Film critics make for notoriously spotty Oscar soothsayers. We sometimes prognosticate with our hearts instead of our heads. We’re often too close to a year in movies to guess what a bunch of industry professionals might decide are its highlights. That said, almost nobody is all that good at predicting the Oscars, even people whose job it is to predict the Oscars. There are huge surprises every year, and whatever system or Nate Silver-like science you apply to the matter, we’re talking about the voting habits of 10,000 strangers with their own unique logic for filling out a ballot. It’s all just grasping at straws.
Last year made it easier on everybody. This year, there’s no Oppenheimer pulling in statuettes like a giant magnet. The field is wider. The frontrunners are fewer. And some of the major races, like Best Actor, Best Actress, and even Best Picture, are basically coin tosses. It’s one of the most competitive award seasons in years – in part because many of the films that looked like frontrunners have endured cycles of backlash and controversy. That’s bad news for the bloggers, but good news for anyone hoping for a little excitement on Oscar night.
Ahead of this Sunday’s Academy Awards, we’re making an earnest attempt to call the winners in 20 categories — all but the shorts, where your guesses truly are as good as ours. Take the predictions below with a grain of salt, because they’re really just educated guesses — conclusions drawn from a combination of history, precursor awards, and gut feeling. As for the preferences, for what we merely hope wins, we’re on firmer ground there. If there’s one thing film critics are good at, it’s endlessly spouting opinions, unsolicited and with undue confidence.
BEST PICTURE
Nominees: Anora; The Brutalist; A Complete Unknown; Conclave; Dune: Part Two; Emilia Pérez; I’m Still Here; Nickel Boys; The Substance; Wicked
Will win: With a near-record 13 nominations, the atrocious Golden Globe-winning cartel musical Emilia Pérez seemed, for a disturbing moment, to have a plausible path to victory. And then came the spectacular implosion of its star’s own awards campaign. Will voters gravitate instead to the ambiguous, three-plus-hour severity of fellow Globes winner The Brutalist, or will they tack in the opposite direction, towards the populist cotton-candy song and dance of Wicked?
Increasingly, the odds have shifted to them splitting the difference with Anora, whose frontrunner perception faded for a few weeks, only to come roaring back with wins from the producing, directing, and writing guilds — a historically unbeatable trifecta of precursor support. All the same, we’re going way out on a limb here and putting our no-guts, no-glory faith in Conclave, a respectable, well-liked middlebrow drama of classical Academy appeal that just won the BAFTA and the SAG ensemble award. What it really has going for it is an idealistic election narrative that should appeal to Sorkin-pilled liberals still licking their wounds after November 5.
Should win: How often is the best movie of the year also it’s most purely entertaining? What an incredible tightrope writer-director Sean Baker walks by folding a heartbreaking tale of thwarted upward mobility into a screwball comedy of Old Hollywood vintage. Anora, like its title character, deserves the big Cinderella ending that now appears to be within its grasp. It would make for the worthiest Best Picture winner since… oh, right, last year.
BEST DIRECTOR
Nominees: Sean Baker, Anora; Brady Corbet, The Brutalist; James Mangold, A Complete Unknown; Jacques Audiard, Emilia Pérez; Coralie Fargeat, The Substance
Will win: Baker’s recent win from the Director’s Guild inches us ever closer to a world where the creator of Greg the Bunny has an Oscar. But the Anora filmmaker will probably achieve that earlier in the night with Original Screenplay, leaving voters to spread the wealth and instead reward Brady Corbet’s grander, more traditionally award-friendly orchestration of The Brutalist — especially given the appealing parallels between the ambitious artist on screen and the one behind the camera.
Should win: The tonal juggling act Baker pulls off in Anora is richly deserving of recognition, as is Coralie Fargeat’s boldly stylized assault on the senses in The Substance, a directorial showcase through and through. All the same, there’s no denying the big-canvas historical vision of The Brutalist, which transcends an uneven script through the performances Corbet coaxes and his sheer sumptuous marshaling of limited resources. He does a whole lot with relatively little.
