Oscars 2025: The Winners We Want vs. The Winners We’ll Get

The 97th Academy Awards ceremony is this Sunday, which is either a welcome reprieve from the onslaught of news headlines. Will voters cast their ballots as if to respond to the moment? Will Conan O’Brien justify his relevancy with his first Academy Awards hosting gig? We shall see! 

In the meantime, while I am an elitist snob whose favorite movies and performances weren’t even nominated this year (no Marianne Jean-Baptiste for Hard Truths, no I Saw the TV Glow for Cinematography, no Problemista for Original Screenplay or Tilda for Supporting Actress), I nonetheless have lots of opinions.

I’m here to break down who will and should win the statuettes this year, and am looking forward to seeing how the evening plays out. 

Ready to cast your own votes? We've created a blank Oscars ballot so you can decide for yourself. Download it here and keep score at home.

Best Picture

Should Win: The Substance

Will Win: Conclave

For a while, it looked like Emilia Pérez, which accrued 13 nominations (the most of any non-English language film in Oscars history), was the front runner. But star Karla Sofía Gascón’s resurfaced tweets (historic first trans acting nominee) likely dashed its chances.

Attention then would shift to Sean Baker’s Anora, fresh off PGA and DGA wins, though its sex-work subject and 2.5-hour runtime could alienate voters—a risk shared by Brady Corbet’s Golden Globe-winning The Brutalist, a four-hour epic with intermission.

This leaves Conclave, a polished papal-election drama subtly championing liberal democracy. If voters bypass Baker’s underdog story, Conclave’s comforting vision of functional electoral politics (with Christian undertones) offers a safe, humanist pick.

Dark horse The Substance, a grotesque body-horror spectacle, revels in exploitation-film audacity and cartoonish tropes. While Demi Moore seems locked for Best Actress, the film’s grotesque metamorphoses and unapologetic commitment to its schlocky premise deserve recognition—though the Oscars will likely blink at its confrontational excess.

Best Actor

Should Win: Colman Domingo, Sing Sing

Will Win: Adrien Brody, The Brutalist

The Oscars love to celebrate The Movies, particularly in context of art as net good for humanity, and while Colman Domingo’s sensitively played John Whitfield isn’t a film director, he is a character who is guiding his fellow incarcerated compatriots on a journey toward soulful enrichment through art. But his performance stands out for its lack of bells and whistles and its unwillingness to slot his character as another totem of Black pain. Rather, with feather light breaths, Domingo looks inwards and finds transcendence in making something together in community. 

The voters will probably give Adrien Brody his second award after previously winning for The Pianist in 2002. But Domingo in Sing Sing sees light in the darkness. 

Best Actress

Should and Will Win: Demi Moore, The Substance

On the one hand, Demi Moore has what the Academy Awards traditionally adore rewarding: a comeback narrative, a transformation, and a bit of self-referentiality. And these things are indeed in the DNA of The Substance, which devours the meta-textuality of Moore’s own star persona throughout. But on the other hand, it also has a performance that violently, mirthfully vacillates between luridly sincere and glaringly parodic. 

There’s the scene where Moore’s character, Elisabeth Sparkle, prepares for a date with a very normal, plain guy from her past. Before she steps out the door, she looks in the mirror and adjusts her makeup. And then she does it again. The clock ticks by, and every adjustment just makes the cracks in her self-perception more warped, Moore’s honesty startling and bracing. And then, in another moment, she is hovering over a stove top, making revolting-looking food, her hair greying and frayed, at once filled with self-loathing and cackling in her voracious indulgence. It’s the versatility in modes, particularly in a genre movie, between taking the emotion seriously and then, in delirium, subverting it with gallows humor, that makes Moore win. 

Best Supporting Actor

Should Win: Jeremy Strong, The Apprentice

Will Win: Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain

It’s a little bit surprising that The Apprentice, Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbassi’s film about Donald Trump’s tutelage under Roy Cohn, got any nominations given how the usual platforms that bring the awards season buzz to a deafening blare studiously avoided talking about it (no Variety Actors on Actors for Stan or Strong!). But nonetheless, Strong plays Cohn as both uncompromising power broker and unhinged daddy figure for Stan’s Trump, a man whose violence and dark heart can be laid down as viciously with a stare as with a terrifying, demanding shout. 

