It’s clear to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Oscars that winning an award is as much about campaigning as it is about being, you know, good. So while this year’s nominations might have only just been announced, you can bet that studios are already prepping their potential prize horses for next year’s ceremony.

This time last year, execs were hoping the following films would be in the conversation, but instead La La Land, Moonlight and Arrival have dominated. Bow your heads for the never-even-rans.

Photograph: Fox

While the Academy did find time to bring Mel Gibson back into the fold with a best director nod for the gruesome second world war epic Hacksaw Ridge, another comeback was well and truly denied. It’s not exactly a snub, though: Warren Beatty’s long-gestating Howard Hughes comedy was a bit of a washout, picking up a range of mostly uninterested reviews. Back to the drawing board for another 18 years, then.

Photograph: Daniel McFadden/Associated Press

In contrast with the other films on this list, there’s actually plenty to enjoy in this bitter tale of business and burgers. There’s refreshingly unsentimental career-best work from The Blind Side director John Lee Hancock, a ferocious lead turn from Michael Keaton and an unsparingly bleak look at how McDonald’s actually came to be. But awards have been absent despite the pedigree, and the Weinsteins pushing it, making it a shoulda-been rather than a coulda-been. It’s likely that a film about a hard-edged, amoral businessman mistreating others to craft a business empire isn’t the film people want to see right now ...

Photograph: Associated Press

Matthew McConaughey has been gradually making a worrying U-turn back towards mediocrity after a laughed-out-of-Cannes turn in Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees led to two failed Oscar-bait projects: the slavery drama Free State of Jones and this underwhelming caper. From Stephen Gaghan, whose two Oscar-touched screenplays for Traffic and Syriana were, well, quite a while ago, this aborted attempt to turn a hunt for gold into a Wolf of Wall Street-esque comedy had once attracted Michael Mann and Spike Lee. Both are probably glad they steered clear, with middling reviews helping to further sink the McConaissance.

Last year saw two fact-based films about interracial romance – the subdued yet powerful Loving and this less subdued but still rather stirring drama. Starring Rosamund Pike in her first major lead role since she scored an Oscar nomination for Gone Girl, and David Oyelowo, cruelly snubbed for Selma, it seemed like a done deal. But while reviews were mostly positive, they weren’t ecstatic, most agreeing that while effective, it was all a tad old-fashioned and the film has an awards unfriendly release date in the US next month. Loving didn’t fare much better, scoring just one well-deserved nod for its star Ruth Negga.

Photograph: Allstar/Sony

Ang Lee isn’t a director with a spotless record. If you were one of the few people who accidentally watched Taking Woodstock on cable late one night, then this you know to be true. But after Lee’s second Oscar, this time for Life of Pi, one would expect a great deal more than this awkward misfire, adapted from an award-winning book by Ben Fountain and given a prime slot in the New York film festival. Indeed, no one could have expected just quite how unsuccessful this war on terror drama would be. Hampered by pointless visual tinkering (it boasted a super-high frame rate) and bored reviews, it couldn’t even crack the $2m mark in the US despite a $40m budget. Keep walking, Billy, and don’t you stop.

Photograph: Courtesy Ev/REX/Shutterstock/Rex/Shutterstock

Due to the timing and the scale of the films being screened, Sundance isn’t seen as a typical launchpad for Oscar contenders. But after last year’s festival, it was seen as settled that Nate Parker’s slavery epic would be a major force at the 2017 Oscars. Reviews were mostly ecstatic as the festival coincided with another all-white set of Oscar nominees and Fox forked out a record $17.5m for the rights. But two things happened in the ensuing months: Parker’s college rape accusation came to light and, well outside of the festival frenzy, critics realized that it wasn’t even that good anyway. Parker’s epic fall from grace ended this week with zero Oscar nominations for his flawed film.

Photograph: Allstar/Archery Pictures

Remember when you couldn’t leave your house without a stranger forcing you at gunpoint to watch three Jessica Chastain films in a row while agreeing that each was deserving of Oscar buzz? Those days are, thankfully, over – and so it seems is the actor’s ability to garner quite as much attention. Seemingly out of nowhere she emerged with an Oscar nomination for The Help, a role in the Oscar-nominated The Tree of Life and an Oscar nomination for Zero Dark Thirty. Oscar! She also cropped up in the Oscar-nominated The Martian more recently. But a lead role in this horrendously misjudged gun lobby drama is an embarrassing awards plea that removes Chastain from the Oscar conversation entirely.

When Batman v Superman turned out to be even less coherent and even more odious than anyone thought possible, Ben Affleck fans consoled themselves with the knowledge that at least he would end 2016 back in everyone’s good books. His Prohibition-era thriller boasted a strong cast (Affleck himself, Zoe Saldana, Elle Fanning, Chris Cooper, Brendan Gleeson, ermmm ... Miguel) and even stronger source material (his prior Dennis Lehane adaptation was the excellent Gone Baby Gone) but he somehow managed to mess it all up with an alternately undercooked and overcooked mess. It became his worst-reviewed film as director by around 60 percentage points on Rotten Tomatoes. Next up: more Batmanning!