Our way-too-early Oscars 2025 predictions

Musical biopics are like catnip to the Academy, and Back To Black, based on the life and untimely death of British singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse, is just dramatic enough to get their attention. Marisa Abela, of HBO’s Industry, plays the uniquely talented but troubled Winehouse, and even does her own singing. The film was written by Matt Greenhalgh, and directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, who previously collaborated on the 2009 film Nowhere Boy, about the early life of John Lennon. If the film does turn out to be awards worthy, it would make for a compelling comeback story for Taylor-Johnson after being nominated in 2016 for a Golden Raspberry for Fifty Shades Of Grey. It’s a longshot, but this is Hollywood, where you’re only as good (or bad) as your last project.

For a while it looked like The Bikeriders might be part of the awards conversation this year, but like many others, it was moved to make way for the likes of Oppenheimer, Killers Of The Flower Moon, and Past Lives. Now that the field is wide open again, it’ll have a head start building up some buzz throughout the year once it finally comes out this June. Directed by Jeff Nichols and set in the midwest in the late 1960s, the film provides a gritty, insider view of a very specific era of motorcycle culture. Austin Butler plays a biker torn between his loyalty to his woman (played by Jodie Comer, who’s been the subject of Oscar speculation since the film premiered in Telluride last year) and his club. The ensemble also includes Tom Hardy, Norman Reedus, Michael Shannon, and Mike Faist.

Speaking of Mike Faist, we’ll get to see even more of him this year in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. He’s one third of the film’s weird love triangle, balanced out by Zendaya and Josh O’Connor. Guadagnino is no stranger to awards hype, having received plenty of acclaim for directing Call Be By Your Name. His work often explores the nature of love and desire, and it looks like this one will be yet another variation on that theme. With a cast this strong and the world of tennis as a symbolically rich backdrop, this film is worth keeping on your radar. It opens in theaters on April 26, but a future streaming release could give it an additional boost later in the year.

We can’t count director Edward Berger out of awards season after his previous film, the German-language adaptation of All Quiet On The Western Front, earned nine Oscar nominations, and took home four statues, including Best International Feature Film. This year he’s taking on papal politics in Conclave, another film with literary roots. This one, based on the book of the same name by Robert Harris, is a fictionalized account of a power struggle within the Vatican following the death of a pope. Ralph Fiennes stars as the cardinal tasked with presiding over the conclave to choose the next pope, and dealing with secrets that complicate the process. Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini also star. Besides its pedigree, the film’s November 1 release date seems like a good sign Conclave is poised for an Oscar campaign.

Denis Villeneuve’s first Dune film was nominated for 10 Oscars and won six of them, so it’s reasonable to expect the second one, which offered some satisfying payoffs to the plotlines it set up, to do just as well in 2025. Those wins were all in technical categories, but the second one might get a few nods in the performance categories too. Timothée Chalamet for Best Actor? Why not? Rebecca Ferguson and Austin Butler for best supporting? They’d deserve it. It’s also a chance for the Academy to make up for snubbing Villeneuve in the directing category last time. While genre films have historically had a difficult time getting the members to take them seriously, there have been exceptions—and Dune was one of them.

Is there room for two epic genre films set in vast, sandy landscapes at the Oscars? We’d like to think so. Just like Dune: Part Two could benefit from the success of its predecessor, Furiosa is a sequel to a film that got a lot of love from the Academy the first time around. Back in 2016, Mad Max: Fury Road was also nominated for 10 Oscars and also won six of them, in many of the same categories. Although, unlike Denis Villeneuve, George Miller did get nominated for Best Director. With these two releases both in the mix we could be headed for a sci-fi sequel showdown for the ages.

With his 2019 film Joker, Todd Phillips managed to do what so many directors before him could not—get the Oscars to take films based on comic-book characters seriously. While big, noisy blockbusters from DC and Marvel always tend to do well in the technical categories, Joker also scored a directing nomination for Phillips and a nomination for Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix, who would go on to win. It received a total of 11 nominations in all, including Best Picture. This year’s sequel, Joker: Folie À Deux, adds another genre to the mix of thriller, action, and superheroes. It also happens to be a musical. And we know how the Academy feels about musicals starring Lady Gaga, so that’s a plus too.

If Martin Scorsese can find late-career success with Killers Of The Flower Moon, one of the most celebrated directors of all time can do it too. Despite his recent track record (or lack of one—he hasn’t directed a film in more than a decade), Francis Ford Coppola makes a return to cinema with his long-gestating Megalopolis. The film, about an architect who sets out to reshape New York City into a utopia after a disaster, is a massive passion project that he’s been thinking about since the 1980s. That’s almost as intriguing as its stacked cast of big-name stars, which includes Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, Nathalie Emmanuel, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jason Schwartzman, Dustin Hoffman, D. B. Sweeney, and Giancarlo Esposito. Sure, there have been reports of turmoil behind the scenes, but that’s just part of Coppola’s process (it didn’t hurt Apocalypse Now). With only one teaser image to base our opinion on, we’re basing this prediction strictly on optimism and our imagination.

Kieran Culkin has the opportunity to parlay his awards streak for his captivating performance as Roman Roy in the final season of Succession and take it to a whole new level with his next project, A Real Pain. After a celebrated premiere at Sundance this past January, the sophomore directing effort from actor-turned-filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg is already gaining momentum. That’s the same path that Past Lives took to get to the Oscars this year, and that film wasn’t the first to do so. So there’s some precedent here, is what we’re saying. Culkin and Eisenberg star as estranged cousins who take a trip to Poland together in honor of their beloved grandmother. What starts as a tour of historical sites becomes an opportunity to air long standing personal and family grievances. It’s the kind of performance-dependent character study we can easily see Academy members warming up to.

This drama about a former war correspondent and her messy relationships will be director Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature film in English. That’s already an interesting twist before you even take into consideration the film’s cast, including Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, and John Turturro. On paper, The Room Next Door seems to have all the elements it takes to make it to Oscar night. The Academy has always had a soft spot for the Spanish director, and they’ve been increasingly inclusive of international features in the major categories in recent years. His last film, Parallel Mothers, earned Penélope Cruz a nomination for Best Actress, and many predicted she’d win it too (she wound up losing to Jessica Chastain for The Eyes Of Tammy Faye). We wouldn’t be surprised to see any of the three stars here wind up with a performance nomination, but Almodóvar could be in the running this time too.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus has done some first-rate dramatic work in independent films in recent years, including her underrated performance in You Hurt My Feelings last year. But you’ve never seen her like this before. Maybe because there’s never been a movie like Tuesday before. First-time filmmaker Daina Oniunas-Pusić weaves a modern fairytale about a mother and her terminally ill daughter who are visited by death in the form of a grizzled, magical macaw. It’s pretty heavy material, there’s no getting around that, but that’s never bothered the Academy before. Whatever happens this year in terms of awards, this role ought to be transformative for Louis-Dreyfus’ career going forward.

Every Oscars race has to have a sentimental favorite, right? A crowd pleaser. A money maker. Something for the viewers at home. It can’t all be doom and gloom, after all. We already got a little preview of what might be in store in 2025 during this year’s ceremony, when Wicked stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande came out to present a couple of awards in color-coded attire evoking their characters, Elphaba and Galinda. Based on the trailers alone, the film looks to have an elaborate production design to rival the hit Broadway musical it’s based on, and there’s a good chance it could also land in at least a few other technical categories too, like costumes, hair and makeup, or sound. So yeah, we think it’s quite possible Erivo and Grande might be back on the stage next year to represent their multi-nominated film, and could even be nominees themselves. As someone told us lately, “Everyone deserves the chance to fly.”