But Culkin, who has picked up a SAG Award, a Golden Globe, and a Spirit Award for his role as the capricious and charismatic cousin to Jesse Eisenberg in the latter’s A Real Pain, will probably also get the Oscar. More engaging than his patience testing rambling or off the handle flying are the simple stares into the middle distance, full of unspoken melancholy, his affect on the precipice of unraveling entirely. 

Best Supporting Actress

Should Win: Ariana Grande, Wicked 

Will Win: Zoe Saldaña, Emilia Pérez

They should give it to Ariana, who elevates Wicked beyond the realm of theater kid obsession into being an impressive work about the heartbreak of telling the story of how someone threw their best friend under the bus for the sake of political gain. Grande’s eyes are big glass marbles about to shatter in your palm, and her chops are particularly on display as she sings, “Goodness knows, the wicked’s lives are lonely/goodness knows, the wicked die alone”. All the regret, self-loathing, and pain seem to shine from her wet orbs. 

For whatever reason, though, Zoe Saldaña, a very good actress who desperately needs to be saved from herself, has been racking up wins at the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs, and the SAG Awards for playing the title character’s lawyer who helps Emilia transition and then reconnect with her family. I can’t imagine why she keeps winning; it isn’t helped by the fact that the movie around her is pretty terrible, but her range isn’t really on display, much less her singing, and it’s a musical. 

Best Director

Should Win: Coralie Fargeat, The Substance

Will Win: Brady Corbet, The Brutalist

The annual complaint about the Academy Awards is that they are out of touch and only pick self-serious, pretentious movies to nominate and award. What a fun change of pace it would be to give the Oscar to someone who has made a movie that is actually rather silly and goofy, even as it exorciates a male dominated industry and lambasts a parasitic beauty/cosmetic/medical space that preys particularly on women.  But The Substance is extremely married to its bizarre expressionistic vision of mutated identities and bodies, expendable until they’re not in entertainment. It is truly an impressive spectacle, gross and hypnotic and deliciously sarcastic. 

But Brady Corbet, once the fave of indie directors like Ruben Östlund and queer iconoclasts like Gregg Araki who then graduated to making dour movies about political trauma and culture on a budget, nabbed the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, and the directing award at the Venice Film Festival. He shot The Brutalist on VistaVision for $10 million, which is absolutely a stately accomplishment. But it’s a film so aware of how it evokes American epics like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, whose grand scales are often used to interrogate American ideals and the grime beneath their surfaces, that it often feels a bit self-conscious. I was a fan of Vox Lux (the better movie about Lady Gaga than the movie with Lady Gaga!), but The Brutalist starts to feel tedious with all its grand standing. 

Best Original Screenplay

Should Win: The Substance

Will Win: A Real Pain or Anora

Eisenberg has so far won the BAFTA and the Spirit Award, and it’s definitely interesting to see him write for the screen after many years writing for the stage. Eisenberg has talked about the origins of the script emerging from the loaded irony of Holocaust tour industrial complex, and while his corrosive wit is all over the script, it sometimes feels like it stops just short of unearthing a really profound insight about the nature of closure and lack thereof. Then again, Sean Baker got the WGA Award for Anora, so he may sneak up behind Eisenberg on the night of. 

This year’s Oscars appear to still have room for surprise, which is the best kind of ceremony. Not too much has been engraved on the statuette’s base, making watching Hollywood write its own history all the more fun. Especially when everyone at the watch party has been pounding lime green jello shots in fake syringes and eating hors d’oeuvres with names like “Defrying Gravity” and “A Real Au Bon Pain”.

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The 97th Academy Awards airs this Sunday, March 2, 2025, at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT on ABC and Hulu. The Oscars Red Carpet Show begins earlier at 3:30 p.m. PT, streaming live on ABC and ABC News Live.