Oscars 2025 Voting Begins Today, and I’m Begging The Academy to Nominate ‘I Saw the TV Glow’

Today marks the first day of voting for the 2025 Oscars, which means now is the time to make last-minute appeals to the Academy to please, please, please, please nominate I Saw the TV Glow for Best Picture. Or Best Actor. Or Best Screenplay. Or Best Director. Just, something!

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, and released in May by A24, I Saw the TV Glow is a surreal, horror-adjacent drama about isolation, escapism, and gender. Justice Smith stars as Owen, a lonely ’90s kid who bonds with an older goth girl, Maddy (played by Brigette Lundy-Paine) over a fictional, monster-of-the-week TV show called The Pink Opaque. As the years pass, it becomes clear that Owen doesn’t feel like the man society tells him he must be. He represses this part of himself, until Maddy unexpectedly reenters his life and tells him that his life is an illusion, and The Pink Opaque is real. She’s offers Owen a chance to live his authentic life—but in order to do so, he has to kill the old version of himself.

The movie is a gut-wrenching metaphor for the trans experience—written and directed by a trans filmmaker—that’s been embraced by the trans and queer community. Hundreds replied to a prompt from Schoebrun on Twitter, sharing how the film helped them on their self-discovery journeys. An I Saw the TV Glow Oscar nomination would be the perfect way for the Academy to signal its support of the transgender community—and especially trans youth—after a brutal election campaign where they were used as a conservative scare tactic, and at a time when they face even more harassment and loss of rights under the incoming President Donald Trump.

Moreover, it’s simply a great movie. I Saw the TV Glow was praised by critics when it premiered at Sundance last January. The film has topped many a best-of-the-year lists, including snagging the No. 1 slots on lists by Vanity Fair, Consequence, and The Film Stage. (Decider voted the film as our No. 2 best film of 2024, and IndieWire, Roger Ebert.com, and Polygon all listed it in their top five.) Freakin’ Martin Scorsese told AP he loved the film, calling it “emotionally and psychologically powerful and very moving.” How many more endorsements do you need?

And yet despite timely messaging and critical acclaim, I Saw the TV Glow is, at best, a long shot for the Oscar 2025 nominations.

It doesn’t have to be this way. To quote one of the most moving parts of this unsettling, brilliant film: There is still time. Over the next five days, Academy members will be voting on the 97th Oscar nominations, to be announced next Friday, January 17. Two years ago, a grassroots social media campaign launched during Oscar voting week secured an underdog Oscar nomination for Andrea Riseborough, despite the fact that her film, To Leslie, had not previously been a serious candidate in the race.

Yes, Riseborough had the power of celebrity Instagram profiles from Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, and more on her side; and yes, the Academy said it would be cracking down on social media outreach in response. But there’s no rule (yet) against me, a lowly entertainment journalist, begging and pleading with the Academy to do what’s right! If To Leslie’s nomination proved anything, it’s that it ain’t til it’s over.

I Saw the TV Glow was snubbed by the recent Golden Globe Awards, but it does have some accolades to put in on the Academy’s radar, including Gotham Award nominations for Schoenbrun, Smith, and Lundy-Paine; and a whopping five nominations at the Independent Spirit Awards for Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Lead Performance, and Best Supporting Performance. If Smith and/or Lundy-Paine manage to earn nominations for the Screen Actors Guild Awards—which will be announced later today—that’s a strong indicator that the actors might have a shot at the Oscars. (Many SAG voters are also Academy voters.) Plus, two-time Oscar-winner Emma Stone is a producer on I Saw the TV Glow. Surely she has at least some pull!

The Academy has expanded and changed a lot in the last decade. It’s not the predictable, Oscar-bait-able monolith that it once was. Five years ago, Parasite, a Korean sci-fi thriller, won Best Picture. This year, The Substance—an R-rated body horror movie where a monster excretes a disembodied breast—is an Oscar front-runner. It’s not preposterous to hope that a weird, queer, little indie movie like I Saw the TV Glow might pull off a well-deserved Oscar an upset in the next week. I’m begging the Academy to make it happen. There is still time.