2025 Oscars: Best Original Screenplay 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
Breaking down the odds a film gets a Best Original Screenplay nomination, the first thing to note is that the Oscar usually goes to a film written or co-written by the director. The last film to win this category without the director having a writing credit is “The King’s Speech” over a decade ago. If one were to guess why this is, a good answer would be that with Best Picture expanding to 10 categories, the door opened to voters being invested in even more filmmakers’ successes, resulting in many deciding to vote one person for Best Director and a different person for each screenplay Oscar. That idea of spreading the wealth is also how winners have become increasingly diverse. For both Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay, the majority of the winners from the last five years are a woman or person of color.
The reason to bring this all up is that one of the bigger stories about this awards season is that there are almost no women directors with a fighting chance of a Best Director nomination. The closest may be “All We Imagine as Light” director Payal Kapadia, given how the film won the Grand Prix at Cannes over other award season contenders like “Emilia Pérez” and “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” but that film’s awards chances took a real hit by not being submitted by India for Best International Feature.
With the screenplay categories being split, cutting down on the number of acclaimed directors from this year they may be competing against, Best Original Screenplay now looks like the category where a female director has the best shot at being nominated. Coralie Fargeat is another example, with her film “The Substance” actually winning the Best Screenplay award at Cannes — but the gleefully gruesome body horror is keeping some voters from even giving the film a chance, so she may have just as hard a time.
What either Kapadia or Fargeat or any female director would need to receive more awards recognition would be for their film to feel like a lock for a nomination in a bigger category. Enter “Babygirl,” which earned star Nicole Kidman the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at Venice this year. That award has increasingly been predictive of the Best Actress race, with four of the last five winners receiving an Oscar nomination. Given Kidman’s stature, this year’s film landscape, and the reaction “Babygirl” has been receiving, it is hard not to see the Australian performer as a frontrunner in that category, meaning voters will definitely watch the erotic thriller to form their own opinions on it.
And by watching Kidman’s bold performance, they will be soaking in director Halina Reijn’s engaging screenplay that already has generated memorable moments just based on the film’s trailer alone. This would probably not be the case if the film did not have much commercial appeal, but there really is a pathway for Reijn to likely be the sole female filmmaker representation among the above the line categories.
That said, just because a man wrote it does not mean plenty of women within the Academy won’t champion Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner “Anora,” or the critically acclaimed “Hard Truths” from beloved British filmmaker Mike Leigh. Both films also have lead performances that are heavily in the running for Best Actress. It is also worth noting that despite “The Brutalist” garnering a bit of a (probably unwarranted) film bro-y reputation akin to “Oppenheimer,” the A24 release is co-written by director Brady Corbet’s spouse Mona Fastvold, who also co-wrote his other two features, so there will very likely be a least one woman nominated in this category.
Last but not least is “A Real Pain” from Oscar-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg, which is finding a second wind after it premiered at Sundance and won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Again, it being one of the frontrunners for Best Supporting Actor for star Kieran Culkin is an indicator it will be seen by enough voters to secure a nomination here.
Potential nominees are listed in alphabetical order; no film will be deemed a frontrunner until we have seen it.
Frontrunners:
Sean Baker (“Anora”)
Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold (“The Brutalist”)
Jesse Eisenberg (“A Real Pain”)
Mike Leigh (“Hard Truths”)
Halina Reijn (“Babygirl”)
Contenders:
Moritz Binder, Alex David, and Tim Fehlbaum (“September 5”)
Coralie Fargeat (“The Substance”)
Azazel Jacobs (“His Three Daughters”)
Payal Kapadia (“All We Imagine as Light”)
Steven Knight (“Maria”)
Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman (“Saturday Night”)
Justin Kuritzkes (“Challengers”)
Josh Margolin (“Thelma”)
Steve McQueen (“Blitz”)
Mohammad Rasoulof (“The Seed of the Sacred Fig”)
Long Shots:
Jonathan A. Abrams (“Juror #2”)
Andrea Arnold (“Bird”)
Efthimis Filippou and Yorgos Lanthimos (“Kinds of Kindness”)
Alex Garland (“Civil War”)
Rasmus Heisterberg and Joshua Oppenheimer (“The End”)
Nick Payne (“We Live in Time”)
Aaron Schimberg (“A Different Man”)
Jane Schoenbrun (“I Saw the TV Glow”)
Gabriel Sherman (“The Apprentice”)
Sean Wang (“Dìdi”)
