11 Huge Screw-Ups From The 94th Oscar Film Nominations
4. Mass And The Last Duel Were Both Robbed
Every year, great movies get side-lined by the Oscars and inevitably, some very deserving movies got left out this year. For your writer, the two worst snubs were Mass and The Last Duel.
Mass is a shattering, almost unbearably powerful meditation on trauma featuring four incredible character actors giving four of the year's best performances, while The Last Duel is a rich, fantastically written epic that is as gripping and thrilling as it is emotionally bruising, making it arguably one of Ridley Scott's best-ever movies.
Perhaps the lack of exposure and grim subject matter of both movies, as well as the box office underperformance of The Last Duel, hurt their chances; regardless of the reason, it's a crying shame that these movies didn't make it in. After all, since they are a Sundance award-winning drama and a historical epic respectively, neither were too far away from typical Oscar material.
Both were superior to quite a few of the Best Picture nominees (as good as most of them are) and both of their screenplays were ten times more deserving of a nomination than, say, King Richard or Don't Look Up while, as already mentioned, several of the actors in both films did better work than the eventual nominees.
Of course, the Oscars can't include every awesome movie from a year, but when you consider what was nominated instead of these movies it's hard not to feel bitter...