The Race for the 2025 Oscars: Some Thoughts

In some years the entertainment press positively buzzes with talk about the chances of film releases in "the Oscars race" from early on.

This was not one of those years.

Just as the year's shrunken slate of films enjoying wide releases was thin on really first-rank blockbusters (as the far from first-rank grosses show) it has been short on critical darlings--even by the standards of recent years that have seen the contenders for the more prestigious (Picture-Director-Actor-Writer) Oscars.

Consider those films from which something might have been hoped. The sequels to Best Picture winner Gladiator and Best Actor winner Joker? No one seems to have any expectations for them in these categories, with the same going for Alex Garland's Civil War. Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis? It also seems unlikely to enjoy any recognition here, given how it flopped with critics as well as audiences. Mad Max: Fury Road was a Best Picture nominee, and Furiosa was well-liked by the critics, but this is the kind of movie that gets nominated more as a gesture toward what people actually watch than as a real competitor, and its having been a big flop will rule it out of recognition on those grounds--all as Kevin Costner's much-hyped Horizon saga suffered from both critical disappointment and public disinterest. Dune, Part Two may have a shot at a Best Picture nomination, but more because of the inclination to recognize at least something that made money than because it is a natural (the second half of the epic even less likely than the first to be a real Best Picture contender because it is basically a big action movie). Perhaps something will be offered Inside Out--though it should be remembered that critics liked the sequel less than they did the Best Screenplay-nominated original.

So what's left among the bigger releases of the year? There is that other Timothée Chalamet film A Complete Unknown, which as a musical biopic is more Oscar's speed (and, if scarcely opened at the time of this writing, did debut on over 2,800 screens). And as an adaptation of a successful Broadway musical popular with both critics and moviegoers there is Wicked, which seems to have the best shot out of the whole bunch at Best Picture. But even so it will be another year where "smaller" and little-seen movies dominate, furthering the trend of the Academy Awards looking ever more like the Independent Spirit Awards.