Voting for the 97th Annual Academy Awards kicks off at 9am PT on Tuesday, February 11, running one week until closing at 5pm PT on Tuesday, February 18. The entire world has changed in the one month (?!?!?!) since nomination voting began. I’m not just talking about the horrific fires that ravaged thousands of lives and so much of the gorgeous Los Angeles landscape. I’m not even talking about the political world. I’m talking about the increasingly nasty 2025 Oscar race which, to me, feels like continues to plummet new depths of bad taste.
For example, in an X post that I won’t share because it’s tacky, someone said (paraphrasing here), “Now that we’ve stopped Karla, it’s time to stop Jacques Audiard.”
I have no idea if that was in jest (I suspect not), but the idea that the online community can “stop” someone from film awards consideration is wildly insane to me. The online community doesn’t like Emilia Pérez. That has been abundantly clear for several months now with plummeting Letterboxd and Rotten Tomatoes user scores and hundreds of thousands of tweets focusing on the “Penis to Vagina” musical sequence. The latter attack appears mostly focused to try to take down Zoe Saldaña, who gives a film-best and career-best performance, just to keep the film from winning even a single Oscar.
Films should be judged on their own merits. Period. No one needs my opinion on this, but yes, what Karla Sofia Gascón said across years of X posts ranges from “my dad’s casual form of ill-humored racism” to outright lies. Maybe she’s not a good person. It’s her choice to say what she wants. I don’t have to like it. I don’t have to watch a film she may make in the future. We all have that choice, but the Oscar race isn’t a purity contest. Personally, I would not have nominated her for Best Actress at all. Two reasons: I don’t think she’s the lead of the film, and I don’t think she’s good enough to be nominated. Not when Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman are RIGHT THERE giving career-best work. For their own reasons, however, enough members of The Academy thought she deserved recognition for her work. They clearly liked Emilia Pérez enough to give it 13 Oscar nominations. That’s their choice. It isn’t mine or yours, but it’s their choice.
So, I tip-toe through this minefield to say that this weekend’s critics and guild award ceremonies won’t entirely reflect the heated online conversation that occurred this week. Critics Choice announces tomorrow night, and their voting window closed January 12. The Producers Guild and Directors Guild announce Saturday with PGA’s voting window closing on January 30 and DGA’s voting window not closing until tomorrow. Personally, I’m not convinced that Karla Sofia Gascón, Jacques Audiard, or Emilia Pérez would have over-performed at any of these ceremonies. Let’s see where things may land by Monday morning.
29th Annual Critics Choice Awards
The Critics Choice Awards moved their ceremony twice due to the devastating LA fires. So, now they’ve landed on an even more influential weekend that originally positioned. They can influence actual winners, not just nominees. Granted, I don’t know exactly how many voting members of The Academy would pay attention to each category, but the headlines are what matter. They will help write a narrative that, by Monday, some film will emerge or be solidified as The Frontrunner based on hardware earned over the weekend. Judging from where we were when Critics Choice voted, I expect Sean Baker’s Anora to have a bit of a resurgence with this group. I also expect Emilia Pérez will take home at least three awards, but it will be The Brutalist‘s big night, I suspect.
At any rate, here are my predictions for the major races at the 29th Annual Critics Choice Awards.
