The 2024/2025 Oscar Season: What Have We Learned and What Does the Future Hold?

I have a confession to make. I don’t really like predicting that much anymore. Don’t get me wrong, it’s probably why most of you are here and have been here since the beginning and I thank you. Don’t worry though, I’m not bailing on them or biting the hands that feed me. I just think there is often more interesting, and insightful, commentary to be had in the aftermath; the why and how things happen, the hindsight, and the knowledge we gather as a result.

That being said, from early predictions to final ones, at least I didn’t pick Isabella Rossellini to win out of nowhere. I never had Wicked or A Complete Unknown in the top spot. Anora and Conclave were in my top since last summer and never left, Emilia Pérez in the top five. The Brutalist, our true #2 this season, admittedly came later for me, with a mention in August and top 5 start in September. Being able to gage changes in the race is obviously a key element to good (or even decent) predicting being right early, and consistent, will always show you to be the victor.

Let’s dive into what happened this season; why Anora won, how festivals shape the Oscar race and why Netflix keeps missing out. Oh, and stan wars, controversies and drama that almost make Harvey Weinstein’s campaigns seem tame.

NEON Shines Bright

Five years ago NEON made Oscar history when Parasite won Best Picture. Kicking off at Cannes with a Palme d’Or win, the Bong Joon-ho darkly comic drama became the first non-English language film to win the top prize from the Academy. Last weekend, NEON was at the scene of Oscar history once again as Anora‘s near sweep netted four individual wins – Best Picture, Best Director, Original Screenplay and Film Editing – setting a new record for the most wins for one person for a single film, besting the three earned by Alejandro G. Iñarrítu for 2014’s Birdman and Walt Disney’s 1953 run for four different films. The young studio ran the kind of campaign that any studio would dream of; it was simultaneously a frontrunner and an underdog. Without an Oppenheimer or Everything Everywhere type of winner, the race was open pretty much all season, or at least constantly evolving between Anora, Conclave, The Brutalist and even Emilia Pérez at a point. Despite being such a huge critics’ favorite during critics’ awards season, when it came to the television industry and non-industry awards, Anora struggled at first. Getting blanked at the Golden Globes – Mikey Madison became the first Best Actress Oscar first winner to lose the Comedy/Musical Golden Globe since Frances McDormand in Fargo (who lost to Madonna in Evita, ultimately not Oscar-nominated) – then lost everything at Critics Choice except Best Picture and then blanked again at SAG. BAFTA gave us the peek at the Best Actress race when Madison finally bested Demi Moore but it was the one-two punch of DGA and PGA in the same night that told the real story. At both events, and at the Spirit Awards where Anora really shined, director Sean Baker highlighted in all of his speeches the importance of longer theatrical runs, the shoestring budgets and how working on an independent film for 3+ years is often financially untenable, especially with the previous revenue stream of DVD sales now dried up and box office in a short time being king. Everything changed for Anora on February 8 at the DGA Awards.

I want to take a minute to present where and why I think the race really changed and why The Brutalist, after its top wins at the Golden Globes and perceived soft frontrunner status, crumbled. Early on, the overriding narrative of Brady Corbet’s epic saga was the marvel of him being able to make it for just $10M, but it came at, well, a price. The film was entirely in Hungary, standing in for Philadelphia. It’s not an entirely unique thing to do, several films are shot in Eastern Europe to help curb budgets. Oscar nominees Dune: Part Two and Maria made use of the country’s tax breaks and massive soundstages. But it became almost an entire personality of the film’s lore itself, as did word that the labor used, or overused, exploiting what are also lax labor and union laws. I think something about that clicked with directors and producers as the industry was still reeling from double strikes on top of a worldwide pandemic. Then, if the city couldn’t suffer any more, the historically devastating fires in January brought tinseltown to another halt. All of these events pushed LA to its limits but also, as with most tragedies or catastrophes, it brought the city together. But it was DGA President Lesli Linka Glatter’s DGA Awards opening speech that clinched it for me. Hammering home that they need to“Bring production back to the United States, and bring it back in force.” Glatter, who lost her home in the fires, emphasized that, following years of turmoil caused by the strikes, pandemic, and recent wildfires, now is the time to “reinvest and recommit” to the communities and workers who built our industry — Directors and their teams, Actors, Writers, IA crews, and Teamsters. She continued, saying “I urge you to insist that your projects be shot where they are set,” Glatter said. “If it’s California, demand to shoot in California, and the same is true for New York, Illinois, Georgia, Mexico… If we all commit to work together, bringing jobs back home to where they are most needed to our city of angels, which has been forced to its knees.” The crowd roared with enthusiastic praise and thunderous applause. It was at that moment I knew, that at least on this side of the pond, it was over for Corbet and indeed, Sean Baker was the (then) shocking winner who then literally minutes later and a mile away would then win the PGA. Oscar winner voting began just three days later. Sometimes momentum can be a false flag but sometimes it’s real and the only thing we have. Taking place just days before Oscar winner voting began, the wheels were in motion and NEON had another winner on its hands.

