Celebrate the Anti-Awards Season with MoMI’s Annual ‘Snubbed’ Festival

What do Kim Novak, Jim Carrey, John Turturro, and the late Donald Sutherland all have in common? Well, aside from being acclaimed actors, these stars have never (we repeat: never) been nominated for an Academy Award. And that crime is now being celebrated by the annual anti-awards season festival, hosted by the Museum of the Moving Image.

The beloved museum announced its third iteration of the popular “Snubbed” screening series, which reexamines films that have been overlooked by the Academy. The 2025 theme is centered on actors and titled “Snubbed Forever: Great Actors, No Nominations.” The program will run February 1 through March 9, and feature 21 films starring actors who have never been nominated for an Oscar.

Highlights include Kim Novak in the enduring “Vertigo,” John Turturro and John Goodman in “Barton Fink,” Rita Hayworth in “The Lady from Shanghai,” Jim Carrey in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and Danny DeVito in “Batman Returns.”

“Rosemary’s Baby” with Mia Farrow and “An Officer and a Gentleman” starring Richard Gere also will screen, along with Christopher Guest’s “For Your Consideration” which the festival has deemed the “funniest movie ever made about the experience of being snubbed for an Oscar nomination.” As “For Your Consideration” lead star Catherine O’Hara said during her tenure as Moira in “Schitt’s Creek,” her favorite season is awards — that is, if you’re nominated.

Check out the lineup for “Snubbed Forever: Great Actors, No Nominations,” with film descriptions provided by MoMI, below.

Dog Day Afternoon
Snubbed Forever: John Cazale
Saturday, February 1, 1:00 p.m.
Sunday, February 2, 3:30 p.m.
Dir. Sidney Lumet. 1975, 125 mins. 35mm. With Al Pacino, John Cazale, Chris Sarandon, Carol Kane, Charles Durning. Pacino gives one of his greatest performances as desperate crook Sonny Wortzik in Lumet’s epochal New York crime drama, based on the bizarre true story of a 1972 bank robbery staged blocks from the movie’s Brooklyn location. An anti-establishment thriller that perfectly captures the anarchy of 1970s New York, the film is remembered primarily for Pacino’s increasingly unhinged work, but the actor is given crucial support from the always poignant Cazale, whose slow-burn turn as Sonny’s unpredictable accomplice, “Sal” Naturile, is a highlight of the underappreciated actor’s legendary run through 1970s American cinema.
 
Barton Fink
Snubbed Forever: John Goodman and John Turturro
Saturday, February 1, 3:30 p.m.
Sunday, February 2, 6:00 p.m.
Dirs. Joel and Ethan Coen. 1991, 116 mins. U.S. 35mm. With John Turturro, John Goodman, Judy Davis, Michael Lerner, John Mahoney. The Coen brothers’ tour de force set in 1930s Hollywood stars Turturro as an overly idealistic east coast playwright who goes west for a gig writing studio scripts. Facing an epic bout of writers’ block while cooped up in a rotting Los Angeles hotel, Barton befriends a diabolically charismatic traveling salesman named Charlie (Goodman) who’s staying down the hall. While attracted to Charlie’s everyman quality, Barton gets drawn further into his own psyche, facing ever more blurred lines of reality and fantasy. Exquisitely designed and brilliantly acted by odd couple Turturro and Goodman, Barton Fink remains one of the Coens’ most deliriously inscrutable dark comedies.
 
Batman Returns
Snubbed Forever: Danny DeVito
Saturday, February 1, 6:00 p.m. 
Sunday, February 2, 1:00 p.m.
Dir. Tim Burton. 1992, 126 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Michael Keaton, Michelle Pfeiffer, Danny DeVito, Christopher Walken. Working at the height of his powers, Burton was given free rein to create one of the most astonishingly strange and perverse summer blockbusters of all time. Batman Returns pits Keaton’s brooding Caped Crusader against two archrivals, both expertly realized in unforgettable performances: Pfeiffer’s mousy, abused secretary Selena Kyle (aka Catwoman), and DeVito’s demeaned, abandoned orphan Oswald Cobblepot (aka The Penguin). Wreaking gruesome havoc on the city, the Penguin is a fiend for the ages, inhabited by DeVito with uncompromising grotesquerie, right up through his Grand Guignol finish.
 
