We’re at the finish line, the 97th Academy Awards will take place this Sunday, March 2nd, and this award season will (almost) come to a close. The ACE Eddies are still a few weeks out, but… The 2024 Oscars felt pretty sewn up with a technical sweeper like Oppenheimer and its smooth path to a Best Picture, Director, and Lead Actor win. This year has given us a much more open race in many categories. While the season may have had some toxic discourse (online brain), the fluidity of many races, including above-the-line categories, has been so exciting. After a breezy year of predicting last year, the 2025 predictions have some of us scratching our heads in numerous categories with last minute, ‘LET ME SWITCH’ texts being sent in the middle of the night.
Most of the team at Offscreen Central has been widely predicting Conclaveall season to win Best Picture and Demi Moore in Lead Actress for her performance in The Substance. That was until Anorahad an amazing weekend winning Best Film at CCA, PGA, and DGA. It quickly followed up with a WGA win as well. However, it then only won Casting and Lead Actress for Mikey Madison at BAFTA, while Conclave won 4 BAFTA Awards, including Best Film and Film Editing, while Sean Baker did not win Director or Original Screenplay. A Real Pain pulled off an upset winning Original Screenplay, as many had hoped all season but not seen any actual wins for. Followed by Brady Corbet winning his second major Best Director statue for The Brutalist, as he had won at the Golden Globes. Conclave immediately followed up by winning SAG Ensemble and Madison did not repeat her Lead Actress win at SAG as it went to Moore.
This has made the race so much more wide open with two contenders having solid paths to Best Picture. Moore has the Make-Up win tied to her path to an Oscar win, however, she has two competitors. Fernanda Torres also won a Golden Globe (as Moore did) for her performance in I’m Still Here. However, Torres missed BAFTA and SAG nominations. Her film surprised with a Best Picture nomination, showing wide support for the film. Torres feels like a strong number two. While Madison, who lost the Globe and SAG to Moore, won BAFTA and is the only Lead Actress contender from a frontrunner to win Best Picture. In a world where Anora over performs, she could easily be swept up in its haul.
With wins outside of International Feature last year for The Zone of Interest, Godzilla Minus One and The Boy and the Heron, it’s become more apparent the international voting bloc has become more influential. Will this lead to Flow winning over the widely predicted The Wild Robot? Additionally, we have many categories that guilds have either given us strong indications of a sweeper (Wicked in Production Design and Costume Design), however, the Sound guilds have gone for Wicked, Dune: Part Twoand A Complete Unknown, leaving the category feeling a bit difficult to finalize. All of the possibilities and fluidity in various races allows for a fun, stressful time predicting and after much debate in our OC group chat, we have our final predictions.
Conan O’Brien is hosting the Oscars for the first time, on Sunday, March 2nd. ABC will air the ceremony live starting at 4 PM (PST) and will stream live on Hulu for the first time.
Below are our final predictions in all 23 categories.
offscreencentral.com 
Leave a comment