2025 Oscars: Best Picture Predictions

Nominations voting was from January 8-17, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 23, 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

The back and forth on which nominee will win the Academy Award for Best Picture has been so drawn out, so contentious, that the surge of support “Anora” got last weekend has been a breath of fresh air. After major wins for Sean Baker and his film at the Critics Choice Awards, the PGA Awards, and the DGA Awards, we finally have some consensus as final Oscars voting opens up.

While Baker’s sex worker dramedy has been a formidable contender since last spring, when it won the Palme d’Or over two other Cannes competition titles that are now also nominated for Best Picture, it being shut out of the Golden Globes was taken as a critical hit to its campaign because of how that voting body has become more reflective of the Academy’s evolving, international tastes. The wins for “The Substance” and “I’m Still Here” at the January ceremony are what seem to have secured those films their own Best Picture nomination, something that was far from guaranteed going into the new year.

“Anora” also has the support of the Screen Actors Guild, the main element of a Best Picture campaign that “The Brutalist” lacks. SAG and BAFTA support is also what led many to believe that “A Complete Unknown” was a viable contender, and never say never, but in the case of music biopics, that support means so much more for the acting races than it does for Best Picture. “Green Book” is arguably the last music biopic to win, though that film hardly features any music, and before that it was “Amadeus,” which also takes a very different approach to a music biopic than the one parodied in the oft-referenced comedy “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.”

“Conclave” and “Wicked” are two other titles that have consistently been getting big nominations, but the films, which are both under the Universal umbrella, the studio that won Best Picture last year, just have not gotten the sort of major public win that could sway more voters into choosing them. That Golden Globe for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement is looking more and more cursed by the day.

Speaking of cursed, the negative energy that was surrounding “Emilia Pérez” as a whole, from the film’s depiction of Mexico, to director Jacques Audiard’s perceived disparagement of the Spanish language, to how well some of the actors speak Spanish in the film, has mostly been diverted toward star Karla Sofía Gascón, after her recent history of offensive tweets was exposed. The Netflix film is not totally out of the Oscar race, it just not at all in the same position it was at the start of the year, when it seemed like the streamer finally put all its eggs in the right basket.

Finally, “Nickel Boys” and “Dune: Part Two” both have gotten immense respect from Academy members below the line, even if the former film did not get the Best Cinematography nod it was hoping for, but one film is seen as too small and the other too big, in the sense that blockbuster sequels are what the Academy would like to stray away from rather than fully embrace.

Nominees are listed in order of likelihood to win.

“Anora”
“Conclave”
“The Brutalist”
“Wicked”
“A Complete Unknown”
“Emilia Pérez”
“I’m Still Here”
“The Substance”
“Nickel Boys”
“Dune: Part Two”