Nominated for Nothing: The Academy should've said 'yes' to Nope

They're destined to score zero Academy Awards, but they won our attention throughout a year (and awards season) like no other. Ahead of the 95th Oscars ceremony on March 12, EW is breaking down the year's best movies, performances, and directorial achievements that were nominated for nothing.

The film: Not the easiest film to wrap your head around, Nope is the third directorial effort by Jordan Peele, following Get Out and Us. But while those two films have relatively straightforward premises, Nope is a more complicated mash-up of multiple genres that aren't often combined. It's a Western (set in the California desert, it's got plenty of beautiful mountain vistas and lots of badass horseback riding) but also sci-fi (the main characters are all haunted by the same UFO), horror (not as explicit as Peele's previous two films, Nope still boasts some of 2022's scariest scenes), and meta-commentary about movies (the driving goal of the plot is not so much about defeating the UFO as it is capturing a unique, beautiful image of it).

Confused yet? Don't worry. As Nope unfolds, it makes clear that those various strains of influence have a lot more in common than you might have assumed. It helps that the cast is top-tier. Nope reunites Peele with Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya as Otis "O.J." Haywood, and it's obvious that the director knows exactly how to use his star's best attributes (especially his eyes) in a role that was written for him. Opposite Kaluuya is Keke Palmer, finally in a part worthy of her dynamite charisma as O.J.'s sister Emerald "Em" Haywood. With their father (Keith David) recently dead from a strange accident, O.J. and Em are trying to maintain the family business of handling horses for Hollywood productions. Facing hard times, the Haywood siblings sell some of their horses to former child star Ricky "Jupe" Park (Steven Yeun) for use in his Western-flavored theme park, but when unusual occurrences seem to imply a connection to their father's death, they set out to investigate and discover a horrifying truth: The UFO isn't an alien spaceship, it is the alien itself…and it's hungry.

Universal Pictures Daniel Kaluuya in 'Nope'

All of the main actors give arresting performances worthy of Oscars recognition, and some even have Academy pedigree: Kaluuya won Best Supporting Actor in 2021 for Judas and the Black Messiah, the same year Yeun was nominated for Best Actor for Minari. In some ways, Kaluuya's work in Nope feels similar to Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in that it is the kind of performance that an actor can only give after winning an Oscar: Free of that anxiety, they now have the confidence to maximize their unique skills and dig into meaty roles. The simultaneously beautiful and horrifying design of the alien definitely should've snagged a visual-effects nomination, Hoyte van Hoytema should've been nominated for Best Cinematography for that near-final shot of Kaluuya on horseback alone, and Peele deserved a second Best Director nod for bringing it all together.

Why it wasn't nominated: The Oscars showed a lot of love to Get Out — giving the film four total nominations, with Peele winning for Best Adapted Screenplay — but since Us was also nominated for nothing, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the Academy feels like they've already given Peele his due (Kaluuya, too). That is strange since Peele has only upped his artistic game with each film. As the director told EW last summer as part of our Nope roundtable discussion, all of his films are aspirational: "I need to start with something that I'm not supposed to do, something I don't know if I can do yet." Nope in particular is full of thematic and aesthetic complexity, which may be part of why Academy voters couldn't understand it. The film also takes more than one viewing to fully appreciate. To name one example, Yeun's monologue about a fictional '90s Saturday Night Live sketch depicting the bloody massacre that ended his acting career only feels properly horrific once you've seen the flashback later on in the film.

Last year was a big one for movies about movies, but while the Academy amply rewarded Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans and gave a few nods to Damien Chazelle's Babylon, it had no time for Nope — perhaps because Peele's take on Hollywood history is not especially valedictory. Babylon may open with an elephant defecating on camera, but that's not nearly as cutting a satire as the Nope alien itself, which seems to mirror the American film industry in the way it hungrily gobbles up content only to later spew out the refuse it can't digest. As descendants of the Black jockey captured on film in the first "motion picture" by Eadweard Muybridge, the Haywood family are heirs to a history Hollywood usually prefers to ignore. And in such a victory-lap year for Spielberg, Peele's distortion of the iconic "Spielberg face" — turning it from a gaze of awe and wonder into one of abject terror from people about to be eaten — may have been too much for Oscar voters.

Glen Wilson/Universal Pictures Jordan Peele on the set of 'Nope.'

Why history will remember it better than the Academy did: Peele is clearly a director who matters. Even more impressive than its Oscars recognition, Get Out was recently named one of the 100 greatest films of all time by Sight & Sound magazine's once-a-decade international poll of critics and cinephiles. Given that kind of recognition, all of his works will be worthy of consideration, and since Nope only grows with every viewing, it will continue to be of interest to film fans.

Nope is in conversation with many strains of current culture (including conspiracy thinking, changing media ecosystems, animal rights, and an increasing awareness of the violence underlying entertainment), and can therefore serve as both inspiration to future artists and useful evidence for future historians. Oscar voters may not have appreciated the film's many nods to classic anime like Akira (toward the end, Palmer slides her motorcycle across the screen just like Kaneda) and Neon Genesis Evangelion (whose "angels" resemble the alien's true form), but future generations certainly will. Less than a year since Nope's release, another Black American filmmaker has released a new blockbuster full of similar anime references. Sometimes a work of art is so plugged into the direction of current culture that it takes a while for judgmental bodies like the Academy to notice. Such seems to be the fate of Nope.

EW's countdown to the 2023 Oscars has everything you're looking for, from our expert predictions and in-depth Awardist interviews with this year's nominees to nostalgia and our takes on the movies and actors we wish had gotten more Oscars love. You can check it all out at The Awardist.

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• Nope review: Space is the place in Jordan Peele's subversive sci-fi update