BEST ACTOR
Nominees: Adrien Brody, The Brutalist; Timothée Chalamet, A Complete Unknown; Colman Domingo, Sing Sing; Ralph Fiennes, Conclave; Sebastian Stan, The Apprentice
Will win: It’s a dead heat between Adrien Brody’s BAFTA-winning turn as a traumatized, visionary Holocaust survivor and Timothée Chalamet’s carefully studied, SAG-winning impression of a young, selfish, brilliant folk hero. Given the Academy’s longstanding inability to resist famous people playing other famous people, Chalamet’s spot-on Dylan has the razor-thin edge. But this one is shaping up to be a real nail-biter.
Should win: Speaking of uncanny impressions, Sebastian Stan’s slow metamorphosis into the fat cat currently running/ruining our country is disturbingly impressive. But there is no Brutalist without Brody, who makes László Tóth a figure of tragic, anguished humanity; the performance feels as carefully crafted and as built to last as one of Toth’s towering architectural masterpieces.
BEST ACTRESS
Nominees: Cynthia Erivo, Wicked; Karla Sofía Gascón, Emilia Pérez; Mikey Madison, Anora; Demi Moore, The Substance; Fernanda Torres, I’m Still Here
Will win: Hollywood loves a comeback story — apparently even one buried under mounds of prosthetics. Which it to say, it seems increasingly likely that Demi Moore will follow in the artificially bloated footsteps of Brendan Fraser and win an Oscar for her vanity-free performance as an aging star monstrously clinging to fame in that unlikeliest of award contenders, The Substance.
Should win: It’s hard not to root for Moore, who’s ferociously sympathetic as Elisabeth Sparkle, anchoring this darkest of dark comedies to some genuinely aching feeling. But forced to choose, we slightly prefer Mikey Madison’s tough, heartbreaking, and layered performance in Anora — another portrait of a woman raging against the world that objectifies and then abandons her.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Nominees: Yura Borisov, Anora; Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain; Edward Norton, A Complete Unknown; Guy Pearce, The Brutalist; Jeremy Strong, The Apprentice
Will win: The safest bet of the night is that Jeremy Strong will once again lose to his Succession costar, Kieran Culkin, whose funny, moving performance as a charismatic screw-up in A Real Pain has won every other prize under the sun.
Should win: Thing is, Culkin is plainly a lead in A Real Pain. The best genuinely supporting performance in this uniformly strong lineup comes from Guy Pearce, laying bare the petty pathology of a wealthy, capricious art patron who giveth and taketh back at a whim. He’s such a captivating villain that he almost makes dramatic sense of the purely allegorical… we’ll say choice his character makes during The Brutalist’s swerve of a final act.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Nominees: Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown; Ariana Grande, Wicked; Felicity Jones, The Brutalist; Isabella Rossellini, Conclave; Zoe Saldaña, Emilia Pérez
Will win: If anyone has emerged unscathed from the Emilia Pérez controversy, it’s Zoe Saldaña. Like Culkin, she’s poised to take home a Supporting performance Oscar for a role every bit as central and hefty as her costar’s — in this case, that of a conflicted lawyer who helps Karla Sofía Gascón’s title character get gender reassignment surgery and escape the brutal life of a cartel kingpin.
Should win: It’s tempting to go Ariana, whose breakout star turn in Wicked is unexpectedly, cartoonishly delightful (albeit very much in the key of her Broadway predecessor, Kristin Chenoweth). But since hers is yet another mischaracterized lead turn, let’s throw support to the likewise vocally gifted Monica Barbaro, making a soulful impression in the largely reactive (which is to say, suitably supporting!) role of exasperated Dylan collaborator/flame Joan Baez.
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Nominees: Anora; The Brutalist; A Real Pain; September 5; The Substance
Will win: The Writer’s Guild has sewn this up for Baker, who’s penned the kind of snappy, human-scaled, dialogue-driven American indie that regularly wins screenplay awards. It helps that the other two Best Picture nominees Anora is up against in this category are triumphs of direction than writing.
Should win: Another award Anora earns — for its audacious structure, and for its entwining of delight and discomfort, hilarity and heartache.
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Nominees: A Complete Unknown; Conclave; Emilia Pérez; Nickel Boys; Sing Sing
Will win: Big speeches, thunderously heavy themes, and an immersion into the private world of papal politics ordain Peter Straughan’s talky (if rather silly) take on the Robert Harris bestseller Conclave.
