This is the biggest Oscars 2025 snub and it’s not even close

The Oscar nominations have been announced, and there’s one specific snub that’s smarting above all others.

The 2025 Oscar nominations are something of a mixed bag. The wildly divisive Emilia Pérez leads the way with 13 nominations, while The Brutalist and Wicked scored 10 apiece.

Conclave managed eight nominations, but with Edward Berger nowhere to be seen in the directing category, it seems that the movie helmed itself.

Angelina Jolie (Maria) and Nicole Kidman (Babygirl) are also absent in their acting category, but when it comes to this year’s biggest Oscar snub, it’s very obviously a brilliant movie score.

Challengers nowhere to be scene in the Best Score category

Tennis drama Challengers was one of the best movies of 2024, and featured the very best score of the year. But it didn’t make the grade at the Academy Awards, with the musical shortlist looking like this:

• The Brutalist
• Conclave
• Emilia Pérez
• Wicked
• The Wild Robot

Don’t get us wrong, those are great scores, with the work of John Powell and Stephen Schwartz complementing the musical numbers in Wicked, and Clément Ducol and Camille doing similarly impressive work on Emilia Pérez. Meanwhile, Daniel Blumberg’s Brutalist score is as bold and bombastic as Volker Bertelmann’s Conclave work is beautiful and understated.

But as far as the Dexerto team is concerned, those works pale in comparison to the Challengers score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which recently – and correctly – won at the Golden Globes.

Their throbbing electro score is heavily influenced by 1990s rave music, as well as the German techno scene, and provides a pulsating soundtrack to the three-way shenanigans between tennis players Tashi (Zendaya), Art (Mike Faist), and Patrick (Josh O’Conner).

Warner Bros.

But their euphoric beats really fly during the tennis scenes, and most notably the movie’s climactic match, which is one of the greatest sports sequences ever shot. That’s down to what’s at stake for the characters involved, as well as cutting edge effects that seamlessly put actor heads on tennis player bodies.

But it’s also due to the work of Reznor and Ross, which somehow injects electricity into this grandstanding scene, prompting us to call the music “absolutely perfect,” in our Challengers review.

All of which turns this shocking oversight into the Academy’s biggest 2025 Oscar snub. And don’t get us started on the movie’s absence from the Best Picture and Director categories…

To see where it ranked on our list, here’s Dexerto’s Top 25 movies of 2024, and you can also check out our best sports movie picks.