Why the Oscars Ignored Challengers

There is perhaps no greater gap between the tastes of Academy voters and the tastes of my own cohort than the disparate reactions to Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. Among my friends both in the corporeal world and on the internet, Challengers is regarded as a modern classic and a clear choice for one of the ten best films of the year. Among the Academy, it … isn’t. When last week’s Oscar nominations had been read, the tennis romance received nary a mention. None of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s thumping beats in Best Score. No “Compress/Repress” in Best Original Song. No Justin Kuritzkes matching his wife Celine Song’s nomination in Best Original Screenplay, creating a tense marital atmosphere that can only be relieved by the reappearance of an enigmatic man from their past. And, of course, after all that, no Best Picture nomination, either.

Among those who don’t follow the Oscars professionally, this has caused no small amount of confusion. How could the Academy overlook a film like Challengers? Let me try to explain. In the world of awards, there’s a move I call the “prestige pivot,” by which a commercially inclined film convinces voters it deserves to be recognized for its art, too. Think of the way Jon M. Chu, Cynthia Erivo, and Ariana Grande honed the message that Wicked was not just a remarkably successful capitalization of Broadway IP but a tribute to radical joy. Lithe-limbed the tennis stars of Challengers might have been, but this was one move they couldn’t pull off.

A caveat: A frothy melodrama like Challengers was always going to have a tougher hill to climb than, say, Everything Everywhere All at Once, which underneath its comic mania hid an Academy-friendly tale of a family coming together. But the film’s bid was also hamstrung by an accident of timing. Challengers was originally set to premiere at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, which would have given the film a jolt of Euro flair that often scans as classy and prestige-y. However, the SAG-AFTRA strike upended that plan. With no Zendaya on hand to offer promotional support, MGM delayed Challengers until the following spring. After the strike wrapped up, the film eschewed a festival run and opened wide in April, nine months before the eventual Oscar nominations. On the internet, Challengers was a cultural sensation. In theaters, it grossed $50 million domestically — a mild success for an original drama, but far from the blockbuster totals that can propel films into the Oscar race all by themselves.

Once fall began, it was time for the pivot. Now, there are many ways an early-season release can reintroduce itself to voters, but almost all of them require appearances from the talent. You can fly your lead actress to Toronto to receive the TIFF Share Her Journey Award, the way EEAAO’s Michelle Yeoh did back in 2022. You can tour the smaller regional festivals and gladhand on a more intimate level, like Sing Sing’s Colman Domingo did. Or you could schedule a series of star-studded guild screenings, the way Dune: Part Two did, bringing Timothée Chalamet, Austin Butler, and Zendaya herself back out on the trail in September.

To be clear, Challengers did a bit of this campaigning, too. In November, Zendaya hosted a Dune/Challengers double feature in Los Angeles. But her partner that night was Denis Villeneuve, not Guadagnino, which speaks to a unique hurdle faced by the tennis drama: Its principal players were all juggling multiple projects. Besides Zendaya double-dipping with Dune, Challengers was in the uncomfortable position of competing with Guadagnino’s other film, Queer, a more personal project that the director himself seemed to prefer. Many of Guadagnino’s collaborators worked on both films — including Kuritzkes, Reznor and Ross, and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom — so their focus was equally split. Had both movies come from the same studio, perhaps some sort of timeshare could have worked out, but Challengers was released by MGM while Queer was A24. (The awards-PR film that handles MGM’s campaigns occasionally works on A24 movies as well, though as far as I can tell, its only such overlap this year was We Live in Time.)

When it came to Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, Challengers was a victim of its own success. The film made in-demand leading men out of Faist and O’Connor, which, as the Ankler’s Katey Rich reported in October, meant that the pair were busy filming for much of the season: Faist in New Zealand for Zoe Kazan’s East of Eden, O’Connor in Ohio on Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind. For relatively new faces, physical presence on the trail is paramount; compare them to A Complete Unknown’s Monica Barbaro, who was absolutely everywhere in the season’s home stretch and earned an Oscar nomination for her trouble. But that’s another benefit of your movie coming out at the end of the year: The premiere press tour is the same as the awards press tour.

Of course, even if Challengers had pushed its release date to May, played in competition at Cannes, and brought back the Concorde to enable Mike Faist to attend the Hamptons, Middleburg, and Mill Valley film festivals, that still may not have been enough. I know this because another film did everything right this season and still wound up with the same number of Oscar nominations as Challengers — Babygirl. The erotic drama debuted at Venice, where star Nicole Kidman took home the Volpi Cup. It released at Christmas on the back of Kidman’s Best Actress award from the National Board of Review and nomination by the Golden Globes. It even inspired a similar, if smaller, sexually tinged social-media hubbub. (A month in, it has grossed roughly half of what Challengers did.) And yet Babygirl blanked all the same.

After Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture, and The Substance pulled in major nominations, our mental notion of an “Oscar movie” has had to shift. But despite their newfound willingness to embrace the gross, the wacky, and the weird, Academy voters still gravitate to their favorite themes. They will vote for a butt-plug wuxia fight if it climaxes with a family group hug. They will sit through a gut-churning body-horror set piece if they believe it empowers middle-aged actresses. They will even tolerate a sex-forward film like Anora as long as it happens to have won the Palme d’Or. But a film that’s primarily selling eroticism, packed with club beats and the occasionally homoerotic visual gag? For an ostensibly liberal body whose tastes run conservative, that may still be too big of a challenge.

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