The 2025 Oscar Ceremony is over and, OK, I confess – I blew it. Last year I achieved a 73% success rate with 17 out of 23 categories correctly predicted. But this year, I managed to only guess 10 out of 23, 43%. That brings my eight-year average down to 53%, better than chance, but not as good as I’d like.
This year I lost all of the short categories, but I’m not really concerned about them as I don’t have enough time, energy, and interest to track them anyway. I correctly guessed Documentary and International Features, but I suspect a lot of people did – they were kind of runaways. But I did not get the Animated Feature – I predicted The Wild Robot and instead it went to the film from Latvia, Flow. Flow was one of the few films to be nominated in both of those categories (an earlier one was Flee). I think that shows one trend in the Academy which is to honor films from outside of America. Flow is the first film from Latvia to receive an Oscar and that will help energize cinema in that country. Another example of this internationalizing trend is the presence on the Best Picture ballot of two international movies, Emilia Perez (France) and I’m Still Here (Brazil).
Speaking of Emilia Perez, the dismissal of that film was something I was mostly correct in predicting. Although being nominated in thirteen categories is certainly an early indication of earning Oscars in most of them, the film ended up with only two, one of them for Original Song, a category I admit I don’t understand and often get wrong. Emilia Perez also won in the supporting actress category awarding it to Zoe Saldana (who, by the way, is the first person of Dominican descent to win an Oscar). But to go from thirteen nominations to only two wins is a big comedown.
Dune: Part Two did about as well as I suspected, winning in the more spectacle categories like Sound and Visual Effects. I thought it would take Production Design, but it didn’t; that Oscar went to Wicked – a spectacle of a different color. Wicked, which was nominated in ten categories, most of them minor, only won Costumes and Production Design. I thought it would take Makeup, but voters were, apparently, enthralled with the gross effects in The Substance. The Brutalist’s win over the musical Wicked for Original Score was, in my mind, an interesting upset.
My only block of solid wins was in what I call The Cinematic Arts – Visual Effects, Cinematography, and Film Editing. While guessing Dune for Visual Effects was easy, the other two are always very difficult picks, especially when you haven’t seen the movies. So I give myself an extra brownie point for those two (The Brutalist for Cinematography and Anora for Film Editing).
I lose all those points, though, when you look at the Acting categories. I have always had reasonable success using the “ensemble” argument – that a film with two or more actors nominated usually motivates the acting guild, the largest block of voters, to choose the ensemble. But that totally didn’t work this time. While my pick Adrien Brody (The Brutalist) won Leading Actor, that wasn’t a real difficult prediction. But his partners, Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones, lost in their races. Jones losing to Zoe Saldana is a loss I can take, but I didn’t predict it because I thought Saldana’s film was out of the running. But the other tri-part ensemble, for A Complete Unknown, didn’t win any acting Oscars. And Kieran Culkin’s (A Real Pain) win for Supporting Actor was totally unpredicted, by me, because he was the only one of the nominees that wasn’t a part of an ensemble. So I guess I now need to reassess my trust in the ensemble theory.
And I may need to reexamine my belief that new and younger actors don’t have much of a chance for the Leading Actor/Actress races. I didn’t think Mikey Madison (Anora) would win because this was her first nomination, and she might need a bit more seasoning. So I assumed it would go to Demi Moore (The Substance). Maybe bringing on more younger members into the Academy has helped get rid of, or at least reduce, the pay-your-dues argument.
I thought the Adapted Screenplay Oscar would go to A Complete Unknown, but it went to Conclave. Who knows why? But I did pick Anora for Director and Original Screenplay, and I should have listened to my gut telling me that when a movie gets both directing and writing Oscars, it should probably get Best Picture. Instead, I used my acting predictions assigned to The Brutalist instead.
To sum up: I think we are seeing an academy that is increasingly younger and more diverse, and that is leading voters to reward movies that are not the traditional standards. International filmmakers are welcome to the tent much more frequently. Edgier movies, like The Substance, Anora, Emilia Perez, and Nosferatu, are now viable candidates and can even win! And some of the old formulas the good old boy network used to use to make award decisions seem to be falling to the wayside. How all of this will affect my future predictions is a work in progress.
The 2025 Oscar anwards are over, and the results are in. The only thing left to do is watch , study, analyze, and review all 35 of this year’s movies to see just why the Academy voted the way they did – or where they made a mistake! Of course, that will take the rest of the year. Later this week, I will post this year’s program, a list of the reviewing festivals and what’s in them, and some changes I’ll be making to the review format and my social media presence. And we start our first movie this Saturday. So stay tuned!