The Festival Run

Where you get your start on an Oscar run is still important and a strong festival presence has definitely been been where it’s at for the last quarter century, but it didn’t start out that way. Going back to 2000, six out of the first seven Best Picture winners that decade had no festival run at all: Gladiator (2000), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Chicago (2002), The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003), Million Dollar Baby (2004) and The Departed (2006) all represent the (near) closing of an era for Hollywood movies and Oscar, relying solely on their theatrical release to drive their awards push. In the middle there is 2005’s Crash, a Toronto premiere and, while it was the biggest upset of the 2000s, the presumptive winner that year, Brokeback Mountain, was a Venice premiere and would have ruined that streak anyway. The only recent film to pull that off was 2023’s Oppenheimer, the Universal summer release that pocketed nearly $1B worldwide.

Anora marks the fourth Cannes world premiere to win Best Picture since 2000 but it’s not quite the golden goose that Venice and Telluride are, each boasting five starters that went on to the big prize. Nomadland (2020) was the last Venice premiere to win but we’re nearly at 10 years since the last Telluride premiere did, 2016’s Moonlight. Time for the mountain town to step it up. It was a good year for Cannes and Venice, with Anora, Emilia Pérez, The Substance and Flow getting their starts on the Croisette and The Brutalist on the Lido before their wins at the Dolby.

Were it not for more than a few upsets (2005’s Brokeback Mountain, 2016’s La La Land, and 2018’s Roma to a lesser extent), Venice would be the dominant presence in the first festival run lineup. Let’s take a look.

5: Venice (The Hurt Locker, Birdman, Spotlight, The Shape of Water, Nomadland)
5: Telluride (Slumdog Millionaire, The King’s Speech, Argo, 12 Years a Slave, Moonlight)
4: Cannes (No Country for Old Men, The Artist, Parasite, Anora)
2: Toronto (Crash, Green Book)
1: Sundance (CODA)
1: SXSW (Everything Everywhere All At Once)

That Oppenheimer win last year keeps the ‘no festival run’ winner total firmly out in front with seven, the aforementioned that includes Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Chicago, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Million Dollar Baby, and The Departed.

Anora joins a rather elite group of films to win Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing, plus a screenplay and at least one acting award. What’s most impressive about it, and the list, is the 28-year gap between 1994’s Forrest Gump and 2022’s Everything Everywhere All At Once. Didn’t happen once in the 1960s either. The first was 1939’s Gone with the Wind.

2022: Everything Everywhere All At Once
1994: Forrest Gump
1982: Gandhi
1971: The French Connection
1970: Patton
1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai
1954: On the Waterfront
1953: From Here to Eternity
1946: The Best Years of Our Lives
1939: Gone with the Wind

Stans and Controversies Hit New Highs (and Lows)

The old days of simple whisper campaigns and sneaky blind items planted to trip up contenders are a thing of the past after this season’s wealth of unforced errors and toxic levels of stan culture poisoning the well. Early in the year when it seemed like Lady Gaga could be an acting contender for the Joker: Folie à Deux, adding to the known entities of Selena Gomez in Emilia Pérez (a Best Actress co-winner with her cast at Cannes) and Ariana Grande in Wicked, social media became an unnavigable hotspot of landmines that even Princess Diana couldn’t help remove in time before detonation. While Gaga became a non-factor, the wars between Gomez and Grande waged on, overly propping up prognosticators that predicted one over the other and lambasting those that didn’t. The Cold War may be over but the looming threat of your favorite pop girlie being an Oscar contender has thousands of recruits ready to die on the front lines.

But no amount of crazed stans could compete with the utter self-implosion of Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón. After winning two major prizes at Cannes – the Jury Prize (3rd place, essentially) and the quadruple Best Actress win – Netflix snatched up the rights to Jacques Audiard’s audacious trans crime musical that put Gascón front and center of the upcoming campaign. A trans actress on the precipice of making awards history on her way to Oscar history, the Spanish actress was brash and outspoken, constantly clapping back to anti-trans comments that targeted her specifically, especially as the film continued to win awards and grow in visibility as a contender. Her aggressive take no prisoners attitude became a calling card and, at the time and specific to the situation, made it easy to root for her to triumph over nameless, faceless bullies. But after the film’s Golden Globe wins and historic Screen Actors Guild nominations, not so old tweets from Gascón resurfaced, as old tweets often do (remember the Green Book writer agreeing with Trump about Muslims in New Jersey cheering 9/11?) and they revealed a dark and ugly side of Gascón filled with racist an inexcusable commentary. In a tweet reacting to the 2021 Academy Awards ceremony, Gascón wrote, translated to English, “More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films, I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M. Apart from that, an ugly, ugly gala.” A 2020 tweet said “Is it just my impression or are there more muslims in Spain? Every time I go to pick up my daughter from school there are more women with their hair covered and their skirts down to their heels. Next year instead of English we’ll have to teach Arabic.”