3:10 to Yuma
Snubbed Forever: Glenn Ford
Friday, February 7, 4:00 p.m.
Sunday, February 9, 4:00 p.m.
Dir. Delmer Daves. 1957, 92 mins. U.S. DCP. With Glenn Ford, Van Heflin. The laidback magnetism of Glenn Ford isn’t the kind of performance style that usually wins Academy Awards, but the psychological complexity and cool-as-ice charisma Ford brought to his roles in genre films made him one of the low-key great movie stars of Hollywood’s golden age. As the ostensible villain of Delmer Daves’s western classic, the outlaw Ben Wade who is being guarded and brought to justice by civilian rancher Dan Evans (Oscar-winner Van Heflin), Ford keeps peeling back layers of humanity, even as the two men enact a tense cat-and-mouse game. 3:10 to Yuma is a morally complicated thriller, tight as a drum, and elegantly shot by western master Charles Lawton Jr.
 
Rosemary’s Baby
Snubbed Forever: Mia Farrow
Friday, February 7, 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, February 8, 6:00 p.m.
Dir. Roman Polanski. 1968, 137 mins. U.S.  35mm. With Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Ralph Bellamy. One of the greatest horror movies ever made, Rosemary’s Baby is a film of uncommon psychological depth that allows the viewer into the fragile, disintegrating mindscape of a newly pregnant woman (Farrow) who moves with her actor husband (Cassavetes) into a Manhattan building with a haunted past and begins to suspect her seemingly normal elderly neighbors (Gordon, Blackmer) have sinister plans for her and her baby. Terrified yet, in the end, frighteningly resilient, Farrow is utterly captivating and entirely sympathetic, on-screen for every scene.
 
The Quiet Man
Snubbed Forever: Maureen O’Hara
Saturday, February 8, 1:30 p.m.
Sunday, February 9, 6:00 p.m.
Dir. John Ford. 1952, 129 mins. U.S. 35mm. With John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Barry Fitzgerald. Ford—born John Martin Feeney—once again returned to his Irish roots in The Quiet Man, sumptuously photographed in Technicolor by three-time Oscar winner Winton C. Hoch (who also shot She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Searchers). Sean Thornton (John Wayne), an ex-heavyweight from Pittsburgh, returns to his ancestral home in the Irish countryside, where he gets the fight of his life from strong-willed local girl Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara) who is every bit his equal. O’Hara’s lyrical yet down-to-earth performance is the crown jewel in a career of no-nonsense women who elevate the game of everyone around them.
 
The Magnificent Ambersons
Snubbed Forever: Joseph Cotten
Saturday, February 8, 4:00 p.m.
Sunday, February 9, 2:00 p.m.
Dir. Orson Welles. 1942, 88 mins. U.S. DCP. With Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Tim Holt, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter. Welles’s exquisite, richly cynical adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s novel about a turn-of-the-century family unwilling to change with the times was famously snatched from Welles’s hands by RKO, re-edited and completed with a new ending. Astonishingly, the film, made just one year after Citizen Kane, remains, despite the tampering, one of the greatest Hollywood movies ever made, a ruthless portrait of an intractable, tradition-minded young man named George Amberson Minafer, whose vice grip on his family leads to its downfall. Cotten gives a gloriously moving and humane performance as the motorcar manufacturer seen by George as an unwanted interloper. Nearly every shot in Welles’s film pushes the cinematic medium into new expressive territory.
 
The Girl from Missouri
Snubbed Forever: Jean Harlow
Friday, February 14, 3:00 p.m.
Saturday, February 15, 2:00 p.m.
Dir. Jack Conway. 1934, 75 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Jean Harlow, Franchot Tone, Lionel Barrymore, Patsy Kelly. Sultry superstar Jean Harlow owned the screen in the “pre-code” good ol’ bad days, and she’s outstanding in this comic drama in which the bombshell plays the quintessential role of a waitress and dance girl who escapes with her loose-lipped pal (Kelly) to New York from dead-end Kansas City to start over. In the hopes of landing a millionaire, without sacrificing her virtue, she finds herself falling into one startling occurrence after another. The Girl from Missouri is a grand showcase for Harlow’s expert mix of seductive comedy and poignant humanity.
 
