2025 Oscar Predictions: The Boomers Say Goodbye as the Revolutionaries Advance

If you’re ever feeling depressed about the current state of cinema, look no further than three cinematic revolutionaries with films in the race this year. Sean Baker’s Anora, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist and Coralie Fargaet’s The Substance are reinventing the form and perhaps, in their own way, setting a new course for what defines an “Oscar movie.” None of their films could be considered traditional Oscar bait. Perhaps the Best Picture winner of the 21st century to really kick down tradition and reinvent the new path forward for the Oscars might have been Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. We may not have seen it that way at the time, because many of us were thinking about history being made with the “woke bona fides,” and it being the first crossover from International Feature to win the top prize.

That it was able to beat 1917, The Irishman, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Joker means something more, I think. Looking back, there was more to Parasite’s triumph than Oscar voters hoping to avoid the morning-after headlines condemning the Academy, had they chosen all white winners instead. In 2020, on the cusp of COVID and the summer of the “Great Awokening,” the revolution in the streets was a signal that nothing would ever be the same.

In hindsight, Parasite’s message and structure set a fresh precedent for a new wave of movies that will come to define the next era in the post-Boomer cinema. This sort of sensation was repeated with Everything Everywhere All At Once, a movie that generated much of the same enthusiasm and online conversations as Parasite. Just on the basis of the inventive structure, regardless of the Woketacular themes, we can begin to see a different kind of cinema emerging, or at least I can.

We can’t say the same for Nomadland or CODA, both of which are quite traditional in their approach. Each seems driven by the desire to “make history,” as opposed to any artistic goal to take the medium in a new direction. They’re good movies, but they fit comfortably into the old-school model of small character-driven dramas.

The way I look back on Academy history is through the generations of social context and the cultural movements that influenced them. We can see how American culture has evolved by examining parallel phases of the Oscar race.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, America was in the thrall of a much more bohemian-minded, pre-code culture. Daring filmmakers took enormous creative risks to explore socially progressive themes that moralists regarded as culturally subversive. It’s beyond the scope of this post to delve much deeper, but the website pre-code.com lays out all of the themes that were permissible in movies back then, like the openly man-on-man affection casually included in All Quiet on the Western Front:

Or in The Divorcee”

“Shearer’s portrayal of a good woman with a healthy sexual appetite who is not condemned for pursuing either in or out of marriage was revolutionary at the time.”

The pre-code era lasted until around 1935, when Hollywood decided it had better clean up its act before loud religious objections and government regulation did it for them. Just six years later, America would enter WWII and initiate one of the biggest influences on the Oscars in their history — movies about wartime heroics, patriotism, moral dilemmas, and a greater awareness of global tragedies, like the Holocaust.

Throughout the era prior to WWII, Hollywood and the Oscars were matriarchal, with an enormous number of films centered around women claiming dominance. There were even female screenwriters and directors. This entire era, I’d say, is “collectivist,” very much like the one we just lived through and the one that is now coming to an end.

Hollywood and the Oscars changed dramatically after WWII. In 1944, partly due to a drastic cutback in studio productions, the Oscar ballot with ten slots for Best Picture came to an end. After Casablanca’s win (the ultimate WWII movie) the Best Picture category was cut back to five nominees, with Going My Way being the first to win. From then on, the Oscars entered the “individualist” era when the bond between Best Picture and Best Director defined the race. It was a king-making era where strong men prevailed. What’s that saying?

Nothing like a world war to remind any nation why we need strong men. That pre-code bohemian attitude wasn’t going to win a war against Hitler, that’s for sure. I fear we may be entering a pre-WWIII era right now. If we are, then very likely the same pattern is about to play out.

We’re in the “good times create weak men” and “weak men create hard times” era. Looking back over history, I have to wonder if societies need war to shake us out of our self-obsession. Who knows. Either way, we can see these broad influences throughout Academy history based on generations.

We know the Greatest Generation was prominent in the Academy throughout the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. But as their kids, the Boomers, grew up and began to taste the “Strong men create good times” era, they exploded with creativity and created some of the best movies we’ve ever seen in this country — all through the 1960s and 1970s. That was what we might call the glory days of the Oscars. It’s never gotten better than that. The Godfather remains the high-water mark for Hollywood and the Oscars.

We watched the shift from the old guard that voted for those war movies like Patton and into the new guard that nominated movies like Five Easy Pieces. Many of us who know film history think it will never get better than that era. But remember, generations die off and memory fades. My daughter, who is 26 (a year older than this site), doesn’t have that memory of the best era for movies. She only knows this era. What she knows about it is that movies don’t excite her. They don’t draw her in. They have nothing new to say to her because they speak for generations past.

