2025 Oscar Predictions: BEST ACTRESS (December)

The hardest Oscar category of the season just got a lot harder.

Before critics and industry started their nominations and accolades, the bench of Best Actress hopefuls was so deep that I’m sure many of us thought (hoped?) that once those kicked off we’d start to see who the ‘real’ contenders were and getting close to finding our top 5 was going to be easier. Well, that didn’t happen.

While some remained strong, and got stronger, like Mikey Madison (Anora) and Karla Sofía Gascón (Emilia Pérez), who are also in the two of the top films in the overall race, it remains the most fluid category of the season. As a Volpi Cup winner for an English-language film, Nicole Kidman in Babygirl should be a lock, right? Well, she missed Critics Choice in a field of six. Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in Maria represents the most recognizable biopic performance of the year and the only drama Globe nominee to cross over at Critics Choice, but she’s not doing too well with regional critics’ nominations. Does she need them? Probably not. Fernanda Torres in Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here plays a real life person and has the compelling narrative of her mother Fernanda Montenegro being a nominee for a Salles film over 25 years ago (Central Station) but has that narrative taken much hold? Marianne Jean-Baptiste feels so close; with Gotham and CCA noms and a British Independent Film Awards win, her Oscar comeback is on the precipice of happening.

What of Cynthia Erivo in the massive blockbuster that is Wicked? If nominated, Erivo would become only the second Black woman in Oscar history to earn two Best Actress nominations, following Viola Davis (who lost both of her bids but won Supporting Actress for Fences). She would also join an equally exclusive club of Black women nominated for Best Actress in musicals, something that hasn’t happened in 70 years – Dorothy Dandridge for 1954’s Carmen Jones. 70 years.

And speaking of musicals, here’s where the real conundrum begins. With the Golden Globes splitting their lead acting categories between drama and comedy or musical, we have 12 nominees to help guide us to where early voting groups have landed. Now, the make up of the Globes (no longer the HPFA) is 334 journalists (something I think people forget, these aren’t industry folks, they’re mostly writers) from all over the world, no longer needing to be LA-based. While the Drama Globe nominees have the weight and star power of a Jolie and a Kidman (and Kate Winslet), it’s the C/M section that are giving us some of the top contenders: Madison, Gascón, Erivo and the comeback queen of the season, Demi Moore in The Substance. This is where it gets tricky; we haven’t had two musical performances get in at the Oscars since Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins and Debbie Reynolds in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, 60 years ago. The Academy has also never nominated four C/M lead actresses in the same year. Those are pretty substantial stats to overcome but every year at the Oscars is different and every year away from a stat is a year closer to breaking it. Just two years ago, Best Actor was comprised of all first-time nominees for the first time in 84 years. Anything can happen when the time is right.

The BAFTA longlists drop on January 3 with nominations on January 15 and right in between there the Screen Actors Guild will have their say with nominations on January 8. Academy Awards nominations will be announced January 17, 2025 and the 97th Oscars will be held on March 2.

Here are my 2025 Oscar predictions in Best Actress for December.

Next up (alphabetical): 

Other contenders: Jodie Comer – The Bikeriders (Focus Features), Lily Gladstone – Fancy Dance (Apple Original Films), Anna Kendrick – Woman of the Hour (Netflix), Julia Louis-Dreyfus – Tuesday (A24), Julianne Moore – The Room Next Door (Sony Pictures Classics), Julianne Nicholson – Janet Planet (A24), Florence Pugh – We Live in Time (A24), Emma Stone – Kinds of Kindness (Searchlight Pictures), Tilda Swinton – The End (NEON), Robin Wright – Here (Sony Pictures/Columbia)

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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