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Snubbed Forever: Jim Carrey
Friday, February 14, 5:30 p.m.
Saturday, February 15, 3:45 p.m.
Dir. Michel Gondry. 2004, 108 mins. U.S. DCP. With Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Tom Wilkinson. Despite giving his tenderest and most nuanced performance, Carrey was again ignored by the Academy for his work as the lovelorn Joel, who undergoes an experimental procedure to erase memories of his former flame Clementine (Winslet, who did receive a nomination). Directing an Oscar-winning script by Charlie Kaufman, Gondry proves his fluid virtuosity and masterful control of image and sound after having made his mark with playful and inventive music videos for Björk, Daft Punk, the Rolling Stones, and more. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a deeply moving meditation on romantic love and the fragility of the human consciousness.

‘An Officer and a Gentleman’©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

An Officer and a Gentleman
Snubbed Forever: Richard Gere
Friday, February 14, 7:45 p.m.
Sunday, February 16, 12:30 p.m.
Dir. Taylor Hackford. 1982, 124 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Richard Gere, Debra Winger, Louis Gossett, Jr., David Keith, Lisa Blount, Robert Loggia, Lisa Eilbacher. Hackford’s rousing romantic melodrama gave Gere one of his most complex and acclaimed starring roles, as Zack Mayo, who, down on his luck after his mother’s suicide, attempts to turn his life around by entering Aviation Officer Candidate School to become a Navy Jet Pilot and prove his mettle to himself and his many doubters. Following Zack’s arduous journey through both a grueling basic training overseen by tough Gunnery Sergeant Foley (Gossett) and a trial-by-fire relationship with local factory worker Paula (Winger), Hackford’s gripping film moves from personal tragedy to crowd-pleasing finale. Gossett won an Oscar, and Winger was nominated, but ascendant star Gere was left out, although he provides the film’s complex, slow-burning emotional center.
 
Maurice
Snubbed Forever: Hugh Grant
Saturday, February 15, 6:00 p.m.
Sunday, February 16, 5:30 p.m.
Dir. James Ivory. 1987, 140 mins.  U.K. DCP. With James Wilby, Hugh Grant, Rupert Graves, Denholm Elliott, Simon Callow, Billie Whitelaw. As a follow-up to their international breakout smash A Room with a View, director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant took an enormous risk with this daring, beautifully mounted adaptation of E. M. Forster’s posthumous novel about a gay man’s coming of age in Edwardian England. Wilby plays Maurice Hall, who falls for dashing school chum Clive Durham, played by Hugh Grant in a performance of heartbreaking complexity, humor, and charm. Clive won’t commit toMaurice, despite his profound romantic feelings for him, terrified of the social disgrace, paving the way for Maurice to meet Rupert Graves’s salt-of-the-earth groundskeeper Scudder. It’s impeccably crafted, yet there’s nothing simple or easy about Maurice, a breakthrough gay movie that was ahead of its time and put Grant on the map a full seven years before Four Weddings and a Funeral.
 
Carmen Jones
Snubbed Forever: Harry Belafonte
Friday, February 21, 5:15 p.m.
Sunday, February 23, 2:00 p.m.
Dir. Otto Preminger. 1954, 105 mins. U.S. DCP. With Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Pearl Bailey, Diahann Carroll, Brock Peters. Following up on his successful 1953 screen debut Bright Road, Harry Belafonte co-starred again with Dorothy Dandridge in this early CinemaScope musical, which adapts the love story of Bizet’s Carmen to World War II. Belafonte plays the young soldier Joe, and Dandridge is the alluring parachute-factory worker Carmen Jones. Dandridge rightfully and historically received a Best Actress nomination for her blazing, charismatic lead performance, yet Belafonte, certifying his newfound stardom, was as fiery, sensual, and magnetic as Joe, whose obsession leads to his downfall and to the film’s explosive climax.
 
