The Oscars: Modern Best Picture Nominees That Received The Smallest Number of Overall Nominations

If you get into the Best Picture category at the Academy Awards, that usually includes also scoring a slew of nominations in other high-profile Oscar categories. This year alone, The Brutalist, Wicked, and Emilia Pérez each scored 10+ nominations including their respective Best Picture nominations. Throughout history, Best Picture Oscar films also tend to get nominations in many other categories – but what about the Best Picture Oscar nominees who don’t receive love all across the board? What about the titles that receive almost all of their recognition in just the Best Picture category?

Before 2009, restricting the Best Picture category to just five nominees limited the number of movies that only scored one other Oscar nomination beyond Best Picture. Heck, no 21st-century Best Picture nominee only scored one other Oscar nomination before 2009! Once this category ballooned beyond five nominees, though, all bets were off. In the last 15 years, a deluge of Best Picture nominees have only scored one other Oscar nomination. This includes this year’s Nickel Boys, which only appeared in the Best Adapted Screenplay category besides receiving its Best Picture nom. That RaMell Ross directorial effort is far from alone in this crop of exceedingly peculiar modern Best Picture nominees – as you can see for yourself, below.

A Serious Man

The very first year the Academy expanded the number of Best Picture nominees beyond five, the ceremony experienced not one but two features score only a single Oscar nomination beyond Best Picture. One of those titles was Joel and Ethan Coen’s dark comedy A Serious Man. Though leading man Michael Stuhlbarg garnered buzz throughout the 2009-2010 award season, the only other Oscar category A Serious Man showed up in was Best Original Screenplay. A Serious Man established a precedent for this kind of Best Picture nominee: if you’re only getting recognized in one other place, make sure it’s either the screenplay or acting categories. If a movie has some real hype surrounding its script, it can overcome getting shut out elsewhere at the Oscars.

The Blind Side

To say The Blind Side was a surprise Best Picture nominee was an understatement. Though a box office phenomenon, this feature scored mixed marks from critics – even when it first came out. Potentially reflecting its divisive response was that The Blind Side only scored an Oscar nomination in one other category. Sandra Bullock got a Best Actress Oscar nod (and eventual win) for the movie, but recognition in other Oscar categories eluded The Blind Side. This John Lee Hancock directorial effort reflected the reality that, if you’re not getting a screenplay Oscar nomination, you better have a high-profile acting nod in your back pocket to have any hopes of a Best Picture nomination.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

It’s not shocking that director Stephen Daldry’s 2011 feature Extremely Loud & Incredible Close scored a Best Picture nomination at the 84th Academy Awards given that his three preceeding feature-length movies all got either Best Director and/or Best Picture Oscar nominations. However, prior Daldry works like The Hours and The Reader scored nominations across a deluge of additional Oscar categories. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, meanwhile, only got one further Oscar nod in Best Supporting Actor. Shockingly, this nomination gave legendary actor Max von Sydor only his second Oscar nomination ever (after a Best Actor nod for 1989’s Pelle the Conqueror).

Selma

Selma is the most bizarre example of a modern Best Picture Oscar nominee to get only one additional Academy Award nomination. Every other post-2008 example of this phenomenon got a nod in either an acting category or one of the two screenplay categories. Ava DuVernay’s acclaimed 2014 feature, though, was relegated to just Best Original Song. This was despite the feature showing up in key categories like Best Director, Best Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Supporting Actress at other big awards ceremonies like the Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice Movie Awards, and Independent Spirit Awards. Selma’s snubbing in so many Oscar categories garnered so much controversy that Kenan Thompson (as Martin Luther King Jr.) even referenced it in a January 2015 Saturday Night Live sketch.

[RELATED: The Oscars Totally Snubbed These 7 Great 2024 Movies]

The Post

All throughout the 2017-2018 award season, endless jokes were made about how The Post being a Steven Spielberg directorial effort starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks made it a shoo-in to dominate the awards circuit. In the end, though, The Post only found Oscar love in one category beyond Best Picture: Best Actress, where Streep received her most recent (but all too typical) Oscar nomination. This also meant the film was excluded from Best Director, a category previous Steven Spielberg-directed Best Picture nominees like Jaws, War Horse, and The Color Purple were also excluded from.

Women Talking

From 2015 to 2023, only one Oscar ceremony (the one featuring The Post) contained a Best Picture nominee that only scored one additional nod. That streak ended with Sarah Polley’s masterpiece Women Talking, which only got further recognized in Best Adapted Screenplay. This was despite the film featuring several acclaimed performances from the likes of Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, and Jessie Buckley that could’ve easily slipped into any of the acting categories. Further confounding matters is that Women Talking won Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars. There was clearly passion behind this feature, just not enough to get it into more than two Oscar categories.

Past Lives

Celine Song made an extraordinary leap to helming feature-length movies with her 2023 directorial debut Past Lives. An instant critical sensation at that year’s Sundance Film Festival, it was inevitable this feature would show up at the Oscars. It did secure a Best Picture nomination, but there was no much-deserved love for lead actors Greta Lee and Teo Yoo. Instead, Past Lives only received further Oscar love in the Best Original Screenplay category. At least this nod ensured that Song herself became an Oscar nominee for her tremendous artistic accomplishments on Past Lives.

Nickel Boys

The 97th Academy Awards are the third consecutive ceremony to feature a Best Picture nominee that received love in only one other category. This time around, that feature was Nickel Boys, a RaMell Ross-directed adaptation of the 2019 Colson Whitehead novel. There are many further Oscar categories Nickel Boys could’ve flourished in. Especially astonishing, though, was that this title (shot entirely in first-person perspective) was excluded from Best Cinematography. Jomo Fray’s groundbreaking imagery surely deserved some love in this Oscar ceremony, while Ethan Herisse and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s performances easily could’ve warranted nominations. In the end, Nickel Boys only got a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination (bestowed upon Ross and Joslyn Barnes) beyond its fBest Picture recognition.

Past Lives is now streaming on Hulu, Nickel Boys is now playing in theaters everywhere.