On the other hand, Sean Baker has changed things in that way. One of my daughter’s roommates in college said he stopped watching the Oscars when The Florida Project was ignored. He was disillusioned with them for not awarding such an original, inventive movie. Now that Sean Baker is back with Anora, which is (in my opinion) better than The Florida Project, maybe that generation will start to see the Oscars differently.

When I first began covering the Oscars, Gladiator won Best Picture. It was 1999. We’d just come off the Bill Clinton impeachment and George W. Bush’s narrow and controversial victory. We would then enter the 9/11 era of mass surveillance, the rise of the internet, and seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The generation that would influence the Oscars in that era was still mainly the Baby Boomers. But back then, there wasn’t much to say about life that gathered us together as one, as WWII had done.

But there’s no doubt that once 2008 rolled around and Barack Obama was elected, half of the country found a collective sense of purpose. Kathryn Bigelow made history in 2009 as the first woman to win Picture and Director for the only film about the Iraq war to gain Oscar recognition. This was also when social media and the iPhone changed the way we thought about screens. Though most of us didn’t realize it then, we were already dividing and “speciating.” Hollywood and the Oscars would close itself off from the rest of the country and even the business of Hollywood, and it would focus primarily on what some might call “do-gooder” movies. Good People doing Good Things.

All of this is to say — with movies like Sean Baker’s Anora, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance — we are now seeing something new happening that goes beyond the usual “good people doing good things” of the past ten years or so. I think we can look at films like Parasite and Everything Everywhere All At Once as movies that broke with the traditional thematic structure of films we see in the Oscar race. And now, we can look at Anora and The Substance as films that break with the narrative structure of what we usually see.

I’m not saying all of these will land in the Best Picture race. But it seems that there is a new generation of filmmakers upon us—a “new wave,” if you will—and that’s something to be excited about.

I mean heck, it beats thinking the whole thing is about to collapse and die, right?

Looking through the films on the Contender Tracker so far and adding in the films yet to be seen, I divide them this way:

Anora – New Wave
Conclave – Traditional
Emilia Perez – New Wave
The Brutalist – New Wave
A Real Pain – Traditional
Hard Truths – Traditional
Sing Sing – Traditional
Nickel Boys – New Wave
Saturday Night – Traditional
The Substance – New Wave
Dune 2 – Traditional
All We Imagine as Light – Traditional
The Piano Lesson – Traditional
Inside Out 2 – Traditional
The Life of Chuck – Traditional

Upcoming:

Gladiator II – Traditional
Blitz – Traditional
A Complete Unknown – Traditional
Joker: Folie à Deux – New Wave
Eden – Traditional
Wicked – Traditional
Nightbitch – New Wave

That’s how I see this moment, which is why I feel that crackling heat for Anora as a strong Best Picture contender and perhaps a win for Sean Baker. When a film like this appears on the scene, people do take notice. It happens once a generation. However, there’s still a chance that something more traditional can derail the revolution, at least once in a while. Traditional voters most likely remain the dominant voting bloc in the Academy, the influx of new voters notwithstanding. At the moment, however, I don’t see anything that can challenge Anora.

Traditionalism vs. New Wave films is a battle we saw play out when The Sting landed a win between the Godfather and the Godfather II. And we could see something like that play out this year too, where the sentiments of the past conflict with the urgency of the future.

In that case, I could maybe see a movie like Sing Sing or Conclave challenging Anora, maybe The Brutalist sits between the two.

Predictions

As usual, I’d like to highlight some newbies on the scene. But you know me, I can’t remember if I named these guys already. Maybe they hate me, who knows. Perhaps they’ve been part of an online Twitter mob or blocked me on Twitter—I have no idea. But I’ll assume they are semi-normal and I’ll give them a tip of the hat:

Last year, around this time, Erik Anderson of Awards Watch had:

Oppenheimer (Universal Pictures) (-)
Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple Original Films/Paramount Pictures) (-)
Poor Things (Searchlight Pictures) (-)
The Zone of Interest (A24) (-)
American Fiction (MGM/Orion) (▲)
All of Us Strangers (Searchlight Pictures) (▲)
Priscilla (A24) (▼)
Origin (NEON) (▲)
The Color Purple (Warner Bros) (▼)
Nyad (Netflix) (-)

And last year around this time I had:

Best Picture
Oppenheimer
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Holdovers
Poor Things
Barbie
Maestro
American Fiction
The Boys in the Boat
Past Lives
The Color Purple

So this time around, I did better than Erik. Why? I have no idea. I still had a blind spot about Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall. But in general, I was getting closer to the right 10 choices.