- Picture: The Brutalist
- Actor: Adrien Brody, The Brutalist
- Actress: Mikey Madison, Anora
- Supporting Actor: Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain
- Supporting Actress: Zoe Saldaña, Emilia Pérez
- Ensemble: Emilia Pérez
- Director: Brady Corbet, The Brutalist
- Original Screenplay: Sean Baker, Anora
- Adapted Screenplay: Peter Straughan, Conclave
- Cinematography: Lol Crawley, The Brutalist
- Production Design: Judy Becker, Patricia Cuccia, The Brutalist
- Editing: Marco Costa, Challengers
- Costume Design: Paul Tazewell, Wicked
- Hair and Makeup: The Substance
- Visual Effects: Dune: Part Two
- Animated Feature: The Wild Robot
- Foreign Language Film: Emilia Pérez
- Song: “El Mal,” Emilia Pérez
- Score: Daniel Blumberg, The Brutalist
Producers Guild Awards
These are a bit more tricky to predict. We could be looking at a year similar to the 2016 Oscar race where a different film wins all of the major guild precursor awards. It’s important to remember that the Producers Guild is the only major guild that uses the same preferential ballot voting system that The Academy uses. That system, as you all know by now, favors the films that are commonly liked or at least don’t have many haters. I don’t see Emilia Pérez winning here, even if they voted before the worst of the recent scandals hit. It’s not the kind of film everyone will love (clearly). For Emilia Pérez to have won Best Picture at the Oscars, it needed to win SAG Ensemble and have the audience jump to their feet to celebrate an historic win for a transgender actress in a culturally diverse cast. To start the inevitability avalanche, the film needed to give voters a reason to root for it. Now, I think that’s all gone.
So, what can win on a preferential ballot? Here are your 2025 PGA nominees:
- Anora
- The Brutalist
- A Complete Unknown
- Conclave
- Dune: Part Two
- Emilia Pérez
- A Real Pain
- September 5
- The Substance
- Wicked
Immediately, you can strike the titles that didn’t make the Oscar Best Picture 10: A Real Pain and September 5. I also personally believe you can strike Emilia Pérez for previously stated reasons. No one feels particularly inclined to award Dune: Part Two for the same reasons they chose to wait on Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. There’s a third / final film still coming. The tremendous Wicked box office reception may lead you to predict that, but I suspect people will wait on this, too, considering Wicked: For Good comes out next year. The Substance holds a great deal of passion behind it, but is it a consensus title? I would put it higher on the PGA tally list than most because I do think there will be a not-small group of voters who applaud the film’s production team for refusing to cater to then Universal’s story editing demands and opting to take the film to a much smaller distributor to retain their artistic integrity. There will be several number one votes for that reason alone, I suspect.
That leaves Anora, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, and Conclave. Any one of those could win. The Brutalist is perhaps most challenged for the win here at this group because it’s not a “sit anyone down in front of it” movie. Again, that’s what the preferential ballot gives you — a common denominator winner. Of the remaining three potential choices, my gut tells me that Conclave is the most likely winner, although I would not be shocked if the Boomers pushed A Complete Unknown to the win. Again, I think we’re looking at a year where the major guilds are going in three different directors (with SAG probably going to Wicked now instead of Emilia Pérez). The winner could also be Anora, but why does it feel like all of the buzz for the film has completely dried up? Who knows — maybe all that changes by Monday morning when it wins here. Still, I’m going with Conclave.
Directors Guild Awards
This year’s easiest guild to predict, the Directors Guild will recognize Brady Corbet‘s ambitious work in The Brutalist. Yes, it’s his third film, but we’ve not seen anything of this scope or scale in a long time. Whether you like the film or not, there’s no denying it’s unlike anything out there right now, and that’s entirely due to Corbet’s vision for the project. Directors will recognize and celebrate that ambition. Of the remaining nominees, Conclave‘s Edward Berger didn’t make the Oscar list, so it would be very rare to see him win here. This is not a Ben Affleck / Argo situation. James Mangold and Sean Baker made both the DGA and Oscar five for A Complete Unknown and Anora respectively, so they can’t be counted out completely. But neither project feels particularly director-driven. That leaves Emilia Pérez‘s Jacques Audiard, and after the events of this week, I’m thinking DGA voters will opt out of that narrative. Would make for a hell of a headline on Monday morning, though, should he win.
If that happens, then I suppose the online knives will be out in full force.
Note: The Annies, celebrating the year’s best in animation, are also Saturday, February 8. Since Flow didn’t make the Best Feature category, I suspect Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot to do very well there.