Should win: Though its power arguably derives much more from how it’s shot than how it’s written, Nickel Boys is an easy choice in a ho-hum lineup. It’s certainly the most adventurous adaptation here, bending Colson Whitehead’s chronologically scrambled Pulitzer winner into a rush of first-person memories and moments.
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Nominees: Flow; Inside Out 2; Memoir of a Snail; Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl; The Wild Robot
Will win: Big animation houses have had a stranglehold on this category for most of its lifespan, which is one reason why it’s been so refreshing watching Pixar and DreamWorks lose one award after another to Flow, a wordless, independently produced marvel from Latvia. That the film is also up for International Feature is a good sign that its underdog (undercat?) success story will culminate with a trip to the stage on Oscar night.
Should win: Without a line of dialogue or state-of-the-art animation (its blocky aesthetic is a choice, not a liability), Flow endears viewers young and old to the plight of its floating menagerie. It’s a beautiful environmental fable about empathy, community, and the eccentric sentience of animal kind.
BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM
Nominees: Emilia Pérez; Flow; The Girl with the Needle; I’m Still Here; The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Will win: Here’s another big test of how much Karla Sofía Gascón’s tweeting history has hurt Emilia Pérez, which was basically a sure thing for this award less than a month ago. Today, it seems very vulnerable to fellow Best Picture winner I’m Still Here, a straightforward true story of survivor’s grief under authoritarian rule with a plain emotional appeal, a timely resonance, and a lead performance not suddenly freighted with baggage.
Should win: Faced with films about murderous dictatorships, cultural revolution, the transgender experience in cartel-controlled Mexico City, and postwar despair, it feels a little silly to root for the cute cat movie again. But oh well: Flow’s pure visual storytelling is as engaging as any of the explicitly adult themes explored, with varying degrees of success, by the other nominees.
BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM
Nominees: Black Box Diaries; No Other Land; Porcelain War; Soundtrack to a Coup d’erat; Sugarcane
Will win: Will the year’s most universally acclaimed documentary complete its winning streak on Oscar night? No Other Land, about a whole town in the West Bank forcibly displaced by the Israeli military, is the clear favorite. Just don’t be too shocked if the Academy goes a different way, one year after some of its members booed an acceptance speech calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Should win: It may not be the most formally adventurous of the nominees (that would be Soundtrack to a Coup d’erat), but No Other Land is a vital act of cinematic journalism, witnessing and chronicling an ongoing injustice with clear eyes and a full, enraged heart. It’s the right movie for this horrifying moment.
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Nominees: The Brutalist; Conclave; Emilia Pérez; Wicked; The Wild Robot
Will win: Never put it past Academy voters to confuse score and songbook (no, a vote for Wicked in this category is not a vote for “Popular”), but the two musicals in contention will probably cancel each other out. That leaves a close contest between Conclave composer Volker Bertelmann, who won this award two years ago for his similarly bombastic score to All Quiet on the Western Front; and experimental musician Daniel Blumberg, whose avant-garde symphony of noise supplies so much of The Brutalist’s eerie, ambivalent power.
Should win: Just listen to the part where the horns come in as the Statue of Liberty floats into upside-down view, and try to say with a straight face that this award should go to anything except The Brutalist.
BEST ORIGINAL SONG
Nominees: “El Mal,” Emilia Pérez; “The Journey,” The Six Triple Eight; “Like a Bird,” Sing Sing; “Mi Camino,” Emilia Pérez; “Never Too Late,” Elton John: Never Too Late
Will win: After 15 nominations and no wins, will songwriter Diane Warren finally add an Oscar to her mantle? Probably not for the drippy “The Journey” — unless the Emilia Pérez partisans fail to rally around one of the film’s two awkward contenders. Awards bloggers seem to think quasi-rap-rock number “El Mal” is the one, maybe because it’s the only song with much of a pulse in this lineup of typically Academy-friendly ballads.
Should win: But then, “El Mal” is also kind of terrible. The rest of the nominees are merely boring. Pressed to pick something, we’ll go with the other Emilia Pérez selection, “Mi Camino,” a pleasant-enough synthy self-love anthem for Selena Gomez, with a marginally more memorable melody.
