The Grammy Awards have never been a simple meritocracy. For nearly seven decades, music’s most famous night has managed to simultaneously crown the obvious and overlook the essential, reward the bold and ignore the transformative. That contradiction is baked into the show’s DNA, and the 67th annual ceremony in February 2025 was a masterclass in it.
The 2025 Grammys landed at a charged cultural moment – Los Angeles was still recovering from devastating wildfires, and the telecast was reshaped as a fundraiser for the affected community. Against that backdrop, the Recording Academy handed out gold gramophones in ways that will be debated, praised, and replayed for years. Here are seven ways the Grammys got it spectacularly wrong, and then turned around and got it spectacularly right.
Wrong: Beyoncé’s Long Wait Was Far Too Long
Beyoncé had been nominated for Album of the Year six times but had yet to win until 2025. That’s a striking figure for an artist widely considered one of the most influential performers of her generation. Albums like Lemonade and Renaissance, projects that fundamentally shifted cultural conversations, came and went from the ceremony without the top prize.
The first time she was up for the award was in 2010 for “I Am… Sasha Fierce,” losing to Taylor Swift’s “Fearless.” She later lost to Beck’s “Morning Phase” in 2015, to Adele’s “25” in 2017, and to Harry Styles in 2023. The pattern became so consistent it turned into a running cultural wound, one that Jay-Z addressed publicly and fans debated endlessly. The Academy let it go on far longer than it ever should have.
Right: Beyoncé Finally Won Album of the Year With Cowboy Carter
In winning Album of the Year with “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé became the first Black woman to win the top prize in the 21st century. The last was Lauryn Hill with “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” 26 years prior. Watching her walk to the stage with her daughter Blue Ivy, visibly stunned, was the kind of moment that doesn’t happen often enough at award shows. It felt earned in a way that went beyond a single album cycle.
Beyoncé also made history at the 2025 Grammys by becoming the first Black woman in the history of the show to take home the award for Best Country Album. The album’s lead single, “Texas Hold ‘Em,” became the first country song by a Black woman to top both the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs charts. The Grammys, for once, recognized an album that was not just commercially successful but genuinely important.
Wrong: Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift Were Both Shut Out Completely
Eilish, a seven-time nominee and a favorite for both Song and Record of the Year, went home empty-handed just years after she swept the big four categories at the 2020 Grammys. Her performance on the night drew real appreciation from the audience, but appreciation and recognition are not the same thing at the Grammys. Watching the camera cut to her after each announcement became its own uncomfortable subplot.
Taylor Swift, nominated for six awards and losing all six, spent the entire night dancing to other artists’ performances. Her graciousness aside, the shutout was jarring. Billie Eilish also came up empty for seven nominations, and Taylor Swift and her producer Jack Antonoff were both zero for six. Two of the biggest pop forces of the modern era walked out of the same night with nothing. That’s a hard outcome to square regardless of how deserving the actual winners were.
Right: Kendrick Lamar’s Historic Five-Grammy Sweep
Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” made Grammy history in February 2025 by sweeping all five major nominations at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. The wins covered Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Rap Performance, Best Rap Song, and Best Music Video. For the first time ever, a track specifically designed as a diss record was recognized at the highest levels of the music industry.
It marked the first time a rapper had won both Song of the Year and Record of the Year since Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” in 2019. A beaming Kendrick Lamar ascended the stage to collect his trophy for “Not Like Us,” the blistering diss track that topped the charts and became an unofficial anthem for L.A., and dedicated the win to the city itself. It was, by almost any measure, one of the most singular nights in Grammy rap history.
Wrong: Post Malone’s Complete Shutout Despite Eight Nominations
Post Malone lost the most awards on Sunday, winning none of the eight categories he was nominated in. Going zero for eight is a brutal outcome by any metric, and it drew significant discussion in the days that followed. His album “F-1 Trillion” had genuine commercial reach, and his crossover work with country artists throughout 2024 demonstrated real versatility.
Post Malone had seven nominations, but his only Big Four nominations were for “Fortnight,” his collaboration with Swift, up for Record and Song of the Year. His album “F-1 Trillion” was passed over for an Album of the Year nod entirely. The Grammys have a habit of nominating artists broadly and then rewarding them nowhere, which ends up feeling more like a backhanded gesture than an honor. Post Malone in 2025 was a textbook example.
Right: Chappell Roan Winning Best New Artist
Roan took Best New Artist, while Sabrina Carpenter won a pair of awards for Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Pop Solo Performance. Roan’s win felt genuinely proportionate to the cultural footprint she built throughout 2024. She went from relative obscurity to headlining festivals and landing everywhere on the cultural landscape within a single year, and the Grammy reflected that trajectory honestly.
She used her acceptance speech to call directly on major labels and the music industry to offer a living wage and healthcare, especially to developing artists, and described getting signed as a minor, getting dropped, and entering the workforce during COVID-19 with no work experience and no health coverage, asking labels to treat artists like “valuable employees.” It was one of the more substantive acceptance speeches the ceremony had seen in years, and it matched the energy of an artist who had earned the room’s attention the hard way.
Wrong: The Weeknd Snubbed Again After Making Peace With the Show
When The Weeknd dropped “After Hours” in March 2020, the album sold 444,000 units in its first week, spawned three number one Billboard hits, and was considered by some to be his best project to date. The awards show didn’t give it a single nomination. That snub triggered years of public tension between Abel Tesfaye and the Recording Academy, including a multi-year boycott.
In 2025, The Weeknd publicly reunited with the show, ending his boycott and making a surprise appearance to perform. However, he was once again snubbed at the 2026 Grammys when his album “Hurry Up Tomorrow” didn’t receive any nominations. Despite debuting with nearly 500,000 first-week units and closing out the After Hours trilogy to widespread acclaim, the Recording Academy repeated the same mistake with the same artist after pretending they’d learned from the last one. Whatever the internal logic of the voting body, the optics were damaging.
Right: Sierra Ferrell’s Surprising Four-Grammy Night
Sierra Ferrell received the second-highest number of awards of the night, with four. The roots community had taken to Ferrell like nobody who’d come along in years, which made it not a total surprise given the support from lovers of folk, Americana, and country. Still, in a night dominated by mainstream pop heavyweights, four wins for a string-band singer from the roots world was genuinely unexpected and quietly wonderful.
To realize that the number of wins she got was higher than anyone’s except the five collected by Lamar was still a happy shock for those who had been paying attention to her work. The Grammys, for all their frustrating patterns, occasionally surface an artist whose recognition signals that a broader swath of the music world still matters to the voters. Ferrell’s night was one of those instances. It was the kind of outcome that reminds you why the show, despite everything, still draws nearly 15 million viewers in a single evening.
