There have been two important years for awards season. There was 1968, a year of cultural and political upheaval, due in part to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the protests against the Vietnam War. It also marked the beginnings of New Hollywood, with films like “Bonnie and Clyde”, “In The Heat of the Night” and “The Graduate” getting nominated for Academy Awards and shifting the film landscape forever. Then there was 1999, a year that  showed how far aggressive producers were willing to go to win an Oscar for a small art film as mediocre as “Shakespeare in Love,” even when the far more critically and commercially popular “Saving Private Ryan” was in the mix..

If 2025 turns out to be important when it comes to the Oscars., it will likely be because this awards season has never been more competitive. Regardless of the quality of this year’s nominees, most of them are expected to get at least one Oscar (there’s no candidate, like “Oppenheimer” last year, expected to sweep), and the race for some of the bigger categories like Best Picture, Director, Actor and Actress, has never been closer. 

First, we can enumerate some surefire wins. Kieran Culkin is the clear favorite to win Best Supporting Actor in “A Real Pain”, a buddy dramedy in which he plays a mismatched cousin during a trip to Holocaust sites in Eastern Europe. Zoe Saldana will likely end up winning Best Supporting Actress as a lawyer who funds the sex operation of a cartel boss in the divisive musical, “Emilia Perez”. 

“Emilia Perez” was the supposed frontrunner, leading with thirteen Oscar nominations, including one for Karla Sofia Garscon as Best Actress, (making her the first transgender woman to do so). But if you pay attention to Gold Derby, a digital platform that tracks the Oscar race,  you’ll find that “Emilia Perez” was actually never the front runner. It has only won Best Picture at the European Film Awards and the Golden Globes and those ceremonies aren’t the best barometers for an Oscar win. Further, the politics (and scandals) swirling around the film were too toxic for the average liberal Academy voter to prefer. It takes a lot to get the transphobes and trans rights activists to agree on one thing (in this case, that the movie sucked) but “Emilia Perez” and Ms. Gascon, recently cancelled for her legion of problematic social media postings, managed to pull it off. 

What seems to matter in the Oscar race are the guilds (an upscale term for unions) – the Screen Actors, Producers, Writers and Directors – and “Anora” (a dramedy about a sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch), which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, has won the Producers, Writers and Directors while “Conclave” (an ornate political thriller about the papacy) could win Best Picture, because it won the the SAG award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. The Guilds are the best predictor for what could win the top category, as no film has a better chance without gaining at least one of the awards for either cast, screenplay, directing or producing. Last year’s Best Picture winner “Oppenheimer” has swept them all (at the Oscars, every award but Best Picture is voted on only by the Academy Members of that particular craft).

“The Substance” (a horror film about an aging actress) may not win Best Picture, but it could potentially earn Demi Moore the Oscar for Best Actress after she won Best Actress at the SAGs over Mikey Madison in “Anora”. Similarly, for “A Complete Unknown” (the Bob Dylan biopic), Timothee Chalamet could win Best Actor, after nabbing the Screen Actors Guild award, over Adrien Brody in “The Brutalist” (a three and a half hour art film about Hungarian architect) who has won Best Actor at the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes.

As Variety noted in December, “awards season is long and momentum shifts constantly.” And the lineup of Best Picture nominees are more artistically diverse than ever. There are two films that are spoken in a language other than English (“I’m Still Here” and “Emilia Perez”), an indie film about a stripper and prostitute (“Anora”) and a body horror splatfest (“The Substance”), up against the conventional nominees – a blockbuster (“Dune: Part Two”), a long epic surrounding the American dream (“The Brutalist”), a musical (“Wicked”), a music biopic (“A Complete Unknown”) and a political thriller (“Conclave”), concerning the pope instead of the president. 

Another possibility for why there’s no frontrunner is because 2024 was not a great year for film. That year, compared to 2023, has seen numerous would-be blockbusters bombing at the box office, with many other films being forgettable filler. This year, there’s no “Barbenheimer” or “Top Gun Maverick”, but nominating “Wicked” and “Dune: Part Two” could remind viewers of the few time last year  when they were excited to go to a cinema. But as The Atlantic’s David Sims writes, the Oscars in general are no longer for mainstream moviegoers. They are for Academy voters who like to flatter their own groupthink of what great art can be.