Oscars 2025 nominations: Jon M Chu surprisingly snubbed for ‘Best Director’
The director of Wicked, Jon M Chu, has been snubbed at the Oscars 2025, with his name not included in the list of ‘Best Director’ nominations.
Presented by Bowen Yang and Rachel Sennott, the Oscars 2025 nominations ceremony took place at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills on January 23rd. The ‘Best Picture’ category is comprised of Anora, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune: Part 2, Emilia Pérez, I’m Still Here, Nickel Boys, The Substance and Wicked.
However, despite the first instalment of Chu’s 2024 musical adaptation being up for ‘Best Picture’, the sixth-highest-grossing film of 2024 and critically acclaimed, it was not enough for him to make it into the ‘Best Director’ category.
The nominees for that category are Sean Baker (Anora), Brady Corbet (The Brutalist), James Mangold (A Complete Unknown), Jaques Audiard (Emilia Perez), and Coralie Fargeat (The Substance).
Last year’s ‘Best Director’ winner was Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer, one of cinema’s biggest sensations in 2023. Starring Cillian Murphy, it’s an adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin’s American Prometheus, the 2005 biography of J Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who developed the first nuclear weapons during World War II.
As for this year’s ‘Best Director’ nominees, A Complete Unknown director James Mangold is no stranger to Oscar wins. He won Academy Awards for his last biopic, 2005’s Walk the Line. That film starred Joaquin Phoenix as the rebel country pioneer Johnny Cash.
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