Despite these, and dozens more including comments about George Floyd and COVID-19 both immersed in racist rhetoric, Gascón insisted “I am neither racist nor anything that all these people have tried to make others believe I am,” while deleting the offensive tweets. Gascón continued to comment and do television interviews, all without the knowledge of Netflix, at this point having lost all control and contact with the actress, who was holed up in her apartment in Spain. With connection cut off, Netflix severed their ties with Gascón, temporarily, refusing to pay for her travel to the upcoming Screen Actors Guild, Critics Choice and BAFTA awards, all of which she was nominated for. She opted not to attend, and her director both distanced himself from her and embraced her in reactions and speeches when he won a prize, as did co-star Zoe Saldaña, who swept the Best Supporting Actress awards all the way to the Oscars. Online, people demanded Gascón’s nominations be rescinded. It would have been unprecedented levels of unprecedented, as the Academy has more than welcomed some of Hollywood’s most problematic people back with nominations and wins. Gascón being an unknown made her an easy target though, what blowback would the Oscars or Hollywood incur from an unknown actor vs a Mel Gibson? Still, all awards bodies ignored the requests and carried on.

Ultimately, Netflix and Gascón reconnected and the streamer agreed to pay for her travel to the Oscars but from the outside it was unclear what kind, if any, agreement had been made as to her ‘behavior’ at the big show. She opted not to walk the red carpet, a smart move, and surely an agreed upon one to avoid the throngs of reporters and journalists dying for an inappropriate quote. It all culminated in Oscars host Conan O’Brien finding the balance of addressing the issue on his very public stage but also making it funny. One of his best jokes of the night centered around the controversy with O’Brien stating that “Anora uses the f-word 479 times. That’s 3 more than the record set by Karla Sofía Gascón’s publicist.” He also jokingly said that “Karla, if you’re going to tweet about the Oscars, remember, my name is Jimmy Kimmel.”

But what does this mean for studios and publicists moving forward with potential unknown contenders? Should there be a team set specifically to devour the social media of an actor or writer or director that is being seen by the public for the first time? In the days and weeks after the controversy was unfolding, plenty of online commentators felt that a social media scrub was the bare minimum a studio should be doing, or should have done, to avoid dust ups that could stand in their way of a successful awards run. It’s obviously a smart idea and will have to be implemented going forward but how much did Gascón’s actions actually negatively impact Emilia Pérez? As the race started truly identifying itself, EP was pretty much out of the running for the top prize (as was Gascón in the face of the Madison-Moore-Torres of it all) and it won two of the three awards it was ‘always’ going to win. The real pain came when voters found where to leave it behind, International Feature Film, giving France yet another loss and giving Brazil its first ever win with I’m Still Here. Sony Pictures Classics ran a stellar phase 2 campaign for ISH, opening the door for voters to make what felt like a clear statement. Which brings us to…

The Netflix Conundrum

No one wants a Best Picture more than Netflix. For the last 10 years, since the Foreign Language Film (as it was called then) for The Square, Netflix’s sights have been on the big one and it’s been out of their grasp for a decade. While the streamer often has some of the year’s best reviewed films that wins tons of accolades, 2018’s Roma, 2019’s The Power of the Dog (both of which won Best Director but lost to Green Book and CODA, respectively, neither of which even had director nominations), the Academy has kept Best Picture at arm’s length for the studio disrupter year after year. Often releasing their major awards contenders in very few theaters and only for the minimum one week qualifying run before December 31, the Academy took an even stronger stance two years ago, requiring a longer run and in more U.S. cities, a clear shot across the Ted Sarandos’ bow. After being lapped by another streamer (Apple with CODA and it’s extremely limited theatrical run) and now NEON twice in five years, how can Netflix go back to the drawing board to find its path to the Best Picture? The streamer wants to make a play to host the Oscars when ABC’s tenure runs out in 2028, which will be the 100th Academy Awards, no less. Netflix began as a disrupter of the industry with its DVD delivery service before venturing into original programming and original films. Every year they scour every single film festival for films to scoop up, often at exorbitant prices only they can afford (with seemingly no end in sight) but they’ll never be seen as the underdog in the Oscar race. That has been and will be their Achilles heel, but I do think they’ve made attempts to loosen their grip on the forced ‘this is the movie you must reward’ position that they’ve taken in years past, or at least as was perceived by voters. When you’re someone as huge as Netflix with the budgets they have to work with for awards campaigns, it makes it hard for their films to be discoveries for audiences and voters alike. The commitment to anti-theatrical runs will likely continue to fail and these last few years are prime examples of it. Even as the Academy membership grows and changes, the theatrical run is clearly a major factor and in this game of chicken between Netflix and the Academy continues to play out against Goliath who wants to be a David. If, and only if, Netflix can bend and make a real play for long, extended theatrical runs of their Best Picture hopefuls (or at least for box office, like it seems they might want for Greta Gerwig’s Narnia series), and find a way to be positioned as the underdog, they’re not going to nab that golden statue.