2025 Oscar Predictions – Best Picture and Who’s on First?

For the first time this Oscar season, the DGA and the PGA will hold their awards on the same night, February 8, 2025. I am almost entirely sure this has never happened in the awards’ history. We’ve had the Producers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild on the same weekend, but not two major award wins that dramatically shifted the race on the same night.

Both of these award shows will go late into the evening, with award watchers hovering over Twitter to hear what wins. That is, unless it’s a year like last year or the year before, when one winner swept all of the awards heading into the big night. We don’t yet know what kind of year this will be—whether it will be a “split” year or a year where Picture and Director go together.

Unless I have this wrong, making things even stranger, the producers will be attending one show and the directors attending another, and there is a scenario where two completely different films will be giving speeches that night, building momentum in a different direction. Or not. One film could easily win both.

Then, we must wait weeks before the SAG awards are held, and Oscar ballots will have long since been turned in. It’s a mess. And if it ain’t, it will do until the mess gets here.

So, let’s quickly examine the order of things, per our calendar, and the major awards that determine Best Picture.

January 5 – Golden Globe Awards
January 8  – Oscar voting begins
January 12 – Oscar voting ends
January 14 – Critics Choice Awards
January 17 – Oscar nominations
February 8 – DGA Awards
February 8 – PGA Awards
February 11  – Final Oscar voting begins
February 18 – Final Oscar voting ends.
February 23 – Screen Actors Guild Awards
March 2 – 97th Oscars

The order of the awards does impact how a film builds momentum heading into the race. This has been true as long as I’ve been covering the awards race, even if the ways that momentum is built have changed. Gone are the days when there were just two trade magazines and mostly hype-TV like late-night comedy shows or talk shows.

Now, it seems that whatever “goes viral” shifts the momentum. The Academy is not yet plugged into TikTok, but I expect, over time, that might end up playing a role. at the moment, the Oscar race is very, very, very small. It’s a small world after all. It’s so small it’s almost non-existent. It matters to a very teeny tiny handful of people now: people who want to win the awards, film critics and bloggers, and publicists and that’s it. There are fans. I know because thousands of people read this site – yes, even now. But it’s a shrinking demo. TikTok plays to the much broader demos.

But still, viral Tweets move headlines and headlines shape perception. So — though it pains to admit and it makes me throw up a little in my mouth — Film Twitter is pretty much it for the Oscar race. Not just Film Twitter but fan Twitter, Social Justice Twitter, even Democratic Party Twitter. All of these things tend to move the race more than just about anything else — at least in the post-COVID era.

Transformational Change

Big transformational events have changed the order of award dates, most recently in 2020 with the COVID pandemic and the “Great Awokening” of the Summer of 2020. Everything changed after that—and I mean everything. We were already on the brink of change. That explosion led to complete and total submission to activists—inclusivity mandates, inclusion riders, the poor Golden Globes and BAFTA debacles.

The Golden Globes imploded and exploded. Now, Penske, Inc. has rescued them. And though they’re still a snake eating its own tail, they’re still here.

The BAFTAs tried to “fix” their problem of accusations of racism (to date, Denzel Washington has never been nominated for a BAFTA) and brought in a hand-picked committee to “select” the “right” choices. That was a disaster, and now they’ve finally dropped it. And the Oscars still have their mandates and so films must be in compliance to be considered for the awards. All of these things were done to safeguard the people at the top whose images and brands were on the line.

In the case of Hollywood and the Academy, it has been a brand-killer for them. When people — muggles — talk about the Oscars now that’s all they talk about. They do not think the movies are meant to just be good movies. They all understand, as does everyone in America, that Hollywood went “woke.” It’s so well known it’s not even necessary to explain it, though people inside the bubble of Hollywood are in perpetual denial about this.

Hollywood lost its mind and lost its way when Trump won in 2016, as did much of America’s “Left.” That, in turn, caused mass hysteria inside the industry where we all believed La La Land was “racist,” Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was “racist,” and then the biggest implosion of them all, Green Book – which was deemed “racist” and “homophobic.”

Before that, the #oscarssowhite hashtag was used in 2015 after all of the major nominees announced were white. The Academy remedied that by adding thousands upon thousands of new members to try to diversify its membership a bit. Now, there are 10,000 Academy members, and it really has changed how the Academy chooses movies. But the core problem of being even remotely interesting to the public remains.

Before that, after Barack Obama’s election in 2008, we saw collectivism take hold in the Academy when five Best Picture contenders expanded to ten and the first film by a woman to win Best Picture and Best Director in 2009, followed by a series of history-making “firsts.”  We’re still in this era, though the Oscars would be advised to shrink it back down to five now that the industry is in such dire straights. I doubt they will because the money train does better with ten.

Oppenheimer’s win last year marked a shift away from “history-making” wins toward profitable blockbusters, but that might have been a one-off.

