Predict the 2025 Academy Awards already? I can hear your incredulous gasps, and it’s not that I don’t sympathize. But it’s a 24/7/365 kinda world, and since we’re in a leap year, that means we’re already a day behind. The truth is, we truly don’t know anything for certain as we gaze into the crystal ball and look toward next year’s Oscar race. But that’s what makes year-ahead predictions so much fun. Anything could happen! After talking about the same two dozen movies for the last few months, now we get to open the windows and let a gust of new movies blow through.
As we glance ahead, though, it’s natural to wonder what the events of the most recent Oscar season can tell us about what to expect from the new one. What lessons do we learn from the Oppenheimer juggernaut, the Emma Stone Oscar run, the successes of European fare like Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest?
We don’t expect this year to copy last year’s results too closely, any more than Oppenheimer followed the same path as Everything Everywhere All at Once. But the Oscar past always manages to be an indicator of the future in some way or another. For starters, we’ve got quite a few sequels to best-picture nominees on the release schedule this year.
BACK AGAIN
There was a time when the only sequels that had a prayer of showing up in a best-picture lineup had the words The Godfather in them. The Hollywood ecosystem (and the number of best-picture nominees) has changed since then, meaning movies like Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun: Maverick don’t have to see their Oscar hopes dashed by sequel snobbery. Still, a sequel seen as an obvious step down from the original film will probably have a hard time amassing the kind of momentum needed to sustain an Oscar campaign.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two has already gotten past that first hurdle, surpassing the first film’s box office numbers and earning rave reviews from critics. Dune: Part One pulled in 10 Oscar nominations and a whopping six wins. How much better could the sequel do come awards time? Oppenheimer showed that there is a taste for large-scale blockbusters in best picture, but Dune: Part Two isn’t exactly about a real-life tortured soul who helped win World War II for the United States.
Mad Max: Fury Road did its own share of defying precedent when it screamed into the 2015 Oscar race. The fourth film in the Mad Max series leveled up in every conceivable way, ultimately earning 10 Oscar nominations and six wins (just like Dune). George Miller is again in the director’s chair for the franchise’s upcoming prequel film, Furiosa, which will see Anya Taylor-Joy step into the role that Charlize Theron played so definitively in the last film. But accomplished as Fury Road was, so much of its Oscar narrative was tied up with the element of surprise. How will Furiosa stack up to sky-high expectations instead—and can it surpass Fury Road in one of the few ways possible by scoring an acting nomination for Taylor-Joy?
Joker was another movie whose run to a best-picture nomination came as a surprise. Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix this year return with Joker: Folie à Deux, a tale of mad love between the title character and Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga). Clever casting may well win over a contingent of Joker skeptics from the first time around—surely plenty of people who dismissed the film out of hand might be interested in seeing what Gaga gets up to here. Certainly, the press tour won’t be boring.
Twenty-three years ago, a sword-and-sandal action flick took the best-picture Oscar. The question is, can Ridley Scott once again make an awards contender out of Gladiator? And is he even interested in doing so? Russell Crowe’s Maximus died at the end of the first film, but Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, and Pedro Pascal look to shore up the sequel’s star power. But Gladiator isn’t universally remembered as a great Oscar winner (defeating Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon didn’t help), which could make a double dip all the less likely.
THE BIG ONES
The above four films are all hoping that best picture’s recent trend toward maximalism (Oppenheimer, Barbie, Top Gun, Avatar, Dune) won’t end in 2025. A handful of nonsequels have the same hope—and there are few swings bigger than what Kevin Costner is attempting with Horizon: An American Saga. The Oscar-winning director of Dances With Wolves is making Westerns again—this time with an incredibly ambitious plan to release four films, two of which will debut this year: Chapter 1 on June 28 and Chapter 2 on August 16. Westerns aren’t exactly dominant at the Oscars these days; in the last 10 years, only three have cracked the best-picture lineup. But Costner is an Oscar legacy, and if he succeeds either critically or commercially with these movies, it will be quite an awards narrative.
At the complete opposite end of the spectrum is the big-screen adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical Wicked. If you watched this year’s Oscars, you know that Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are already out there promoting their performances as Elphaba and Glinda, respectively. Let’s hope they don’t burn themselves out by Thanksgiving, which is when the film premieres. Few movies are more presold than this one, but big, splashy movie musicals have been in free fall recently. Even Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, which scored a handful of nominations and a win for Ariana DeBose, got a tepid reception from audiences. There’s also the fact that while Wicked is incredibly popular, it’s not exactly revered as great musical theater.