletic enthusiasm. And how many performances from 2024 were as charismatic as Josh O’Connor’s turn as the mischievous, down-on-his-luck Patrick, mounting a comeback that’s really a roundabout push to reconnect with an old friend and the beautiful fellow tennis star who came between them?
And who could forget that throbbing Reznor-Ross symphony, a techno heartbeat that drives the action, on and off the court, as relentlessly as it ear-wormed its way onto gym playlists? You can hold the blasphemous opinion that maybe, just maybe, Guadagnino should have mixed the music down a little (the way it drowns out dialogue in key scenes is a bit much, however bold and purposeful) and still acknowledge that it’s the kind of infectious musical suite — inseparable from the movie it augments, instrumental to its rhythm and tone — that the Original Score category was seemingly created to honor.
The way Challengers brought all these elements together should have made it a shoo-in for the Best Picture lineup, too. Yes, it was a competitive field, but how many of the final nominees supplied as collective a buzz of satisfaction? How many built to a better, more instantly iconic ending? Of course, great movies fail to make the cut every year. That’s the real folly of complaining about the Oscars: You’ll go hoarse cataloging their slights. And certainly, there are movies that would benefit more from a nomination than Challengers, an already well-liked, widely-seen Hollywood movie that got good reviews and made healthy money.
But that’s the thing: The relative success of this film is worth celebrating, especially by an industry that could stand to learn from (and emulate) its example. Challengers is something of a unicorn in the modern movie landscape — the sort of adult-oriented studio confection that too rarely gets made anymore. A movie about people and sex and relationships. A star-driven drama in an age when you usually have to look for those on the small screen, not the big one. It’s like the second coming of Bull Durham — another ménage à trois of a sports movie that, incidentally, did score an Oscar nomination for its screenplay.
So what stopped Hollywood’s most prominent voting bloc from embracing a well-reviewed American crowd-pleaser that drummed up $50 million at the box office (aka more than most of the Best Picture nominees) and forcefully touched a meme-making zeitgeist? Timing might be to blame. Challengers, after all, opened way back in April. In recent years, the conventional wisdom that a pre-summer movie can’t compete has been repeatedly, well, challenged. But recency bias still benefits late-breaking contenders at the expense of others. Look at the other big Zendaya vehicle of 2024, Dune: Part Two, which also opened in the spring after being delayed by the guild strikes. That movie did pick up some nominations… but not as many as some initially predicted it would when it hit theaters.
More than the when, it might be the what of Challengers that kept it out of the running. It’s gotten to the point where the Academy, like the industry on a whole, sees movies in binary terms. On the one side, you have the arthouse films — the festival favorites like Anora or The Brutalist or (sigh) Emilia Pérez that make the case for cinema as a still-vital medium, worthy of the praise the Oscars reinforce. On the other side, you have the tenpole entertainments and popcorn spectacles that keep the lights on at Disney, Warner Bros., et al. Nominations for Wicked and Dune are as much about commercial performance as they are about quality, though it takes a certain respectability to make an awards contender out of a blockbuster.
Challengers doesn’t really fit either of those labels. It’s a serious piece of storytelling and filmmaking that’s also a hoot. It’s a deliriously fun movie that didn’t make a billion dollars or employ hundreds to thousands of special-effects wizards. It’s caught, in a sense, between the two poles of art and entertainment that now define the split priorities of Hollywood. We used to get a lot of studio films that fit such a description. Now a mid-budget success story like Challengers mostly exists in the streaming sphere, where movies so often go to disappear.
Maybe the Academy ignored this great film because it represents a kind of moviemaking — accessible but intelligent, endlessly enjoyable (and rewatchable) but not aimed at all ages and demographics — that barely exists anymore. Which is one big reason, of course, that they shouldn’t have ignored it. Challengers is gleeful proof that, every once in a while, they do make ’em like they used to. If that isn’t deserving of a trip to the Dolby Theatre and a shot at the gold, what is?
Challengers is available to rent or purchase from the major digital services. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
Read the full article here