And arguably, the biggest transformational shift was when the Academy pushed the date of the Oscars back from late March to late February, right around 2003.  That pushed everything back by one month and made the awards race all about film festivals and special screenings as opposed to delivering for the people and the box office.

In 2024, the box office has almost no impact on film awards. Because there are so few films to begin with, even the flops can do well in the crafts categories. The Oscars exist unto themselves now, but for a few movies here and there, like Barbenheimer last year, maybe Gladiator II, Joker Folie a Deux and Wicked.

The Order of the Awards

The Golden Globes will come first. That will be the biggest publicity event before Oscar voting. The Critics Choice Awards are less watched but still a big event that can move the needle in terms of the hive mind online.

Every Oscar year tells a story, and we are still determining what this year’s will be. We are in the midst of dramatic cultural change almost everywhere you look. True in the film industry and in politics. But we don’t know yet what this year’s Oscar story will be because we have a transformational, once-in-a-generation election hanging over our heads.

Where Hollywood and the Oscars are right now is not sustainable. Blacklisting, “cancel culture,” shutting out half the country – none of that is good for Hollywood’s collective health. That means two stories are happening at once. One story is the one that people inside the collective bubble we call American culture tell themselves. The other story is the real story- what is really happening in the film industry and the culture.

I look around and see Hollywood turning into Broadway, the Tonys, where a small group of people are into them, but they have little relevance outside of their own ecosystem. Even this year, our movies are similar to what happened on Broadway, where almost every production must relate somehow to something already written or made. There is risk-taking, but it’s rare. Now more than ever, audiences respond to brands. While celebrities used to be brands, they’re not as much as they once were.

Many stories within the industry will impact the Oscars, such as the rise of AI, de-aging technology, motion capture, and the looming threat that no one will go to the movies anymore if they have such good “content” at home.

These are the stories that will haunt this year’s Oscar race. The Order of the awards will reflect how we respond to them. The industry will eventually unite around one movie—one ring to rule them all—but we have no way of knowing right now what that movie will be and why.

It was easy last year, though, wasn’t it? Last year’s winner, Oppenheimer, was the kind of race the Oscars were built for: strong box office, original story, important themes. What each Best Picture contender says not just about Hollywood but about the global human experience is likely what will drive the win.

We start with the Golden Globes. There are two winners, drama and comedy. Last year, Oppenheimer and Poor Things both won and went on to dominate the Oscars. It seems easy enough, right? But it doesn’t always go that way. The Golden Globes themselves have changed. They have 300 members now, as opposed to 90.

The entire race will take two months.

As you can see, it’s a whirlwind.

What we know:

1. Anora isn’t just a celebration of Sean Baker, who is long overdue; it’s a funny, unpretentious, unpredictable thrill ride. It won the Palme d’Or and was among the runner-ups in Toronto. But it will likely be placed in comedy at the Golden Globes, giving it some stiff competition.
2. Sing Sing — following (I think) the CODA strategy of laying low. You hear people complaining about the publicity but they knew enough to tamp down the hype since it was coming in at number one. Except this to be a stealthy competitor and potential spoiler for the frontrunner (whatever that will be).
3. Conclave – a strong contender for the win at the Golden Globes (or at least the “old Globes”).
4. Emilia Perez – will compete directly with Anora. It is very “international” and modern, which might appeal to Globes voters — and new Academy voters.
5. The Brutalist – a challenging work of the kind of film awards were made for (I haven’t seen it yet but that’s the buzz)
6. Dune 2 — a monumental work in all ways except having a clear story anyone can follow. It doesn’t matter because the film will likely swallow up all the techs.
7. A Real Pain –– a beautifully rendered character drama that packs a punch. Does this get put in comedy at the Globes?
8. Saturday Night — Boomer nostalgia but also a huge cast of actors and huge casts of actors tend to do well at the Oscars. I think Jason Reitman did a good enough job here to be in contention for directing too.
9. All We Imagine as Light – it will need the support of the critics who will have to work hard to push it into the race, but this is for sure a “if Harris wins the election” kind of vibe, not just because of her Indian heritage but because it was written and directed by a woman of color. Just saying!
10. Hard Truths – while a Mike Leigh movie hasn’t been “competitive in a while,” the strong performance of Marianne Jean-Baptiste will motivate people to watch the movie, if nothing else.

What we don’t know:

1. Gladiator II – there is a story to be told here about “When the Oscars were great” back in 2000 and now, to rescue them from oblivion. Will it be good enough to land? Will it be good enough to win Ridley the gold at long last? Who knows.
2. Wicked – can a musical capture the hearts of a war-torn country? I guess we’ll see.
3. Joker Folie a Deux – will a mea culpa redux find its way into the hearts of Academy voters? Not sure.
4. The Substance – too gross for Academy members? Perhaps.
5. Nickel Boys – will the original directing style be something voters love or have trouble with?
6. Juror #2 – does Eastwood still have it? Who knows. We’ll see.

I think the Academy should reduce it to five, though it’s also possible that it’s just too late and the Oscars will have to move on to whatever they have coming next.