Oscars 2025: Who Will Win, Who Should Win

Best Picture

WILL WIN Anora

The Brutalist, The Substance and Nickel Boys are art films loved by cineastes. A Complete Unknown and Wicked are crowd-pleasers that could benefit from the preferential ballot. Checking both boxes: BAFTA and SAG winner Conclave and Cannes, PGA, DGA, Critics Choice and Spirit winner Anora. Given voters’ recent gravitation to edgier fare (e.g., Parasite and Everything Everywhere All at Once), stick with Anora. — Scott Feinberg

SHOULD WIN The Brutalist

I keep leaning toward Anora, with its deft balance of screwball comedy and poignant human drama. But the staggering ambition of The Brutalist is something we seldom see these days, especially from an indie filmmaker working with a miniscule budget. At a time when the promises and betrayals of the American dream are on many people’s minds, this is a movie with much to say in our present moment. — David Rooney

Best Director

WILL WIN Sean Baker, Anora

Picture and director could split for the seventh time since the preferential ballot’s return 15 years ago, as Golden Globe and BAFTA winner Brady Corbet’s lift on The Brutalist looks heavier than Sean Baker’s on Anora. But DGA winner Baker is better known, widely liked and, like recent winners Guillermo del Toro and Christopher Nolan, a vocal champion of cinema, making him harder to bet against.  — SF

SHOULD WIN Brady Corbet, The Brutalist

I met Brady Corbet when he was 16 and attending the Venice Film Festival. He said to me, “I’m staying on a couple of days to see the new Claire Denis.” Already, he was a hard-core teenage cinephile. The idiosyncratic directors he chose to work with in the years that followed served as an on-the-job auteurist film school. All the distinctive storytelling and craftsmanship he observed on those shoots pays off in his epic. — DR

Best Actor

WILL WIN Adrien Brody, The Brutalist

Twenty-two years after winning this award for The Pianist, Adrien Brody is poised to become only the 11th person to have won it more than once. He bagged every important precursor until the SAG Awards, when A Complete Unknown‘s Timothée Chalamet prevailed — but that populist group was never likely to go for The Brutalist. The wild card: Conclave‘s Ralph Fiennes, a revered vet who’s never won.  — SF

SHOULD WIN Adrien Brody, The Brutalist

A strong category with multiple deserving winners, notably Ralph Fiennes in Conclave and Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. But Brody’s wrenching work juxtaposing hubris and humiliation distills an entire life into the raw pain of lingering trauma, the life-giving force of creative achievement and the crushing blows of the immigrant experience as his character is reminded of his place. — DR

Best Actress

WILL WIN Demi Moore, The Substance

Voters often reward ingenues like Anora‘s BAFTA and Spirit winner Mikey Madison for playing sex workers, but she’s up against a vet who gave a gutsy turn and may not get a comparable part again: Golden Globe, Critics Choice and SAG winner Demi Moore. I’m Still Here‘s Fernanda Torres had late momentum, though she’d be the first person not SAG- or BAFTA-nominated to win a lead acting Oscar.  — SF

SHOULD WIN Fernanda Torres, I’m Still Here

A win for Demi Moore would be a belated Hollywood Cinderella story, recognition for a star often undervalued during her four-decade career. Her knockout performance carries The Substance, propelled by visceral desperation, rage and cruel suffering. But actresses in non-English-language films are infrequently honored on Oscar night, and Fernanda Torres’ iron-willed performance surges with defiant resistance. — DR

Best Supporting Actor

WILL WIN Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain

A Real Pain‘s Kieran Culkin won every notable pre-Oscars honor. Still, there are two long-shot reasons he might be vulnerable: (a) he’s nominated for playing a character quite like the one he played on Succession and plays when accepting awards, and (b) his film, unlike three other nominees’ — Anora‘s Yura Borisov, A Complete Unknown‘s Edward Norton and The Brutalist‘s Guy Pearce — isn’t nominated for best picture.  — SF

SHOULD WIN Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain

Playing the clown to director Jesse Eisenberg’s uptight straight man, Culkin is in full control of his shape-shifting character. Benji seems like the last person you’d want tagging along on a solemn memorial tour, but his levity, as well as his surprising depths, function as the glue that bonds the tour group together, and his irreverence doesn’t conceal the degree to which he feels the awful weight of history or his own private sadness. — DR

Best Supporting Actress

WILL WIN Zoe Saldaña, Emilia Pérez

Emilia Pérez‘s Zoe Saldaña, in recognition of a tour de force performance in which she sings, dances and acts (in Spanish), seems to have weathered the Karla Sofía Gascón backlash that engulfed her film — indeed, she swept the precursors. But hovering in the wings: Conclave‘s Isabella Rossellini, for a brief but searing eight-minute performance, and A Complete Unknown breakthrough Monica Barbaro.  — SF

