The 2025 Oscars is the hardest to predict in a long time

Usually, by the time the BAFTAs — now comfortably established, along with the Golden Globes, as a dress rehearsal for the Oscars — roll around, it is fairly clear which film or films are likely to be taking gold at the Academy Awards next month. Thanks to the often frenzied behind-the-scenes lobbying and intriguing of various well-paid publicists, a storyline will emerge, and it is only in relatively rare cases that there will be a genuine surprise on the night. After all, nobody wants to spend a fortune on promoting (or celebrating) a lost cause.

This year, however, is wildly unpredictable, and in fact is the first occasion since 2019 that it’s genuinely difficult to know which film is going to be triumphant. On that occasion, Sam Mendes’s expensive, technically brilliant 1917 was pipped to the post by Bong Joon-ho’s lower-key Parasite, despite having won Best Film and Best Director at both the BAFTAs and the Globes. There were wide murmurings that the decision to award the Oscars to the South Korean movie smacked more of a wish on the part of the Academy members to offer a sop to diversity than giving the best film of the year its due, but in fact Parasite’s excellence means that, with a few years’ distance, it is quite clear that it was the worthy winner and Mendes’s accomplished film merely the honorable bridesmaid.

This time round, things are different. Since the beginning of the year, at various points we have seen The Brutalist, the now notorious Emilia Pérez, Sean Baker’s sex-work drama Anora and the BAFTA-winning Conclave all take pole position for the awards. It is now impossible for anyone to say with any conviction which film will be triumphant on the night of March 2, although given the controversy around Emilia Pérez, as well as a sense that the Academy voters who so enthusiastically nominated it for twelve awards either hadn’t seen it or were recognizing its apparently laudable, now lambasted pro-trans intentions rather than the filmmaking itself, it looks unlikely that that will be storming the citadel. Otherwise, it’s anyone’s guess which film will win — and if so, whether it will sweep the awards or be restricted to Best Film and perhaps a technical award or two.

The reason for the fragmentation in awards voting, and the resulting unpredictability, is that the Academy, which used to be largely populated by middle-aged to elderly white men, informally disciplined its membership after they failed to give Best Picture to Brokeback Mountain, in a decision widely (if perhaps erroneously) put down to homophobia on the part of its voters. Since then, there have been endless efforts to bring in more diverse membership, which accounts, for instance, for Moonlight winning over La La Land (even if, of course, this is not how it initially panned out on the night) and could yet see Anora, which tackles the hot-button issue of sex work, win out over Conclave (too many white men, and Catholic cardinals, to boot) or The Brutalist (too long, too Jewish, with a director who seems unafraid of lambasting the industry for its failings in almost embarrassingly public fashion).

In any case, this has been the most interesting — if wild — awards season in years. At a time when the films on offer have been necessarily limited by actors’ and writers’ strikes, it is not necessarily a vintage selection, but whoever grasps their Oscars to their chest next month will not be doing so in the knowledge that it was a second-rate year, but that they have emerged triumphant in a strange, deeply competitive and uncertain field. And that itself is as much of an achievement as anything we’re likely to see on screen.