For Your Consideration: Some Thoughts on the 2025 Oscar Nominees

After being twice-delayed by the not-so-minor matter of the climate change-intensified fires devastating a large part of Los Angeles county (and sending a good many of the more literate observers of current events back to their copies of Mike Davis' Ecology of Fear as those who sneered at Davis' "apocalypticism" prove themselves complete and utter morons for the umpteenth time) the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has finally released its list of the nominations for its 2025 awards ceremony.

Can we speak of any really great surprises here, with regard to really surprising snubs or really unexpected honors? Comparing Variety's comprehensive predictions about the nominees list (a safe index, I think, of entertainment industry Establishment opinion) to the list we eventually got I see that in the Best Picture category Variety correctly forecast eight of the ten nominees, while also getting right three of the five directing nominees, sixteen of the twenty acting nominees, and eight of the ten writing nominees as well--thirty-five of the forty-five in total for a 78 percent average across the board, and 80 percent in seven of the eight categories. Meanwhile, where the nominees Variety did not guess correctly are concerned a significant number were a matter of some Best Picture nominee snatching the spot away from a less-lauded film--as with A Complete Unknown getting the Best Director and Best Supporting Actress nods that Variety had predicted going to the un-nominated All We Imagine as Light and The Last Showgirl, while Emilia Pérez landed the Best Actress nod they thought would go to Hard Truths.

In short, real surprises were few in number. Fans of this film or that actor may complain about a snub, but all the same, it is part of the ceremony's politics that it spreads the prizes around, such that (simply for a start) if some expected Jamie Lee Curtis to get at least a nomination for her supporting role in Showgirl the fact that she won a statue in that exact category two years earlier worked against that--just as Denzel Washington's nine nominations and two wins meant that giving him another nomination for a Gladiator II no one expected to see in the running for much in the way of the bigger prizes is not some great shock. And this is only as expected given last year's thinned-out slate of films, which was as light on obvious award contenders as it was on obvious blockbusters (recall how at the year's start many thought that not one movie would make the billion-dollar mark), such that we did not see any movies with very large and vocal popular lobbies to compare with "Team Barbie" and its coronation of "their" movie as Best Picture in July, and their subsequent shock and anger when the movie got less than they felt was coming to it. Indeed, as David Walsh, who can be counted on for a rare forthrightness in these matters, put it, "It is difficult to point to important films that were slighted or ignored, because there were so few of those this year."

The result is that pretty much the only exception to the predictability is Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong getting acting nods in the otherwise overlooked The Apprentice. I will leave it to others to parse whether these nominations are a matter of well-deserved recognition for work well done, protest gesture, or a mix of the two, but it does seem to me fair to say that on the whole the slate was less impressive for the political content of its films than last year's, when the historical drama Oppenheimer and the socially critical Poor Things together swept up most of the principal awards--save in the area of identity and gender politics, as such movies as Emilia Pérez and The Substance make clear. Of course, as those familiar with his writing would expect, Walsh sees the themes of those films as going hand in hand with the lack of "expression in Hollywood films" of "the most pressing questions in American life"--and what others have called the "corporate wokeness" supposedly in retrograde still alive and well among those who make films with an eye to winning critical laurels.