Oscars 2025: From Emilia Perez To The Brutalist, Who Will Win — And Who Should Win

IT’S ALMOST HERE. Conan O’Brien will host the 97th Academy Awards — better known as the Oscars 2025 — at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Now that the earth-shattering information is out of the way, let’s move onto the year that was. 2024 was a mixed bag in terms of cinema, but as a disclaimer, I must mention that the Oscars aren’t exactly the yardstick for quality — they’re more like the NBA (basketball) or NFL (football) or World Series (baseball) of film, where the ‘best in the world’ implicitly means ‘best in America’. Throw in a controversial foreign player (in this case, Emilia Perez) every now and then to distract from the illusion.

Having said that, the list of nominees this year is probably the weakest this decade. Still, someone’s going to win and many are going to lose. The main contenders are Anora, The Brutalist, Conclave and Emilia Perez. So here goes, with my annual predictions:

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Will Win: Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain)
Should Win: Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain)

Brother from a fictional mother and fellow nominee Jeremy Strong will not be pleased — especially because his Roy Cohn turn in The Apprentice oozes respect and obsession with the craft of acting — but Culkin’s freestyle performance as a grieving and lost Jewish cousin is simply undeniable. Culkin sounds like the sort of annoying kid who wings it during the exams and tops the class with sheer charisma and inherent talent alone. He can trash-talk the craft as much as he wants, but he’s seriously effortless — at playing different versions of himself. The pain in his eyes and his mood swings in the film deserve their own statue.

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Will Win: Zoe Saldana (Emilia Perez)
Should Win: Monica Barbaro (A Complete Unknown)

The truth is Barbaro, as musician and folk-singer Joan Baez, blows even Timothee Chalamet out of the water in his Bob Dylan biopic. It’s not just an imitative role, akin to Reese Witherspoon in the same director’s Walk The Line (2005). But if awards were given on merit alone, we would live in a very different world. Zoe Saldana is far and away the best thing about a love-it-or-hate-it musical, but the optics of her walking away with the trophy has always been seductive. To its credit, Emilia Perez swings for the fences — often failing miserably but making it look like fun — so nobody would begrudge Saldana her long-in-the-coming Oscar. She deserves it, but for an underrated career (box office as well as critical) that precedes this performance. At least the world now knows of Barbaro, the beguiling actor, beyond just the gossipy tag as Andrew Garfield’s new girlfriend.

Best Writing (Original Screenplay)

Will Win: The Substance
Should Win: A Real Pain

I know, I know. But a social sci-fi left-of-field weird thriller like The Substance is tailor made for such awards — the academy loves rewarding movies with subtext that they reiterate without quite understanding. And Coralie Fargeat, her zionist politics notwithstanding, deserves it just for the audacity of The Substance. Meanwhile, Jesse Eisenberg’s Sundancey and bittersweet A Real Pain looks so easy and seamless, but it’s incredibly hard to conceive. Two American Jewish cousins going on a holocaust guide tour to Poland sounds painfully simple, yet the underlying pain and characterisations and resentments are a marvel to watch. That’s what the best writing does — it’s invisible.

Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

Will Win: Conclave
Should Win: Nickel Boys

Admittedly, a papal thriller in the Vatican is hard to resist; the tension is sublime, and the commentary is so radical that it’s almost utopian. It’s a very tight and playful screenplay. But Nickel Boys is the sort of indie and crafty gem whose first-person visual gimmick deserves more recognition — arguably the best American film of 2024 by a mile. It’s not all writing of course, but the marriage of technique and cultural significance is one for the history books.

Best International Feature Film 

Will Win: Emilia Perez
Should Win: Flow

With Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light — the best international title of the lot — not being sent by India, Jacques Audiard’s bizarre musical is going to sweep these categories. But the animated, self-produced, shoestring-budget Latvian film that follows a cat and a bunch of animals in a post-human world is the kind of landscape-shifting, medium-altering story that should be the fairytale of the night.

Best Actor in a Leading Role

Will Win: Adrien Brody (The Brutalist)
Should Win: Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice)

It’s neck to neck between Brody’s self-serious and skillful performance as a Hungarian architect in the 1930s or Timothee Chalamet’s overreaching performance as Bob Dylan. But Sebastian Stan’s rendition of a middle-aged Donald Trump is not only relevant and uncanny today, it has the emotional and geopolitical intelligence of an artist who knows exactly why he’s doing the film. Stan was terrific in A Different Man as well, and 2024 was his year, so it’s not surprising to see the performative liberal lobby of the Academy misinterpret his greatness as Trump as an endorsement of the problematic president.

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Will Win: Demi Moore (The Substance)
Should Win: Mikey Madison (Anora)

It’s hard to resist the fairytale story of a veteran actress (not known for ‘acting’) landing the biggest statue in world cinema for a performance that channels the internal anxieties of has-been stardom, artistic insecurity and fading beauty. Demi Moore is it. It’s the ultimate comeback. But young Mikey Madison’s performance as a Brooklyn stripper in Anora transcends meta meaning and seductive storylines. It’s a visceral, physical and deceptively brave turn that stages a modern-day Cinderella story as the same old immigrant-and-delusions tragicomedy that we think we see everyday. Madison has a blindingly bright future, but that shouldn’t stop her from claiming top prize in an age of regressive wokeness.

Best Director

Will Win: Sean Baker (Anora)
Should Win: Coralie Fargeat (The Substance)

Brady Corbet’s chances for Brutalist might have dimmed after his use of AI-generated backgrounds and sounds came to light. The academy tends to be both hypocritical and nitpicky about these things. So that should leave Sean Baker in the lead for perhaps his weakest and most restless movie yet. But if there’s one award that Substance deserves, it’s for directing — and not just because she’s the only woman in the list. The conviction of translating those absurd concepts and words into breathing life and gore and skin on screen is never a done deal. It helps that it’s her own vision, too, one that’s more topical than any of the white-cishet stories in the reckoning.

Best Picture

Will Win: The Brutalist
Should Win: N/A

That’s right. It doesn’t matter if Brutalist or Anora wins. Or if Conclave upsets the competition, mirroring the events of the film itself. Except perhaps Nickel Boys — which isn’t expected to pull off a Moonlight again — none of the nominees truly deserve to take the stage in the final moments of the night. It’s been that sort of year. What’s Dune: Part Two and Wicked doing here? Is Conclave the papal version of a newspaper drama? What’s the token I’m Still Here nomination for? Will Emilia Perez take the fall for its trans star Karla Sofia Gascon’s problematic past tweets? It truly, completely doesn’t matter. There’s no Oppenheimer. No Everything Everywhere All At Once. No Parasite. No La La Land. Not one of these movies might stand the test of memory and time. Ask CODA, or Crash, or Green Book, or even Nomadland.