2025 Oscars: Best Director Predictions
Marcus Jones
Nominations voting is from January 8-12, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 17, 2025. Final voting is February 11-18, 2025. And finally, the 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2 and air live on ABC at 7:00 p.m. ET/ 4:00 p.m. PT. We update our picks through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions.
The State of the Race
If there is one major Oscar race that has changed the most due to the Academy’s push to become more globally-minded, it is the Best Director race. Recent surprise nominees, from “Anatomy of a Fall” filmmaker Justine Triet last year to “Triangle of Sadness” director Ruben Östlund and “Drive My Car” director Ryusuke Hamaguchi the years prior, have often been directors that appealed more to the tastes of international voters.
Fast forward to now, and that sort of Cannes crowd really is leading the conversation around which filmmakers are likely to receive Oscar nominations. Though Sean Baker is an American director, his latest film “Anora” was the first American film to win the Palme d’Or since Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” in 2011. And not too far behind him was Jury Prize winner “Emilia Pérez” from French auteur Jacques Audiard, which was just chosen as France’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar. Both films found a second wind at the fall festivals, with the two nearly winning the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The actual winner of that award, “The Life of Chuck,” did so without being backed by a distributor, so any awards prospects for it, including a Best Director bid for Mike Flanagan, may be too last minute to find any legs. After all, the film only got slightly positive reviews.
Compare that to “The Brutalist,” which had glowing reviews, and then was acquired by A24 pretty immediately after director Brady Corbet won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and one can see the difference securing a distributor quickly makes. Should the studio decide to release “The Brutalist” this year, Corbet seems like a lock for this category specifically, given the Directors Branch’s taste, but it’s notable that the film keeps getting compared to America epic “There Will Be Blood,” which neither won Best Picture nor Best Director for Paul Thomas Anderson.
Again, if Audiard does not fulfill the international quotient of the category, two other filmmakers likely to be propelled by that preference are German director Edward Berger, whose “All Quiet on the Western Front” follow-up “Conclave” has the makeup of a prestige thriller with broad appeal, and Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who not only put out two films this year, but did so in a way that shows the breadth of his skillset, similar to when Steven Soderbergh won Best Director for “Traffic” the same year he was nominated for “Erin Brockovich.”
That was also the year “Gladiator” won Best Picture, yet director Ridley Scott lost Best Director. Of the older celebrated filmmakers making an Oscar bid this year, the British director seems most primed to get that possible legacy slot like Scorsese and Spielberg in recent years, but that’s if “Gladiator II” is any good.
Controversy has already seemed to sink Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” which had mixed reviews out of Cannes. Meanwhile, Pedro Almodóvar won the Golden Lion at Venice for “The Room Next Door,” and Mike Leigh is receiving great reviews for his new film “Hard Truths,” though those films are a bit more intimate than what usually receives the nomination here.
Potential nominees are listed in alphabetical order; no film will be deemed a frontrunner until we have seen it.
Frontrunners:
Jacques Audiard, “Emilia Pérez”
Sean Baker, “Anora”
Edward Berger, “Conclave”
Brady Corbet, “The Brutalist”
Luca Guadagnino, “Challengers”
Contenders:
Pedro Almodóvar, “The Room Next Door”
Payal Kapadia, “All We Imagine As Light”
Pablo Larraín, “Maria”
Mike Leigh, “Hard Truths”
Steve McQueen, “Blitz”
Mohammad Rasoulof, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”
Jason Reitman, “Saturday Night”
RaMell Ross, “Nickel Boys”
Ridley Scott, “Gladiator II”
Denis Villenueve, “Dune: Part Two”
Long Shots:
Francis Ford Coppola, “Megalopolis”
Robert Eggers, “Nosferatu”
Coralie Fargeat, “The Substance”
Tim Fehlbaum, “September 5”
Mike Flanagan, “The Life of Chuck”
Luca Guadagnino, “Queer”
Marielle Heller, “Nightbitch”
Greg Kwedar, “Sing Sing”
Todd Phillips, “Joker: Folie à Deux”
Malcolm Washington, “The Piano Lesson”
