Best Picture 2025: Can Anything Break Up the Fixed Consensus?

Sometimes I look at the Oscar race like I look at politics, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.” At Telluride, I watched the publicists from the big players in the Oscar race squire around bloggers they deemed “important.” Those bloggers lap it up, as though they have any choice in the matter. It’s simply a way to control an already-rigged game. The movies are made for Oscar voters.

Publicists already guess which of their movies have the best shot at the Oscars. Bloggers are paid with big checks from the studios or with high-status perks: early screenings, fancy parties, and celebrity access. Politics is exactly the same way. Money, lobbyists, corporations, and candidates seem to have been made specifically for high office. Everyone tells themselves they’re fighting the good fight and are on the right side. But they also know they’re playing a part in a story whose ending is more or less written.

Don’t get me wrong. Some great movies seem to be dominating the race right now. Sean Baker’s Anora is one of the very best. It wasn’t a hothouse flower. It wowed audiences in Cannes. No one saw it coming. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I saw it. It was such an unpredictable ride of a movie full of contradictions, complex characters, and creative life.

Another film that has stayed with me since Telluride is Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain. It’s like Anora in that the characters don’t behave in a rational way. You must discover who they are as the film goes along. In most movies, especially Oscar movies, the characters represent something – just one thing. That makes them easy to figure out early on. But the ones where the actors keep you guessing about what they’ll do next, how they will reveal themselves – those are the ones that embed themselves deeply. Profoundly.

Weirdly enough, even though I didn’t like the movie at all — it was an agonizing sit, to put it mildly – Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End has wormed its way into my mind’s eye too as my brain attempts to work it all out. It was disturbing, unpredictable and uncomfortable to watch. But it was not a movie that gives you easy answers (beyond blaming one side for the end of the world). But that kind of movie, I think, will find a place in film history because it’s so strange and challenging. I imagine that when Gen Z finds their way to it, they will begin a conversation about it, one that might last decades.  Is it an “Oscar movie”? Not a chance. Does it have to be? Absolutely not.

Conclave is another film that stood out just because it was so well made – directing, acting, writing. It does pack a powerful punch at the end for a certain kind of viewer. Will that translate more broadly to the Academy? Maybe. I guess we’ll have to see where it lands.

As far as I can tell, Emilia Perez is the film getting the biggest push and having the most support online. That seems to be more a movie for the kinds of people who vote on the awards than anything else. What they seem to like (last year’s winner notwithstanding) are films that say who they are. Who are they? They’re the people who gave Parasite the win in 2019.

Netflix has yet to win Best Picture, despite the dominating presence of Ted Sarandos within the institution of the Academy, despite how many films they’ve represented that came close to winning.

I keep wondering whether any of the Big Movies coming out in the next few months can shake up the race. Can any movie overcome the rigged game the Oscars have become? Take Ron Howard’s Eden, which will play in Toronto in the next few days and weeks. No one knows much about it except those of us who have researched it.

Here is a summary of the real story via a newsreel:

Now, thanks to an article in Vanity Fair on the Film, now we know a little bit more. The writer, David Canfield, calls it a “wacky survival film.” And the first paragraph:

There’s a scene in Eden, Ron Howard’s wacky survival film premiering Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival, in which Sydney Sweeney gives birth in a remote cave surrounded by wild dogs. It’s the early 1930s and Sweeney’s Margret Wittmer, a German housewife who’s relocated with her husband to the uninhabited Galápagos island of Floreana, cannot find a single soul around her when her water breaks. On the days that Sweeney shot the scene, the temperature hovered around 100 degrees. The performance verges on feral. “She got it,” Howard says. “It was raw and she was all in, just like her character had to have been at that moment.”

And he writes:

Viewers might be forgiven for assuming that Eden, written by Emmy nominee Noah Pink (Genius), is a work of fiction. Its characters are outrageous; its story is bizarre, start to finish. But Howard has been compelled by the tale of Floreana’s settlers since he first heard it 15 years ago on a family vacation. After exhaustively researching and examining contradictory accounts, he figured out how to make a movie about it. “You’d be shocked at how accurate the movie actually is,” he says. “What was chilling about this story is that a handful of people went there and half of them either died or vanished—and that’s intense. That’s like a season of Survivor where people really don’t make it.”