BEST SOUND
Nominees: A Complete Unknown; Dune: Part Two; Emilia Pérez; Wicked; The Wild Robot
Will win: While music movies often claim an obvious advantage in the sound category, this is another race where they could split the vote: Those bewitched by the siren call of pop tunes might go for Wicked, Emilia Pérez, or recent Cinema Audio Society winner A Complete Unknown. That gridlock of choices benefits the roaring desert-combat cacophony of Dune: Part Two.
Should win: Nice as it would be to support a more aurally subtle candidate, there’s little denying the rumbling Dolby immersiveness of Dune’s otherworldly sonic design — a sci-fi soundtrack of war you can feel in your rattling bones.
BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Nominees: The Brutalist; Conclave; Dune: Part Two; Nosferatu; Wicked
Will win: No matter how badly it’s sometimes lit, the sparkling Oz of Wicked is just the kind of elaborately realized fantasy kingdom that tends to claim this award (though don’t rule out the more tasteful appeal of a carefully reproduced past, like the one we tour in The Brutalist).
Should win: No great surprise that a movie about a brilliant architect boasts stunning production design. Any time we’re lead into one of László Tóth’s temples of reflection — an elegant reading room; a community center forged from memories of a place without hope or light — The Brutalist earns every bit of admiration bestowed upon its revered fictional subject.
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Nominees: The Brutalist; Dune: Part Two; Emilia Pérez; Maria; Nosferatu
Will win: The American Society of Cinematographers just bucked predictions and gave this award to the opera-singer biopic Maria. But with the full Academy voting, something more widely admired seems likelier on Oscar night. Pencil in The Brutalist, a striking VistaVision epic whose shooting specs have played a big role in its instant mystique and A24 marketing campaign.
Should win: The only nominee here with more memorable imagery than The Brutalist is Nosferatu, which elevates an umpteenth take on Bram Stoker with one ravishingly seductive shot after another. I mean, just look at this!
BEST MAKEUP & HAIRSTYLING
Nominees: A Different Man; Emilia Pérez; Nosferatu; The Substance; Wicked
Will win: When it comes to predicting most Oscar races, a good rule thumb is to simply replace best with most. By that metric, the appalling parade of body-horror abominations that is The Substance should come out ahead in a lineup absolutely stacked with elaborately transformative prosthetic achievements (and also Wicked).
Should win: But actually, The Substance really is the best of these nominees: a jaw-dropping anatomy theatre of mutilation and mutation that calls back to the 1980s heyday of practical effects work… including the very first Best Makeup winner, An American Werewolf in London.
BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Nominees: A Complete Unknown; Conclave; Gladiator II; Nosferatu; Wicked
Will win: As with Production Design, this category often comes down to lavish period pieces versus fanciful fantasies. And without any truly extravagant runway shows of Victorian fashion in contention, Wicked’s storybook couture should prevail.
Should win: You just know that Linda Muir devoted a small lifetime of research to getting every sartorial detail right for the baroque but tasteful 19th-century wardrobe chest of Nosferatu.
BEST FILM EDITING
Nominees: Anora; The Brutalist; Conclave; Emilia Pérez; Wicked
Will win: Were the Academy to revert to a classic five-deep Best Picture lineup, the nominees in this category would probably be the five — which is one reason it might be the toughest race to call this year. (Another is that the editors guild doesn’t announce its winners until Oscar night!) The fast-paced screwball comedy of Anora has a shot, but if we’re going to predict Conclave for the big one, we should acknowledge how well its chamber-piece urgency might do here, too.
Should win: Editing is so crucial to the ingenious rude-awakening design of Anora, which unfolds via a fluid flood of ecstatic montage for its first half, before slowing to a grueling crawl once Ani’s fantasy of a dream life as a dream wife falls apart.
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Nominees: Alien: Romulus; Better Man; Dune: Part Two; Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes; Wicked
Will win: Sorry, Dune heads. This feels like the only guaranteed win for Denis Villeneuve’s monolithic space opera. Going up against three movies featuring the same essential effects achievement — CGI simians! — can only boost its more varied offering of vessels and worms.
Should win: But what if the chimps look really good? Astonishing as the massive sci-fi spectacle of Dune often is, it’s past time the Academy recognized the motion-capture marvels of the rebooted Apes series, which reaches a new peak of nuance and expressiveness with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
The 97th Academy Awards will air on ABC and stream on Hulu on Sunday, March 2, 2025. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