SHOULD WIN Zoe Saldaña, Emilia Pérez

Emilia Pérez has taken a beating for reasons both just and unjust, but there’s no disputing the excitement of watching Zoe Saldaña sing and dance with aplomb, while stepping away from the greenscreen and into a complex character whose professional ethics, needling moral conflicts and ultimate fealty to the bonds of sisterhood are the backbone of Jacques Audiard’s musical. Category fraud or not, Saldaña earned this. — DR

Best Adapted Screenplay

WILL WIN Peter Straughan, Conclave

Seven of the past 10 best picture winners also won a screenplay award, so if one thinks that this year’s best pic will be Conclave or Anora, then one should pick Conclave in this category. Peter Straughan’s script already won the unified Golden Globe and corresponding BAFTA, Critics Choice and USC Scripter awards. (It wasn’t eligible for the Writers Guild award, which went to Nickel Boys, the probable runner-up here.)  — SF

SHOULD WIN Peter Straughan, Conclave

Robert Harris’ novel about the election of a new pope is a pulpy page-turner that doubles as a thoughtful consideration of faith, uncertainty and political ambition, set within the walls of Vatican City. Along with director Edward Berger, Peter Straughan’s taut adaptation approaches the material with intimacy or big bold brushstrokes as required, crafting juicy roles for one of the year’s most outstanding ensembles. — DR

Best Original Screenplay

WILL WIN Sean Baker, Anora

A Real Pain snagged BAFTA and Spirit awards, but isn’t nominated for the best picture Oscar, and it’s been 20 years since this Oscar went to a film that wasn’t. The most eccentric option sometimes prevails — that would be Critics Choice winner The Substance, a best pic nominee. But the smart money is on Writers Guild winner Anora, presumably the strongest best pic contender of the lot.  — SF

SHOULD WIN Sean Baker, Anora

Sean Baker has built a career out of exploring the worlds of scrappy outsiders and finding the bruised humanity in characters. His Cannes Palme d’Or winner whirls around a Brooklyn sex worker dealing with the fallout from her impetuous marriage to the cokehead son of a Russian oligarch. Baker wrote the role of a lifetime for Mikey Madison, in a script whose freewheeling plot developments are tethered to precision construction. — DR

Best Documentary Feature

WILL WIN Porcelain War

Critics groups united behind No Other Land, a collaboration between Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers about life in the West Bank. It’s timely but also pretty bleak, which, rightly or not, may in part have driven industry voters toward another of-the-moment title that’s more hopeful: Porcelain War, about artists in Ukraine whose lives are upended by the Russian invasion but who continue to make beautiful art.  — SF

SHOULD WIN No Other Land

Even after sweeping national critics’ awards and being crowned in many of the Oscar precursors, no U.S. distributor will touch this film — made by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli activists — of the Israeli military’s systematic displacement of West Bank communities. It’s a powerful, deeply compassionate piece of guerrilla filmmaking that leaves the viewer shaken, planting a knot of indignation in the pit of your stomach. — DR

Best International Feature

WILL WIN I’m Still Here (Brazil)

The French Oscar entry Emilia Pérez won the corresponding Golden Globe, Critics Choice and BAFTA awards, but faces a formidable foe in Brazil’s I’m Still Here. Both films have multiple other Oscar nominations, including best picture. But since the noms announcement, Emilia lost support (see: the Gascón situation), while I’m Still Here gained it (as more voters caught up with the film).  — SF

SHOULD WIN I’m Still Here (Brazil)

Director Walter Salles comes full circle with his return to Brazil after 16 years’ absence. Casting Fernanda Torres as a woman who refuses to be broken by devastating loss and inhumanity, this stirring true story, set against the backdrop of dictatorship, provides a direct link to Central Station, which starred Torres’ mother, Fernanda Montenegro. With the global rise of authoritarianism, the new film is an urgent cri de coeur. — DR

Best Animated Feature

WILL WIN The Wild Robot

The favorite is Universal’s The Wild Robot, an acclaimed hit that won Critics Choice and studio Annie awards and is also up for best score and sound. But don’t count out Golden Globe and indie Annie winner Flow, the category’s only other contender also nominated beyond this category (best international feature), which, like 2024 winner The Boy and the Heron, hails from outside the studio system.  — SF

SHOULD WIN Flow

The Wild Robot has originality, charm and intelligence to burn, Inside Out 2 energetically shrugs off any concerns about sequel fatigue and Memoir of a Snail is a marvel of invention with a dizzying attention to detail. But Gints Zilbalodis’ enchanting eco-fable about the rewards of community in challenging times has the power to heal, even if it never sugarcoats our precarious tenancy on this ailing planet. — DR

And Feinberg Forecasts the Rest …

Cinematography
The Brutalist

Costume Design
Wicked

Film Editing
Conclave

Makeup & Hairstyling
The Substance

Original Score
The Brutalist

Original Song
“Like a Bird” from Sing Sing

Production Design
Wicked

Sound
Dune: Part Two

Visual Effects
Dune: Part Two

Animated Short
Yuck!

Documentary Short
Death by Numbers

Live-Action Short
The Last Ranger

This story appeared in the Feb. 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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