2025 Oscars: Best Adapted Screenplay Predictions

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

After the majority of nominations for precursors have been announced, the frontrunner for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar happens to be one of the scripts that was ineligible for a WGA Award nomination.

Though people are still hesitant to say “Conclave” will win Best Picture, the consensus after the film’s Best Screenplay win at the Golden Globes (and Peter Straughan’s speech), is that his adaptation of the 2016 Robert Harris novel is the contender to beat.

But even on the adaptation side of things, directors who wrote the scripts themselves are favored. One would have to go all the way back to the 2017 Oscars, when James Ivory (an industry icon and director in his own right) won for “Call Me By Your Name,” in order to find the last time someone who did not also direct the film won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

In terms of the other films that feel like locks for nominations, both “Nickel Boys” and “Sing Sing” earned both BAFTA and WGA nominations, as did “A Complete Unknown,” but the latter film represents an interesting conversation happening with the field of contenders this year.

Though “A Complete Unknown” is heavy on musical performances, many voters do not consider it a musical as much as a music biopic (one of their favorite genres). Meanwhile, “Emilia Pérez” and “Wicked” are musicals that have both earned major screenplay nominations recently (the former making it onto the BAFTA list, while the latter got WGA). Technically, the last musical to be nominated for adapted screenplay was Bradley Cooper’s “A Star Is Born,” but the musical performances in that film are naturalistic in the same way as James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown.” The last traditional musical nominated in the category was “Chicago” over 20 years ago, and it did not win, despite winning Best Picture.

“Emilia Pérez” has the advantage over “Wicked” by virtue of being written by the film’s director Jacques Audiard (plus Netflix is really good at securing Oscar nominations). But if a musical getting in means another film gets knocked out, expect it to be either “Dune: Part Two” or “Sing Sing,” which have both been underperforming in other categories with some precursor awards.

Potential nominees are listed in alphabetical order, below.