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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
Unlike Best Animated Feature, which really only has the Annie Awards, and Best International Feature, which does not have any awards body to give a full picture of the contenders, the Best Documentary Feature race has so many precursors for the industry’s picks for the best nonfiction films of the year.
So far, awards veer toward more populist fare, like the Critics Choice Documentary Award, “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” (as also shown by its PGA Award nomination.) Among groups that skew more toward the cerebral, critical side, like the IDA Awards, “No Other Land” has been the winner, which really sticks out given how the film still does not have a distributor.
That could be one of the driving forces in its early wins. The more recognition it gets, the more a distributor can say it acquired “No Other Land” for all its awards, as a way to sidestep wading into the war in Gaza (which the film gives a lot of context to, having been made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, about the Israeli military’s dismantling of a West Bank settlement).
That said, none of this dispels the fact that Netflix is a huge player in this race. The trio of “Will & Harper,” “Daughters,” and “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin” have all collected plenty of awards throughout the year, whether it be “Will & Harper” sharing that Critics Choice Award with “Super/Man” or “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin” recently receiving a European Film Award. They not only seem like locks for the shortlist, even despite the Documentary branch’s ongoing aversion to celebrity-focused films, but two out of three could be nominees. And don’t sleep on “Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa” either; it’s notched plenty of noms, too.
The majority of frontrunners premiered at Sundance 2024, so it’s been fascinating to see the different awards campaigns figure out the right timing to reinvigorate interest in the films in time for voting. Currently, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” and “Porcelain War” are doing very impressive jobs of feeling like discoveries for people, even though they premiered in January, but there are other titles like “Black Box Diaries,” “Sugarcane,” and “Frida” holding strong post-release.
Contenders for the shortlist of 15 are listed in alphabetical order below.
Frontrunners:
“Black Box Diaries”
“Dahomey”
“Daughters”
“Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”
“Frida”
“Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa”
“No Other Land”
“Porcelain War”
“The Remarkable Life of Ibelin”
“Queendom”
“Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”
“Sugarcane”
“Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story”
“Union”
“Will & Harper”
Contenders:
“A New Kind of Wilderness”
“Bad River”
“The Bibi Files”
“Bread and Roses”
“Eno”
“Gaucho Gaucho”
“Hollywoodgate”
“The Last Journey”
“Look Into My Eyes”
“Nocturnes”
“Patrice: The Movie”
“Piece by Piece”
“Separated”
“We Will Dance Again”
“Zurawski v Texas”
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