2025 Oscar Predictions: BEST PICTURE and BEST DIRECTOR (September)

With the Venice, Telluride and Toronto film festivals behind us, the race has changed quite a bit since early summer (or has it?).

While Telluride is not an awards-based or driven fest, Michael Patterson’s Telluride Blog‘s yearly tabulation of parallel voting by critics and industry (of which I took part) alongside non-industry folks both put Sean Baker’s Anora at the top of their list of the best narrative feature they saw. Already the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes in May, Anora‘s cache keeps rising. While Telluride’s own cache of housing eventual Best Picture winners has fallen a bit – they’ve missed on the last three in a row to other festivals or, in the case of Oppenheimer, no festivals – films like Anora (NEON), Nickel Boys (Amazon MGM), Emilia Pérez (Netflix), September 5 (just picked up by Paramount for a prime Thanksgiving release) and Saturday Night (Sony Pictures) could factor into the Best Picture race in some form.

Venice brought Pedro Almodóvar his first major festival juried Best Film win (shocking to think about) with The Room Next Door, which stars Oscar winners Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, also happens to be his first English-language full feature. The track record for the Golden Lion, at least for English-language films, is pretty good as of late with 2019’s Joker, 2020’s Nomadland and 2023’s Poor Things all making the Best Picture cut at the Oscars with Nomadland winning. Each of those films also won a lead Oscar and in the case of The Room Next Door, Sony Pictures Classics has made the brave choice to position both Swinton and Moore as leads. But more on that in the Best Actress piece later.

Actor-turned-director Brady Corbet grabbed the Silver Lion for Best Director for his three and a half hour magnum opus The Brutalist, which A24 picked up post-festival. Already a piece of the Oscar puzzle, Corbet sits in a very good spot…as long as A24 can juggle its multiple films; it already had Sing Sing and also grabbed Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, among others. The epic will play the New York Film Festival next but doesn’t have a release date yet (neither does Queer, for that matter…tick tock).

Then TIFF came along and, for many trigger happy people, upended a lot of predictions when Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck won the TIFF People’s Choice Award. Since 2008, all but one winner here went on to a Best Picture nomination (Nadine Labaki’s 2011 film Where Do We Go Now?) but all of those films had something at the time that The Life of Chuck doesn’t: distribution. Last year’s People’s Choice winner, American Fiction, went on to nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor and won the Oscar for Adapted Screenplay. The previous year, The Fabelmans earned seven Oscar nominations but became the first TIFF winner in over 10 years to reap no wins. Emilia Pérez and Anora placed second and third, respectively. While many are easily tossing Chuck into their predictions, I’m holding off as there are too many contenders that are backed and with strategies in place. If it gets a sudden pick up and release date? Sure, then we’ll talk (just like with The Brutalist). But my gut says this might end up a new exception and not part of the rule.

It didn’t come as a huge surprise (or shouldn’t have) but last week it was announced that four-time Oscar winner Clint Eastwood’s newest feature, Juror #2, would be the closing film of AFI FEST on October 27 followed by a limited theatrical release kick off on November 1. That also happens to be the date for another AFI FEST debut, Robert Zemekis’s Here and was originally the bow for Edward Berger’s Conclave, which will now eschew a platform release for a wide release the week before (October 25).

Here are my 2025 Oscar predictions in Best Picture and Best Director for September.

BEST PICTURE

1. Conclave (Focus Features) – 10/25
2. Anora (NEON) – 10/18
3. Dune Part II (Warner Bros) – 3/1
4. The Brutalist (A24) – date TBA
5. Emilia Pérez (Netflix) – 11/1
6. A Complete Unknown (Searchlight Pictures) – 12/25
7. The Room Next Door (Sony Pictures Classics) – 12/20
8. Blitz (Apple Original Films) – 11/22
9. Nickel Boys (Amazon MGM) – 10/25
10. September 5 (Paramount Pictures) – 11/27

• 11. Gladiator II (Paramount Pictures) – 11/22
• 12. Sing Sing (A24) – 7/12
• 13. Saturday Night (Sony Pictures) – 9/27
• 14. Challengers (Amazon MGM) – 4/26
• 15. Juror #2 (Warner Bros) – 11/1
• 16. Queer (A24) – date TBA
• 17. A Real Pain (Searchlight Pictures) – 10/18
• 18. Nightbitch (Searchlight Pictures) – 12/6
• 19. Joker: Folie à Deux (Warner Bros) – 10/4
• 20. The Piano Lesson (Netflix) – 11/8

Next up: All We Imagine As Light (Janus/Sideshow) – 11/15, Babygirl (A24) – 12/25, Hard Truths (Bleecker Street) – 10/18, The Life of Chuck (TBA) – date TBA, The Seed of the Sacred Fig (NEON) – 11/27

Other contenders: The Apprentice (Briarcliff Entertainment), Better Man (Paramount Pictures) – 12/25, Civil War (A24) – 4/12, Dìdi (Focus Features) – 7/26, A Different Man (A24) – 9/20, The Fire Inside (Amazon MGM) – 12/25, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Warner Bros) – 5/24, Here (Sony Pictures/Columbia Pictures) – 11/1, His Three Daughters (Netflix) – 9/6, Hit Man (Netflix) – 6/7, Kinds of Kindness (Searchlight Pictures) – 6/28, Maria (Netflix) – date TBA, Megalopolis (Lionsgate) – 9/27, Nosferatu (Focus Features) – 12/25, The Substance (MUBI) – 9/20, The End (NEON) – 12/6, Unstoppable (Amazon MGM) – 12/25, We Live in Time (A24) – 10/11, Wicked Part I (Universal Pictures) – 11/22

2024 or 2025?: The Life of Chuck (TBA) – date TBA

BEST DIRECTOR

1. Edward Berger – Conclave (Focus Features)
2. Sean Baker – Anora (NEON)
3. Brady Corbet – The Brutalist (A24)
4. Jacques Audiard – Emilia Pérez (Netflix)
5. Denis Villeneuve – Dune Part II (Warner Bros)

• 6. James Mangold – A Complete Unknown (Searchlight Pictures)
• 7. Pedro Almodóvar – The Room Next Door (Sony Pictures Classics)
• 8. Steve McQueen – Blitz (Apple Original Films)
• 9. RaMell Ross – Nickel Boys (Amazon MGM)
• 10. Mohammad Rasoulof – The Seed of the Sacred Fig (NEON)

Next up: Payal Kapadia – All We Imagine as Light (Janus/Sideshow), Luca Guadagnino – Challengers (Amazon MGM), Ridley Scott – Gladiator II (Paramount Pictures), Clint Eastwood – Juror #2 (Warner Bros), Mike Flanagan – The Life of Chuck (TBA), Pablo Larraín – Maria (Netflix), Marielle Heller – Nightbitch (Searchlight Pictures), Malcolm Washington – The Piano Lesson (Netflix), Luca Guadagnino – Queer (A24), Jason Reitman – Saturday Night (Sony Pictures), Tim Fehlbaum – September 5 (Paramount Pictures), Greg Kwedar – Sing Sing (A24)

Other contenders: Halina Reijn – Babygirl (A24), Michael Gracey – Better Man (Paramount Pictures), Sean Wang – Dìdi (Focus Features), Rachel Morrison – The Fire Inside (Amazon MGM), George Miller – Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Warner Bros), Richard Linklater – Hit Man (Netflix), Mike Leigh – Hard Truths (Bleecker Street), Robert Zemekis – Here (Sony Pictures/Columbia Pictures), Azazel Jacobs – His Three Daughters (Netflix), Walter Salles – I’m Still Here (Sony Pictures Classics), Todd Phillips – Joker: Folie à Deux (Warner Bros), Yorgos Lanthimos – Kind of Kindness (Searchlight Pictures), Francis Ford Coppola – Megalopolis (Lionsgate), Jesse Eisenberg – A Real Pain (Searchlight Pictures), Coralie Fargeat – The Substance (MUBI), Joshua Oppenheimer – The End (NEON), William Goldenberg – Unstoppable (Amazon MGM), John Crowley – We Live in Time (A24), John M. Chu – Wicked Part I (Warner Bros)

2024 or 2025?: Mike Flanagan – The Life of Chuck (TBA)