ScreenCrush Staff

More ‘Stranger Things’ and a new Russo brothers movie are coming.

The full list of nominees for the 2017 Academy Awards are out, and while there’s plenty to celebrate about this year’s batch of Oscars contenders, there are also plenty of surprises. And some of those surprises are of the not-so-good kind that involved leaving out our favorite movies or filmmakers of 2016. Below, the staff of ScreenCrush picked out the biggest Oscar snubs of 2017, along with a few of the most pleasant shockers from this year’s list of nominees. The winners of all the awards will be announced on Sunday February 26 at the 89th Academy Awards.

The 2017 Golden Globes winners will be announced during the ceremony hosted by Jimmy Fallon on Sunday, January 8 at 5 p.m. PST/8 p.m. EST on NBC.

Of all the celebrity deaths in 2016, Carrie Fisher’s might hurt the worst. At 60 years old, she was still a young woman; she should have had many great performances, books, and scripts ahead of her. And with her recent work in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it seemed like she was finally getting her due as an actor, after years spent in the spotlight as an author and activist.

There were a lot of great movies in 2016. There were! Please don’t let this list convince you otherwise. The movies were absolutely wonderful this year. Just not these specific movies. These were bad. So, so, so bad. Just awful.

You might know that National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation was written by John Hughes, the guy behind ’80s classics like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But did you know that before Hughes became a filmmaker he was a contributor to the National Lampoon magazine? In fact, he based his Christmas Vacation screenplay on one of his old Lampoon pieces, “Christmas ’59.” That’s just one of the cheerful facts featured in the newest episode of You Think You Know Movies!

Y’know those back to school ads for Staples? The ones that repurpose the Christmas standard “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” to celebrate children going back class? I always hated those ads as a kid. Going back to school was not a time to celebrate. It was a time for grief and mourning.

Be honest: When you clicked on the link to open this page, did you think for a second this article might just say “ALL OF THEM!”

Okay, so it was one of the worst summer movie seasons in recent memory. Trying to find the good blockbusters amongst the last four months releases sometimes felt like trying to find a needle in a stack of s---. But even this year there were diamonds in the rough. Today we’re celebrating the ten best, the summer movies of 2016 that didn’t make us weep for the future of cinema — and note that this list is just movies that got wide releases in at least 500 theaters. We’ll have a separate piece on under-the-radar summer films you might have missed next week on ScreenCrush. In the meantime, let’s celebrate the highlights from a depressing summer before we clear the decks and get ready for the fall.

We’ve already picked the best movies of 2016 so far. But with just nine titles across our two lists, that left out a lot of great performances and movies and surprises from the year that was (not to mention the worst movies and crushing disappointments). Before we start looking ahead to the rest of the year, let’s give out some awards for the stuff we loved (and hated) from January to June. It’ll be fun! Even if we don’t know what to call these things. (The Crushies? The Screeners?) Whatever they’re called, here they are: