Think of the Oscars and it’s inevitable that the first image that comes to mind is one of tears (crocodile or otherwise) being shed by the belladonna dilated eyes of actors and directors over the decades. What’s equally easy to envision these days is the quieter sound of teeth being ground into molar dust and fists being slowly furled by those who believed they deserved to be nominated for an award – but either weren’t invited onto the shortlist or fell just short on the night itself. Oscars snubs are, after all, a tale as old as the awards themselves.

Take, for example, Margot Robbie, whose performance in Barbie failed to garner her a nomination for Best Actress at the 2024 Academy Awards. Upon learning of the snub a few weeks ago, in a statement that could barely have been more pre-scripted by her management, she said that, “There’s no way to feel sad when you know you’re this blessed.” The actress’ noticeable departure from fuchsia-hued high-fashion to simple black gown at the Oscars ceremony said otherwise.

Yet she is merely following a familiar, wet handkerchief-strewn path of A-listers who, for reasons that, in retrospect, can often seem willfully perverse, failed to step into their waiting limo with gong in hand at the end of the ceremony.

Here’s our all-time list of notable Oscars snubs which were greeted by the stars and directors involved by either terse silence or outright tantrums.

1931: Charlie Chaplin – City Lights

The Academy Awards (it was never called the Oscars in the early days) were making strange (read: wrong) decisions right from the start. Way back in 1931, The Little Tramp was overlooked in the Best Actor award at the fourth ceremony for City Lights, Chaplin’s quite wonderful tale (with some of his finest slapstick) of ardent devotion to a blind flower seller. It’s possible that, with the era of ‘talkie’ movies in its infancy, Hollywood had little time for what it considered to be the old-fashioned medium of silent films.

Snubs would become a familiar misery for Chaplin who even failed to receive an Oscar for his masterpiece, The Great Dictator, despite being on the shortlist in five different categories. However, Hollywood seemed to finally realise the error of its ways when an elderly Chaplin was invited to travel to Los Angeles from his home in Switzerland in 1972 to receive an honorary award. The standing ovation he received lasted for a full 12 minutes.

1959: Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo

If the image of James Stewart clinging to a San Francisco rooftop doesn’t ring a bell then you’re probably one of the (lucky) people who haven’t yet had the experience of watching Hitchcock’s greatest achievement. Yet, there was to be no suspense for Hitchcock on Oscars night in 1959, with Vertigo not even making it onto the shortlist for either Best Director or Best Picture. Even in the years when Hitch was nominated for his films, a feat he achieved five times, the envelope containing the winner always had another star's name inside. The fact that Vertigo did get two nominations, in the minor categories of art direction and sound, was probably of little consolation to the great man but it certainly didn’t dampen his creative fire. After all, he followed up Vertigo with North By Northwest and Psycho.

1960: Marilyn Monroe – Some Like It Hot

The girl born as Norma Jean Baker was always late, forgot her lines, and was hated by the crew and director Billy Wilder on the set of 1959’s Some Like It Hot, with co-star Tony Curtis famously comparing kissing her to planting a smacker on Hitler. But the result was one of the funniest films of all time, with Monroe cementing her position as one of the great cinematic comediennes. Yet, it appears that Hollywood simply couldn’t see her as anything more than a sex symbol, perhaps explaining why Monroe not only never won an Academy Award, she was never even nominated for one.

1969: Stanley Kubrick – 2001: A Space Odyssey

Lionel Bart was a fantastic composer. And there are few more enjoyable films to watch on a rainy Sunday afternoon than Oliver. But it surely didn’t deserve to win Best Picture in 1969 over Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The director did get a gong that year for Special Visual Effects, a consolation prize that, perhaps, has done something to put people off watching the film in the mistaken belief that it is mostly surface effects with little substance. Still, despite creating some of the most influential movies in cinematic history, this was the only Oscar Kubrick ever won – and even that has been posthumously disputed. Speaking in 2014, the film’s special photographic effects supervisor, Douglas Trumball, said that Kubrick (who died in 1999) should never have received the award as ‘(he) did not create the visual effects. He directed them…There was a certain level of inappropriateness to taking that Oscar.’ In Hollywood, it seems that even when you win, you’ve lost.

1976: Steven Spielberg – Jaws

Back in the mid-1970s, a young Spielberg’s frenetic action-horror was pulling crowds into cinemas in numbers that had barely been seen since the mass introduction of television into households.

But, for all the good work that Jaws did to revive the fortunes of flea-pit auditoriums from Los Angeles to Luton, the Oscars committee failed to nominate Spielberg in the Best Director category. It’s probably worth mentioning, as a strong mitigating circumstance, that Jaws came out in one of the richest years for movies that Hollywood had mustered for decades; Stanley Kubrick (for Barry Lyndon) and Robert Altman (for Nashville) lost out to Milos Forman, who won the director gong for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

1977: Martin Scorsese – Taxi Driver

There are too many disturbing and unforgettable moments in Taxi Driver to mention but perhaps the most sinister Scorsese’s own cameo, sitting in the back of Travis Bickle’s cab, detailing to the demented protagonist how he intends to murder his cheating girlfriend. The movie’s terrifying depiction of mental unravelling in a deteriorating New York failed to garner Scorsese an Oscar for Best Director in 1977, with the award going to John G. Avildsen for Rocky instead. Scorsese remained defiant, stating: ‘You don’t make pictures for Oscars’. To date, Scorsese has been nominated for a total of 16 Oscars, taking home just one: Best Director for 2006’s The Departed.

1997: Pam Grier – Jackie Brown

This was the moment when the lack of diversity at the Oscars really started to be noticed by the audience at large. Many a talented Black performer had been routinely overlooked in the preceding years (Samuel L. Jackson for Pulp Fiction and Michael Clark Duncan for The Green Mile to name but two) but Grier’s 1997 omission for Tarantino's warm yet sinister tale, starring the Blaxploitation pioneer as a flight attendant doing illegal money running on the side, was a particularly bizarre misstep. Multi-faceted, funny and sublimely cool, Grier’s performance was the best of her career. And yet the Best Actress gong that year went to Helen Hunt for the utterly mediocre As Good As It Gets. It wouldn’t be long before the #OscarsSoWhite agitation would begin in earnest.

1998: Leonardo DiCaprio – Titanic

The viewing figures for the Oscars have dropped off a cliff in recent years. The zenith for audience numbers was reached in 1998 when Titanic became that rarest of movies: a commercial mastodon that was also adored by the critics. Yet its leading man wasn’t even nominated for Best Actor. DiCaprio, as it emerged not long after the film’s release, had an ambiguous relationship with the movie from the off. Described by James Cameron (who did win the Best Director award for the film) as being ‘so negative’ during initial script readings, DiCaprio was told that if he maintained his initial stance of refusing to screen test with Kate Winslet (who was at least nominated for Best Actress) then he simply wouldn’t be hired at all.

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