Wicked: For Good seemingly had all the makings of an Oscar darling film — yet found itself completely left out of the nominations list.
The annual Oscar nominations in late January always come with a handful of surprises. This year, there were plenty. Hamnet’s Paul Mescal was pushed out of the Supporting Actor quintet by Delroy Lindo in Sinners, despite the former nabbing every precursor nomination and the latter making none. In a similar turn of events, newcomer Chase Infiniti from One Battle After Another lost her spot in the Leading Actress category to Kate Hudson in Song Sung Blue (a snub I actually correctly predicted…not to toot my own horn).
Beyond the acting categories, shocks and snubs ran through the ballot. The Brad Pitt-led F1 managed to snag a spot in the Best Picture race, Sinners scored a record-breaking 16 nominations, and “Sweet Dreams of Joy” from Viva Verdi! scored a Best Original Song nod. Not a bad year for those who love award season chaos as I do.
But by far the biggest surprise of Oscar nomination morning wasn’t necessarily who got in, but rather who didn’t. Even the most experienced Oscar predictors wouldn’t have expected Wicked: For Good to be shut out cold. Yet it was.
Wicked: For Good is the follow-up to 2024’s Wicked, adapted from the stage musical of the same name, originally based on a novel inspired by the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Clearly, Dorothy and her slippers are quite the creative catalyst.
Wicked covered the first act of the musical, while Wicked: For Good picks up during the second act, where the story gets darker and should have, hypothetically, been even richer material for Oscar voters to sink their teeth into. Seeing as Wicked scored 10 nominations and brought home two statuettes, Wicked: For Good should have had no problem collecting at least a few recognitions. Instead, it completely blanked. Zero nominations.
So why did the anticipated follow-up to an Oscar-darling first film faceplant so badly?
Sometimes, the most obvious answer turns out to be the right one. Wicked: For Good just wasn’t…well, good. As a neutral Wicked observer, I loved the first film and went into the second with high expectations, only to be sorely disappointed. The songs are entirely forgettable, including the two new ones that were so head-scratchingly boring I couldn’t even understand why they had been included. Everything that was great about the first film went downhill, and its already-prevalent weaknesses just became more pronounced.
The widely panned lighting and cinematography of Wicked were doubled down on in the sequel, resulting in soulless and dull shots that paradoxically make the practical effects and sets look entirely CGI. If you’re going to spend so much effort on your sets and costumes, at least make sure the lighting lets us appreciate them. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande try their best with Elphaba and Glinda, but commitment can’t save a script this over the top. There were line readings where I was genuinely cringing — dialogue so clunky that it completely undercuts moments meant to feel emotionally cathartic.
Anyone who’s seen Wicked on stage knows that the second act of the musical is notoriously the show’s Achilles’ heel. Where the first act soars, the second act crashes and burns. This became apparent during Wicked’s original Tony Awards ceremony, where it lost Best Musical to Avenue Q, largely based on the failure of the second act to stick the landing. As someone who has seen the musical multiple times, the decision to turn such an unevenly structured show into two separate films was always baffling.
The second film was always bound to struggle, unless certain creative liberties were taken to revive the plot. But Wicked: For Good put zero effort into fixing any of the issues with its source material. Instead, with its drawn-out runtime, poor pacing, and incompetent directing, the film was even more frustrating than the musical.
The Academy Awards seem to agree with me. Immediately after For Good was released, Oscar pundits knew it would not reach the heights of its predecessor, but there was still hope. Picture, maybe. Actress, perhaps. Supporting Actress? Original Song? Production Design and Costumes (the two awards the original film took home)? Definitely.
As the award season progressed, the likelihood of some of these awards dwindled. The film failed to show up in the Best Musical category at the Golden Globes, and while Ariana Grande made it at precursors by the skin of her teeth for Supporting Actress, Erivo’s chances in Lead were shot after an early miss at the Critics’ Choice Awards. But a complete shut-out was never expected.
Of course, the Academy’s decisions never rely solely on the quality of films. Every year, some of the best films are shut out, while some egregious choices slide through. Never forget this is the organization that awarded 2005’s Crash Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain. So there are other factors at play besides how good a film is.
For one, sequels are a tough pill for Oscar voters to swallow. The number of sequels succeeding at the Awards is actually quite slim. Only two direct sequels have ever won Best Picture — The Godfather: Part 2 in 1974, and Return of the King in 2001. Not too many have been nominated, either. The consensus seems to be that, in order for a sequel to break through during award season, it has to be just as good if not better than its predecessor. Wicked: For Good, by all metrics, was not. Even in terms of its box office pull, For Good grossed around $250 million less than Wicked.
Similarly, where For Good differs from other sequels is that it was actually filmed concurrently with Wicked. Meaning, production began with the intention of there being one film, and it was split into two as production progressed. This is an interesting situation: essentially, every element of the sequel is a continuation of the first one. As a result, Wicked: For Good never feels like its own artistic vision. The costumes are the same, the sets are the same. Even the acting performances are kind of the same. Rather than providing something new to the voters, For Good reads as a prolonged back half of a movie voters already heftily rewarded. Is it worth, then, handing out more nominations that are intended to celebrate creative distinction? Wicked: For Good failed to prove why it deserved recognition beyond what its first half got, and the Academy responded in turn.
I think there’s a lesson buried beneath Wicked: For Good’s faceplant that Hollywood needs, which is that audiences grow tired of greed. Dramatic, maybe. But there was no reason for Wicked to be split into two films, especially if it meant the quality disparity would be so jarring that the Academy couldn’t muster up a single nomination for its middling second. What could have been a perfect, concise adaptation was stretched into a nearly four-hour total runtime that did not prove itself in the slightest beyond inflating its box office. By no means is the Academy the harbinger of taste, but its complete rejection of For Good reflects a growing intolerance of confusing spectacle for artistry. Hopefully, filmmakers learn from Wicked’s fumble before sending another beloved IP on the same ill-fated path.