Blue Collar
Snubbed Forever: Richard Pryor and Yaphet Kotto
Friday, February 21, 7:30 p.m. 
Sunday, February 23, 6:00 p.m.
Dir. Paul Schrader. 1978, 114 mins. U.S. DCP. With Richard Pryor, Yaphet Kotto, Harvey Keitel, Ed Begley, Jr. Paul Schrader’s directorial debut gave Richard Pryor and Yaphet Kotto two of their greatest roles, as Detroit auto workers who take matters into their own hands after being mistreated by both management and their Union bosses. After deciding to commit an ill-planned robbery at union headquarters, they come upon papers linking their organizers to a crime syndicate. Paranoia and recrimination abound from the fallout in Schrader’s incisive, gritty feature. In his first serious role, Pryor harnesses the rage of his standup routines for dramatic effect, while Kotto commands the screen with his effortless charisma, as he would throughout his distinguished career.
 
Scarlet Street
Snubbed Forever: Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett
Friday, February 28, 3:00 p.m.
Saturday, March 1, 2:15 p.m.
Dir. Fritz Lang. 1945, 102 mins. U.S. 35mm archival print from the Library of Congress. With Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea, Margaret Lindsay, Rosiland Ivan. Even amidst the darkness of the burgeoning, as-yet-unnamed film noir movement in American cinema, Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street is a jolt of pure fatalism. Robinson gives a career-best lead performance as a browbeaten, retired Greenwich Village cashier and amateur painter who falls into a trap set by a shady local girl who dangles the hope of a romantic affair in front of him, all the while swindling him out of cash. Giving performances unsparing in their pitifulness and malignancy, respectively, Robinson and Bennett guide viewers through the jaw-dropping, labyrinthine plot all the way to a haunting ending that contributed to the film being banned in a number of cities across the United States.
 
For Your Consideration
Snubbed Forever: Catherine O’Hara
Friday, February 28, 5:30 p.m.
Sunday, March 2, 4:45 p.m.
Dir. Christopher Guest. 2006, 86 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Catherine O’Hara, Harry Shearer, Parker Posey, Michael McKean, Bob Balaban, Jennifer Coolidge, Eugene Levy, Larry Miller. The funniest movie ever made about the experience of being snubbed for an Oscar nomination, For Your Consideration found Christopher Guest and company moving away from their patented mockumentary format for this hilarious and merciless satire. Focusing equally on the hellish Oscar-prognostication media landscape as much as on the Tinseltown fools who buy into it with self-destructive relish, Guest’s film gives O’Hara one of her greatest screen roles as Marilyn Hack, who discovers, much to her detriment, that she has been tapped for a possible Oscar nomination for the ridiculous ethnic melodrama (“Home for Purim,” in a bit of classic Borscht Belt humor) she’s currently shooting. Everyone is skewered, from journalists and critics to agents and producers to, of course, vain movie stars, in this delightful, ultimately poignant parody.
 
Cutter’s Way
Snubbed Forever: John Heard
Friday, February 28, 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 1, 4:30 p.m.
Dir. Ivan Passer. 1981, 109 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Jeff Bridges, John Heard, Lisa Eichhorn. Ivan Passer’s gripping neo-noir gave Heard the meatiest role of his career, a performance of remarkable, implosive rage. He plays Cutter, a broken-down, one-eyed Vietnam veteran determined to exact revenge on the death of a young woman whose body is discovered by his friend Bone (Bridges). Although no one can be sure who the murderer is, Cutter’s conspiracy theories lead them to believe a local tycoon is responsible. Initially buried by its studio, this trickily ambiguous thriller feels like an elegy for the seventies and was later recouped as one of the best films of its era. 
 
Saint Jack
Snubbed Forever: Ben Gazzara
Saturday, March 1, 6:30 p.m.
Sunday, March 2, 2:15 p.m.
Dir Peter Bogdanovich. 1979. 112 mins. U.S. DCP. With Ben Gazzara, Denholm Elliott, James Villiers, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lazenby. Bogdanovich closed out his most celebrated decade with an underappreciated gem. Adapted from a novel by Paul Theroux, Saint Jack stars 1970s king Ben Gazzara in one of his most charming and complex star turns as American expat Jack Flowers, an amiable pimp in Singapore who knows everyone by name, never turns down a drink, and wears the blues with a grin. Produced by Roger Corman, shot by legendary DP Robby Müller, and featuring ecstatically self-effacing performances by Elliott, Lazenby, and Bogdanovich as a sleazy self-parody of himself, Saint Jack is what the kids call “a vibe,” with gestures and moments and visions ambulating past—and somewhere along the way time passes and everything changes.
 
