Luca Guadagnino is no stranger to critical acclaim - or Oscar snubs. In 2024, the Italian director delivered two strikingly different but equally lauded films: Challengers, a steamy, slow-burn tennis romance, and Queer, a moody adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novella. Both films were praised by critics, yet neither received a single Oscar nomination.

This isn’t shocking. Despite a filmography filled with bold, emotional, and visually stunning work, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has largely ignored him. Only Call Me By Your Name (2017) broke through, earning nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Original Song, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Still, the film won only one of those categories, for Best Adapted Screenplay.

On paper, Guadagnino’s work seems like classic Oscar bait - big emotions, grand romance, thorough explorations of desire and obsession. And yet, time and time again, the Academy looks the other way. Is it a timing issue? A bias against genre-fluid filmmaking? A discomfort with the kind of love Guadagnino explores, often messy and unsanitized?

Whatever the reason, Guadagnino’s latest snubs raise yet again the same question that has lingered over his career: Why does the Academy refuse to embrace one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today, despite his popularity with both critics and audiences? Let’s figure it out.

Challengers had all the makings of an awards contender - sleek, sexy, and meticulously crafted. Directed with Guadagnino’s visual flair, the film stars Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor in a simmering love triangle between three tennis prodigies. Critics raved, audiences were captivated, yet when Oscar season arrived, Challengers was nowhere to be found.

So what happened? Several factors worked against it.  First, its April release - historically a release date this early is a death sentence for Oscar hopefuls. Academy voters seem to have short memories, and without a late-year prestige push, a film can fade from the conversation. There was also the SAG-AFTRA strike, which meant Zendaya, the film’s biggest asset, couldn’t promote it. No late-night interviews, no magazine spreads, no publicity tour to keep the film in the spotlight. 

Beyond timing, Challengers was hard to categorize, genre-wise. It wasn’t just a sports movie or a romance - it blurred genre lines in a way that made it difficult to package as Oscar material. It also wasn’t a ‘serious’ film in the traditional prestige sense, instead reveling in its glossy, high-energy aesthetic, embracing excess rather than solemnity.

And then there’s the queer element. The Academy has long favored a certain type of queer story - one marked by repression, tragedy, or historical significance. Challengers doesn’t fit that mold. Its queerness is fluid and implicit, unspoken but undeniable, woven into the dynamics of competition and desire rather than presented as an explicit struggle. 

There’s no coming-out moment, no grand statement of identity, but rather a tangle of complex emotions and shifting power. That kind of attraction is a harder sell for awards bodies that still prefer their queer stories neat, noble, and easily categorized. Guadagnino, as always, refuses to sterilize desire, and the Academy, as always, doesn’t quite know what to do with that. Challengers didn’t beg for approval, and that, perhaps more than anything, made it an unlikely Oscar contender. 

Now, if Challengers was too playful for the Academy, Queer was too impenetrable. As a Burroughs adaptation, the film was niche from the start - literary, experimental, and deliberately alienating. Daniel Craig stars as a lonely, repressed expat drifting through 1950s Mexico, consumed by unrequited desire for a younger man. The film is sexually charged and unapologetically strange - qualities that rarely align with Oscar success. 

Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name thrived on soft, sentimental queerness: sun-drenched longing, a Sufjan Stevens ballad, a tearful monologue from the supportive father. Queer, on the other hand, is gritty, obsessive, and raw. There’s little actual romance, instead focusing on fixation. No catharsis, only isolation. As I mentioned, that kind of queerness - unresolved, uncomfortable, and explicitly sexual - has never been the Academy’s preference.

Craig earned some early Best Actor buzz, but Queer was never a serious Oscar contender, despite being a better film than about 80% of the actual nominees. The subject matter alone was a hard sell, and its unflinching approach to desire only pushed it further to the margins. Guadagnino didn’t soften the material to make it more awards-friendly, and, as a result, the Academy ignored it entirely. If Challengers was too fun, Queer was too bleak - both, in their own ways, unfit for Oscar gold in the eyes of the voters.

The Oscars favor films that fit neatly into their idea of prestige, and Guadagnino refuses to play by those rules. His latest snubs highlight a larger pattern: the Academy struggles with directors who refuse categorization. Guadagnino jumps from lush romance to brutal horror to erotic sports drama to surreal literary adaptation, never settling into a single awards-friendly identity.

Compare him to recent Oscar darlings like Christopher Nolan, whose reputation as the auteur behind intelligent blockbusters has made him an Academy favorite, or Yorgos Lanthimos, who’s carved out a space in the awards conversation with surreal, politically-charged films. Guadagnino, despite consistent critical acclaim, remains an outsider due to his lack of a clear directorial identity. His films are too fluid, unwilling to conform to the Academy’s rigid standards of what makes a film ‘worthy.’ 

Timing, genre, and subject matter all played a role in Challengers and Queer being overlooked, but the deeper issue is that Guadagnino’s vision rarely caters to Oscar sensibilities. He isn’t interested in compromise or crafting a film with awards in mind, and until the Academy expands its understanding of prestige - or stops punishing directors for refusing to brand themselves - Guadagnino will likely remain on the outside.

Not that he seems to mind. Guadagnino’s films don’t live and die by awards season - they linger, evolve, and find their audience over time. Call Me By Your Name became a generational touchstone, Suspiria went from divisive remake/homage to cult favorite, and Bones and All found its audience as a haunting romance. His work exists beyond the narrow window of Oscar buzz, aging better than many of the films that the Academy actually recognizes.

If anything, the Academy’s indifference only reinforces how ahead of the curve Guadagnino tends to be. They often lag behind in recognizing filmmakers who challenge convention. It took them years to acknowledge Todd Haynes, overlooking Safe before finally acknowledging him for Far from Heaven (even then with only one nomination). They snubbed David Lynch’s Blue Velvet for Best Picture and gave Martin Scorsese his first Oscar for The Departed - years after Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. Maybe ten years from now, they’ll finally catch up to Guadagnino. 

Guadagnino may be snubbed again, but his impact is undeniable. The Oscars are a snapshot of the industry’s taste at a given moment, often favoring the safe over the bold, but cinema history isn’t written by awards alone. Guadagnino’s films will last long after this year’s winners are announced.

Oscar hype is temporary; great art endures. The Academy may not know what to do with a director who refuses to fit into their idea of prestige, but audiences and critics en masse recognize his vision. His work provokes and lingers in ways that go far beyond the lifespan of an awards campaign.

Years from now, I believe that Challengers and Queer will be reassessed, their brilliance more widely acknowledged by the industry. Guadagnino himself seems unconcerned with chasing validation, continuing to make the films he wants on his own terms. Whether or not the Academy ever catches up, his legacy is secure. He doesn’t need a golden statuette to prove that.

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