The 2025 Academy Awards: Some Words on the Best Picture Nominees

As those who care to know are likely to already be aware, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its 97th annual awards ceremony Sunday night.

At least where the conventionally higher-profile nominees were concerned there were not many surprises--certainly going by the way I have seen these things play out, year in, year out.

I am unsurprised that Anora won, given its buzz (helped by the backlash against the record thirteen prize-nominated Emilia Perez)--and only slightly less unsurprised by its having had a "near-sweep" (emphasis on "near") of the most prestigious prizes. Best Picture and Best Director go together more often than not, while it is more likely than not that the Best Picture winner will also get at least one of the acting prizes, and one of the writing prizes too. (Of the last ten Best Picture winners, six landed Best Director, seven landed at least one acting award, and seven a screenplay Oscar--while every single one of the Best Picture winners chalked up at least one win in the directing, acting or writing categories, and eight of them at least two wins, making for an average of 2.2, leaving Anora just a bit above average with three wins here.)

I am also unsurprised that, as it was a year where no movie was quite the overwhelming presence we see in some years (while we certainly did not see the kind of furor we had last year as the partisans of Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan demanded recognition for each of their films), the rest of the prizes were very widely dispersed, with Anora getting just one more prize, and that in a technical category (Film Editing), as the other four acting and writing prizes (Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay) were spread out among three other Best Picture contenders, namely The Brutalist, Emilia Perez, and Conclave (and A Real Pain with them)--the "spread the wealth" dynamic fairly in evidence here, with the additional recognition accorded them in the technical categories consistent with that. (Brutalist and Emilia Perez each got a second award for their music--the former for original score, the latter for the song "El Mal"--while The Substance, if missing out on the Best Actress prize for which Demi Moore was supposedly a lock, got only a hair and makeup award.)

At the same time I am unsurprised that Part Two of Dune was limited to the technical categories, and that Dune and Part One of Wicked each picked up a mere two prizes (especially as Wicked's being a faithful, no-additional-songs adaptation of the Broadway original ruled it out of the more musically-oriented categories, and especially as Wicked is just a "Part One" and so unlike the other contenders will have a chance at greater recognition in the 2026 ceremony, should the second half of the film be well-received, an expectation for which there is some precedent).

I am also not surprised that, if no movie claimed a really big share of the prizes, the result was still that the makers of two Best Picture nominees, including A Complete Unknown (which, a natural for an Oscar as a biopic of a famed singer, had among its eight nominations one for Timothée "Are You Sick of Hearing About Him Yet?" Chalamet), walked away from the ceremony without a single statue--for simple mathematics makes clear how hard it is to give everyone something when ten Best Picture nominees are now the norm, and there are only seventeen prizes to go around for any U.S.-made live-action feature film (the rest recognizing animated, short, documentary and foreign work), as a result of which their backers will have to settle for promoting their movies as "Oscar nominees" rather than "Oscar winners" (while Best Picture nominee I'm Still Here had its sole win the International Feature Film category).

And it is equally unsurprising that in a year in which filmgoing was down even by post-pandemic standards and excitement about the cinematic releases weak, and what eventually proved to be the leading contenders for the bigger prizes got limited attention from the wider audience (even A Complete Unknown grossed a mere $73 million, as the five that claimed eleven of the prizes, including all the more prestigious prizes, picked up much less--Anora, The Brutalist and Emilia Perez grossing just $15 million each, A Real Pain half that, and the whole lot under $90 million) the evidences of the interest of the general public in the ceremony were not very high. If viewership was better than in the (understandably) rock-bottom year of 2021, it fell for the first time in four years.

Indeed, considering these numbers the Julius Streichers over at the New York Times wondered aloud if the numbers did not bespeak the cultural "irrelevance" of the ceremony.

Admittedly I have myself been arguing for the declining "relevance" of the ceremony for years now, but what the NYT offered was not an assessment of the ways in which popular culture and the standing of film in it have evolved, but rather their starting point for an argument that "as the country veered right" the perceived progressive content of the more substantial nominees was out of touch with the sentiment of the folks who live outside "the Hollywood bubble." An exercise in what those schooled in "logical fallacies" call "begging the question," it is entirely clear from the Times' predictably taking that line that they mean for their readers to think so--continuing in their relentlessly pushing the view that the rest of the country has no truck with Hollywood liberalism (remember their part in spinning the story of Twisters' release?), and especially that the outcome of the presidential election of 2024 was not a matter of profound material and especially economic discontents, staggering incompetence (or indifference) on the part of a Democratic Party that, utterly terrified of anything that might press its platform in a progressive direction, put itself in an exceedingly difficult situation through the decisions that led to its changing candidates so late in the race, and the lack of alternatives for the protest-minded that those so committed to forcing a "Hold your nose and vote"-type of politics on the public approve so heartily, but instead an expression of deep shifts in the views of the public that made November 2024 a turning point in der kulturkampf, on the flames of which they stand ever ready to pour gasoline--and point to as justification for their own rightward march.