The Body Snatcher
Snubbed Forever: Boris Karloff
Saturday, March 1, 12:30 p.m.
Sunday, March 2, 12:30 p.m.
Dir. Robert Wise. 1945, 78 mins. U.S. 35mm archival print from the Library of Congress. With Boris Karloff, Henry Daniell, Edith Atwater, Bela Lugosi, Russell Wade. Based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, this spare and chilling entry in Val Lewton’s hallowed 1940s run of B horror movies stars a brilliant Boris Karloff as a struggling cab driver in 19th-century Edinburgh who helps procure bodies from freshly dug graves for a local doctor. Soon enough, the bodies he delivers become a little too fresh. Lewton and director Robert Wise, of course, provide the eerie atmospherics on a budget, yet Karloff brings his customary richness of character to this tricky role, cutting through all the ghoulish murder and blackmail with humor and literate depth as it builds toward its truly macabre finale.
 
Don’t Look Now
Snubbed Forever: Donald Sutherland
Friday, March 7, 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 8, 5:30 p.m.
Dir. Nicolas Roeg. 1973, 110 mins. U.K. DCP. With Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania, Renato Scarpa. A red-hooded coat gains an ominous significance in Nicolas Roeg’s masterful thriller adapted from a haunting novella by Daphne du Maurier. Don’t Look Now follows married couple John and Laura Baxter (Sutherland and Christie) as they journey to Venice, where they try to come to terms with their daughter’s accidental death. In this decaying, labyrinthine city, John and Laura meet a pair of weird sisters who claim to have seen their dead child, sending the couple into a spiral of hope, fear, and, finally, unspeakable horror. Sutherland’s immensely moving, wholly naturalistic portrayal of grief, bound up with his character’s need to emotionally and romantically reconnect with his wife, provides the center of this supernatural classic, brilliantly directed by Roeg as an endless cascade of temporal and spatial disorientation that reflects its central couple’s experience.
 
The Lady from Shanghai
Snubbed Forever: Rita Hayworth
Saturday, March 8, 1:00 p.m.
Sunday, March 9, 1:00 p.m.
Dir. Orson Welles. 1947, 88 mins. U.S. DCP. With Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Everett Sloane. Fresh off her star-making turn in the smash hit Gilda, Rita Hayworth was cast in another quintessential noir of the forties, this one directed by none other than her then-husband Orson Welles. The larger-than-life writer-director plays the dupe, an Irish sailor who falls head over heels in confounded lust for Elsa (Hayworth), the enigmatic wife of a crooked lawyer (Everett Sloane), recently arrived in New York from Shanghai. When Michael is roped into a nefarious plot to enact a fake murder, he is drawn ever closer to danger. Hayworth, who commanded the screen as few stars could, is the haunting center of this ever-spiraling thriller, which climaxes in a hall-of-mirrors shootout that is one of the most visually complex scenes of the era.
 
Vertigo
Snubbed Forever: Kim Novak
Saturday, March 8, 3:00 p.m.
Sunday, March 9, 5:30 p.m.
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1958, 128 mins. U.S. DCP. With James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes. Voted the greatest film of all time in the 2012 Sight & Sound international critics poll, Hitchcock’s peerless psychological thriller follows a San Francisco private detective who comes out of retirement to trail an old schoolmate’s beautiful wife, who appears to be haunted by a figure from her ancestral past. Both an ingeniously plotted mystery and a profoundly disturbing tale of romantic obsession, Vertigo is an emotional experience like no other—an astonishment on the level of image, sound, and storytelling. Stewart’s rightfully acclaimed performance as a man who falls into spirals of psychosis is matched at every turn by Novak’s ethereal work as two different, yet equally tragic women:  the inscrutable Madeleine and the earthy Judy.