Let’s take a look at Erik Anderson’s predictions for this week (as of September 17):

BEST PICTURE

Conclave (Focus Features) – 10/25

Anora (NEON) – 10/18

Dune Part II (Warner Bros) – 3/1

The Brutalist (A24) – date TBA

Emilia Pérez (Netflix) – 11/1

A Complete Unknown (Searchlight Pictures) – 12/25

The Room Next Door (Sony Pictures Classics) – 12/20

Blitz (Apple Original Films) – 11/22

Nickel Boys (Amazon MGM) – 10/25

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

And for Director he has:

BEST DIRECTOR

Edward Berger – Conclave (Focus Features)

Sean Baker – Anora (NEON)

Brady Corbet – The Brutalist (A24)

Jacques Audiard – Emilia Pérez (Netflix)

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)

Full disclosure, I haven’t seen a lot of these movies so my guesses are going to be less accurate than if I had seen them. In fact, studio publicists may think twice about blacklisting me, since I can really push a movie I love and perhaps get it the attention it needs to push it into the race (sometimes). So far, I’ve been getting the cold shoulder. It’s a good thing I’m a member of the Critics Choice (they are among the few groups that still have enough integrity not to blacklist someone for words said or opinions held) and that enables me to see some movies.

I will be seeing Joker: Folie à Deux soon. At the moment, I feel like its reception in Venice means it’s probably not a Best Picture contender. But who knows. We will have to wait and see.

This is how I see the race as of today.

Best Picture
Anora
The Brutalist
Conclave
Emilia Perez
A Real Pain
Sing Sing
Dune 2
Hard Truths
All We Imagine as Light
Gladiator II (not yet seen)
Alts: Saturday Night, The Substance, A Complete Unknown, Joker Folie a Deux

Best Director
Sean Baker, Anora
Brady Corbet, The Brutalist
Edward Berger, Conclave
Jaques Audiard, Emilia Pérez
Payal Kapadia, All We Imagine as Light
Alt. Coralie Fargeat, The Substance; Ridley Scott, Gladiator II; Jason Reitman, Saturday Night; RaMell Ross, Nickel Boys; Jesse Eisenberg, A Real Pain

Best Actor
Adrien Brody, The Brutalist
Ralph Fiennes, Conclave
Colman Domingo, Sing Sing
Joaquin Phoenix, Joker Folie a Deux
Daniel Craig, Queer
Alts: Jesse Eisenberg, A Real Pain; Paul Mescal, Gladiator II; John David Washington, The Piano Lesson

Best Actress
Mikey Madison, Anora
Karla Sofia Gascon, Emilia Pérez
Angelina Jolie, Maria
Nicole Kidman, Baby Girl
Saoirse Ronan, The Outrun

Alts: Amy Adams, Nightbitch; Cynthia Erivo, Wicked; Lady Gaga, Joker: Folie a Deux; Julianne Moore, the Room Next Door

Best Supporting Actor
Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain
Denzel Washington, Gladiator II (unless lead?)
Stanley Tucci, Conclave
Samuel L. Jackson, The Piano Lesson
Guy Pearce, The Brutalist

Alts: Yura Borisov, Anora; Clarence Maclin, Sing Sing; Paul Raci, Sing Sing; Pedro Pascal, Gladiator II

Supporting Actress
Zoe Saldana, Emilia Perez
Danielle Deadwyler, The Piano Lesson
Lady Gaga, Joker Folie a Deux (unless lead)
Zoe Saldana, Emilia Pérez
Selena Gomez – Emilia Pérez
Isabella Rossellini, Conclave
Alts: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Nickel Boys; Rachel Sennott, Saturday Night; Tilda Swinton, The Room Next Door; Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown

Original Screenplay
The Brutalist
Anora
A Real Pain
Emilia Pérez
Sing Sing
Alt. Saturday NightThe Seed of the Sacred Fig

Adapted Screenplay
Conclave
Nickel Boys
The Piano Lesson
Gladiator II
Joker Folie a Deux

Editing
The Brutalist
Anora
Conclave
Saturday Night
Gladiator II

Cinematography
The Brutalist
Dune 2
Conclave
Gladiator II
Saturday Night
Alts: Anora

Production Design
Dune 2
The Brutalist
Conclave
Gladiator II
Wicked
Alts: Saturday Night, Joker Folie a Deux

Costumes
Wicked
The Brutalist
Maria
Gladiator II
Nosferatu
Alts: Conclave, Blitz, Saturday Night

Original Score
Conclave
The Brutalist
Queer
Emilia Perez
Dune 2
Alts: Challengers, Joker Folie a Deux, The Piano Lesson, Inside Out 2

That’s pretty much all I have for you, and it’s already too much! Just remember, you might hate me but you’ll miss me when I’m gone.