2025 Oscars: Will Any Film Directed by a Woman Crack the Best Picture Category?

At the moment, it doesn’t look good for films directed by women to crack the top ten in the Best Picture race or the Best Director race. On the other hand, all it takes is for someone to notice and rally voters around a cause to make that happen, as we saw with both LIttle Women and Women Talking. Someone needs to make Little Women Talking.

Either way, in the old days I would have made a big deal about this. It isn’t fair, I would cry. Little did I know the entire industry would upend itself to ensure equal representation across the board, which would, in the end, destroy the business, or very nearly.

It seems as though the road to hell was paved with good intentions. Now, representation matters less than merit. And that is a problem for Hollywood because we need the best writers and directors putting out films today. We don’t have that exactly.

Studios and productions are monitored for this and given a rating by various activist groups as to how well they have adhered to the code. On top of that, box office is no longer a factor. For decades, the free market determined who was successful enough to keep making movies but that is no longer the case. No one is safe in Hollywood now. Not from the screeching hive mind scolds and not from executives who must protect themselves by ensuring visible representation in front of and behind the camera.

But awards pundits aren’t thinking that way. We sort of keep in mind representation — what will “they” vote for? But we’re not exactly counting heads, otherwise there would be a film by a woman “in the conversation.” At the moment, there is not.

On my contender tracker, I have the following films:

Anora
Conclave
Emilia Perez
The Brutalist
A Real Pain
Hard Truths
Sing Sing
Nickel Boys
Saturday Night
The Substance
Dune 2
The Piano Lesson
Inside Out 2
The Life of Chuck

The only two films that would have a remote shot at a Best Picture nomination are Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, which opens this weekend in the US and in various other countries.

And All We Imagine as Light, written and directed by Payal Kapadia.

Both of these films premiered at Cannes, both are written and directed by women, and both star two women. It’s everything Hollywood has been asking for. All We Imagine as Light won the Grand Prix at Cannes. It could have been submitted by either France or India for International Feature. Now that France has chosen Emilia Perez, that means it’s likely All We Imagine as Light will be India’s submission, setting the International Feature category up for a battle royale.

You’ll recall that last year, France did not select Anatomy of a Fall for International Feature, choosing instead (the far better film) Pot Au Feu. Everyone threw a fit, and before long, Anatomy of a Fall was ushered through to the Best Picture and Best Director categories and would ultimately win Original Screenplay.

So it would be ironic if France chooses Emilia Perez and then loses in the category to All We Imagine as Light. It may go that way, I do not know. But it’s interesting.

The Substance will not have that advantage, so it will need to gain enough word of mouth and buzz to push it to the top of the ballots.

I expect that All We Imagine is Light could be the film the critics rally around to push into the race as they have in the past with films like Drive My Car and Triangle of Sadness. But that will mean that Emilia Perez and All We Imagine as Light will land in two major categories, like Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall last year. And it makes it more likely that they will win something.

All We Imagine as Light has a perfect score at RT:

The Substance sits a bit lower with 88%:

These films have all been celebrated in their own right. None of them have been elevated because they were directed by women. Yet, the race doesn’t seem to have room for them, at least not at the moment. Voters will need to be pressured into rallying around one or the other or both.  Thus, representation will have to matter if people want to avoid what will be angry op-eds when the nominations come down and all five directing nominees are men and all ten Best Picture nominees are directed by men.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you!