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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
It has already been said plenty of times, even since Cannes, but this is a really weird year for Best Picture. Academy rules have changed to make it so there will be 10 nominees no matter what, but there are only five to seven films that feel like shoo-ins for an Oscar nomination in the category.
With all the uncertainty around what films will make it in, there’s room for one or two newcomers to claim a spot. With critics having seen the last crop of major live-action awards contenders, it feels safest to say that the winners in that respect are “Wicked” and “A Complete Unknown.” Both musical projects feel like they occupy a void missing in the Best Picture race, whether it’s starrier fare, more tentpole films, or even just the standard biopic.
It’s more than likely true that Universal Pictures is not going to have back-to-back Oscar wins for Best Picture, just by virtue of “Wicked” being the first part of a series, and nitpicks around the craft of the film, but the film is driving people to theaters during a crucial moment in the awards race. It pays off to be one of the main characters in an assessment of the year in film, and “Wicked” seems poised to be that, while still maintaining a thin patina of prestige. Ariana Grande, one of the biggest popstars in the world, is the film’s main contender to receive an acting nomination. She also contributes to the idea that the telecast could use more films whose casts will draw people to watch it. Many of the above reasons are why blockbuster “Dune: Part Two” is seen as being in line for a Best Picture nomination as well.
Relatedly, “A Complete Unknown,” the last of the bunch to screen, sees star Timothée Chalamet finally park in the spot reserved for him the whole year in the Best Actor category. Lesser biopics with lesser-known stars have sailed right into the Best Picture race, and outside of “Maria,” which has not been the top Best Picture priority for Netflix, no other Best Picture contender is fitting the most Oscar-baity genre of them all.
That said, “A Complete Unknown” is being released by Searchlight Pictures, which has recently gotten the ball rolling on its awards campaign for Sundance hit “A Real Pain,” enough to where the Jesse Eisenberg film now feels like it has a shot at a Best Picture nomination. To be fair, getting two films into the race is very doable for the former Fox imprint. It has won Best Picture five times. But put it up against a film like “Blitz,” which is pretty much Apple Studios’ only awards contender, meaning it in theory has more campaign money behind it than any other film in the race, and it becomes easier to see how the dramedy could get eclipsed.
A24 is the other studio with two undeniable Best Picture contenders in the race. Since its Venice premiere, “The Brutalist” has been a hot ticket among awards voters, and though “Sing Sing” has not been as widely seen as expected, the Colman Domingo-starrer is a slam dunk with the actors branch, which is the biggest sect of Academy voters.
This has also been a really good year for Focus Features, with “Conclave” not only being one of the films most expected to get a Best Picture nomination, but is seen as the film most likely to dethrone Cannes favorites “Anora” and “Emilia Pérez,” which have led the Best Picture race for months. The studio’s late-in-the-year release “Nosferatu” is also incredibly impressive, but the aversion to horror is one of the Academy’s strongest biases. That is also why indie success story “The Substance” still feels like a long shot. There will be voters who refuse to watch the films no matter how much people assure them they won’t be too scary.
Finally, though the overlap between who votes for critics awards, and who votes for the Oscars is infinitesimal, sometimes Academy members will listen in when the critical acclaim is so strong. Though few critics awards have been announced yet, it seems clear that Amazon MGM Studios release “Nickel Boys” is likely to clean up in those circles, and that could be the exact momentum it needs to break into the Best Picture race.
Potential nominees are listed in alphabetical order; no film will be deemed a frontrunner until we have seen it.
Frontrunners:
“A Complete Unknown”
“Anora”
“Blitz”
“The Brutalist”
“Conclave”
“Dune: Part Two”
“Emilia Pérez”
“Nickel Boys”
“Sing Sing”
“Wicked”
Contenders:
“A Real Pain”
“All We Imagine As Light”
“Challengers”
“Gladiator II”
“Nosferatu”
“The Piano Lesson”
“The Room Next Door”
“September 5”
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig”
“The Substance”
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