2025 Oscars: Best Picture 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
With the first round of fall film festivals coming to an end, the reality is settling in that 2024 just has not been the best year in film so far. Although Mike Flanagan’s “The Life of Chuck” was the eventual winner of the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival, an honor that has been one of the best indicators of what films will receive a Best Picture nomination, the two runner-ups were Cannes winners “Anora” and “Emilia Pérez,” now making them as solid a two Best Picture contenders as there could be (very rarely do titles that had already premiered earlier in the year place well at TIFF awards).
Of course, last year’s People’s Choice Award winner “American Fiction” was similarly not on Oscar prognosticators’ radars until after it premiered at TIFF, but the big difference was that that film already had distribution. Flanagan already has ties to Netflix and Warner Bros. Pictures, so there is a good shot of the film being able to find a studio to put it out by the end of the year so that it can take a stab at winning film awards. It would be better to premiere “The Life of Chuck” in what is already known to be a weaker year than risk it losing momentum in the interim between now and next fall, but whatever home it finds will have to scramble to prioritize it as one of its top contenders.
The other big fall festival winner was Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” which was given the Golden Lion by the Venice Film Festival jury led by actress Isabelle Huppert. However, the win for the Sony Pictures Classics release read to many onlookers as an opportunity to honor the Spanish auteur for the breadth of his work (this being his first English language feature,) and that the real revelation was “The Brutalist,” which earned director Brady Corbet the Silver Lion.
That latter film was picked up by A24, which already has a major Best Picture contender in the TIFF and SXSW breakout “Sing Sing,” starring recent Best Actor nominee Colman Domingo. The studio has yet to announce whether Corbet’s epic will be released in time for awards consideration.
The world premieres at Telluride were more successful in being pegged as more obvious Oscar contenders. RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys,” an Amazon MGM Studios title, is a favorite among many critics, but its choice to tell the story quite literally through the eyes of the two leads is already divisive. Meanwhile, “Conclave” from Focus Features only got knocked for being a bit sillier than what was expected of a drama set in the Vatican, but it has proven to be a total crowdpleaser.
“Saturday Night” and “September 5” are also two interesting players in the race, both from big studios that have had shakier luck receiving Best Picture nominations in recent years. Though they both tell a near real time story of a pivotal day of television production, the former leans more toward the side of anxious comedy, while the latter focuses on a harrowing subject that brings to question journalism ethics, which is akin to past nominees like “Spotlight” or “The Post.”
Ultimately, it is looking like some of the releases from earlier in the year that have a similar overlap of a prestige pedigree, yet broad appeal, have much sturdier legs in the awards race than previously expected. Ask around, and there are still plenty of people within the industry who say “Challengers” was their favorite theatergoing experience of the year so far, and a Best Picture nomination for “Dune: Part Two” has felt like a foregone conclusion since its box office success in March (plus other Warner Bros. Pictures contenders like “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” did not take off).
The two things to watch out for in the coming months are if any foreign language films besides “Emilia Pérez” entering the race, as the Academy has become increasingly international (Neon release “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” Germany’s entrant for Best International Feature Film, is an example). And then whether or not any blockbusters set for the holiday season will reveal themselves to be Oscar contenders. The cat is out the bag that “Wicked” will just be part one of two, so that dampens its prospects, as voters prefer to recognize the conclusion of a series. But “Gladiator II,” the follow-up to the 2000 Best Picture winner, is looking incredibly strong, should it be well-received by critics later in the year.
Potential nominees are listed in alphabetical order; no film will be deemed a frontrunner until we have seen it.
Frontrunners:
“Anora”
“The Brutalist”
“Challengers”
“Conclave”
“Dune: Part Two”
“Emilia Pérez”
“Nickel Boys”
“The Room Next Door”
“Saturday Night”
“Sing Sing”
Contenders:
“A Complete Unknown”
“A Real Pain”
“All We Imagine As Light”
“Blitz”
“Gladiator II”
“Inside Out 2”
“The Life of Chuck”
“The Piano Lesson”
“September 5”
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig”
Long Shots:
“Babygirl”
“Hard Truths”
“Joker: Folie à Deux”
“Maria”
“Megalopolis”
“Nightbitch”
“Nosferatu”
“Queer”
“The Substance”
“Wicked”