Readers of this site already know that it’s based on a true story because I’ve been telling you about it for a while now. Canfield writes, “Its story is bizarre, start to finish.” We get it, bro. We get it. It weirded you out. It weirds me out too, and I haven’t even seen it, but you can’t say we all aren’t intrigued anyway.

Thanks to Canfield’s piece, we now know who gets the best part in the movie, that’s Ana De Armas as The Baroness. And, as Canfield writes: “with two seemingly obedient hunks (Felix Kammerer and Toby Wallace) by her side and available at her every whim. So begins a power struggle for control of the island.”

Here is a “first look” photo of De Armas as The Baroness, via Vanity Fair:

And, of course, in a totalitarian paradise like Hollywood has become, if Ron Howard is involved, there has to be a reference to …wait for it …

Howard helmed the poorly reviewed JD Vance 2020 biopic Hillbilly Elegy for Netflix—a project that has earned enduring backlash, with its subject now Donald Trump’s controversial running mate. Vance’s prominence has actually boosted Hillbilly Elegy, which depicts the VP candidate in positive terms, back onto Netflix’s most-watched charts.

“Look, I don’t want to say a lot about it—the film is what it is, made [five] years ago—but I will say I am surprised and disappointed by the rhetoric that I’m hearing,” Howard says of the VP candidate. “We have to do our job as citizens and really think about it and go out and vote. It’s not about some movie maybe five or six years ago, it’s about what’s happening today. Go out and vote. Participate.”

I imagine no one on the Left will let this go until their chosen candidate wins in November, and then maybe they might consider forgiving Ron Howard for that movie.

The story goes on:

In any case, Eden’s timing couldn’t be better for a kind of reset for Howard. He made the movie independently (it’s headed to Toronto seeking distribution). “We were on a really tight budget and schedule on a movie that had no cover sets—we built all of our sets on location,” he says. “Our only cover was to shoot real fucking fast when we had the good weather.” That energy shows in the movie. It’s a risky, unusual curiosity, and you can feel Howard having fun not just in the world—Eden really was filmed in the jungle—but with tone. He’s long been drawn to themes of survival and triumph, but rarely has he laced them with a loose playfulness that borders on camp.

There are plenty of pictures over at Vanity Fair, so head over to look.

What I love about the idea of Howard doing this movie is that, to me, it will fall into that category of unintentionally being about life on the modern-day Left. These people escaped civilization, but they escaped Germany falling to Hitler. They attempted to find or recreate paradise, as humans often do. But to do that, they had to build a utopia. And, as with all utopias, it had only two options: become more authoritarian or collapse.

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II is the other film that might shake up the race. I was fascinated to read that he built Rome rather than use computer generated images:

“We built Rome,” says Scott. “I discovered that you can have a lot of access, nice costumes and all blue screen. But in every shot you take — whether it’s (Scott holds his hands up for wide shots, over-shoulder shots and close-ups) you’re investing money on the blue. It’s more expensive to do that than to build it. So I built the Colosseum 40% full scale. It was cheaper to do that than blue screen.”

And lastly, there is Wicked, a Christmas-time musical that may or may not find its way into the lineup. But if history is any indication, it won’t. How can it be done with hundreds of people whose tastes now shape the Oscar race and they decide for themselves which film “should” win Best Picture? When you take the public out of it, what kind of lasting impact can it possibly have?

Most of the time, when people talk about the Oscars, they joke about how they can’t even remember what won the year before. When they hear the titles, they often scratch their heads, “What was that again?” The Oscars exist now as a magic mirror for a kind of Royal Court. If it pleases thee, it wins.

I am still hoping for a more organic process to the Oscars. Maybe some of the late breakers will shake up the already fixed race. But there is no denying the dramatic shift from Gladiator in 2000 and Gladiator II in 2024. That’s my entire career covering the Oscars online. I lasted just long enough for the industry I helped build to turn on me. Sadly, even turning on me, even purging utopia of all of the undesirables, can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. No, to do that the Oscars, and Hollywood, will need to lower the drawbridge, open the gates, and let the public back in.