Oscars 2025 predictions: Who will win and who should win at the 97th Academy Awards

Oscar season frenzy over two films, Anora and Conclave, battling for Best Picture at the 2025 Academy Awards.

Oscar season has a way of turning otherwise reasonable people into amateur statisticians, astrologists, and armchair Hollywood prognosticators. We scrutinise guild awards like tea leaves, debate anonymous ballots as if decoding some ancient script, and pore over every campaign stop, hunting for the moment a frontrunner might slip or, just as thrillingly, the instant an underdog catches fire. It’s a ritual built on equal parts math and mythology, and for the 2025 Academy Awards, the script is particularly juicy: a dogfight between two wildly different films, each appealing to a different set of Academy instincts.

On one side, there’s Anora, Sean Baker’s micro-budget Palme d’Or winner about a Brooklyn stripper navigating an absurd collision of sex, power, and capitalism. It’s indie to its bones — raw, rough-around-the-edges, and deeply American. On the other, is Edward Berger’s Vatican thriller, Conclave — a rivetting battle of ideology and secrecy unfolding within the walls of the Sistine.

The two have divvied up the road to the Dolby Theatre in ways that make predicting a winner an act of masochism. Anora steamrolled through the Critics Choice Awards, the Directors Guild, the Producers Guild, and the Writers Guild — powerful signals, all. But the stately European pedigree of Conclavedominated the BAFTAs and, crucially, took home the SAG Ensemble prize, a bellwether of mainstream appeal. And then there’s that confounding preferential ballot, the Academy’s method of voting that has upended more than a few Oscar frontrunners in the past, with this year’s battle hinging on whichever film ends up more broadly liked rather than passionately adored. The PGA win suggests Anora has the momentum, but Conclave’s international-leaning support could swing the other way.

Meanwhile, as Anora and Conclave duke it out, lurking in the wings is The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s brooding, post-war epic tracing the decades-spanning journey of a Holocaust survivor turned architect. It has ten nominations, including Best Director and Best Actor for Adrien Brody, who, 21 years after his history-making win for The Pianist, is in serious contention to repeat the feat. But standing in his way is Timothée Chalamet, embodying young Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown with an almost supernatural ease — singing, strumming, and shape-shifting his way into voters’ hearts. Brody has swept the season, but Chalamet’s SAG win signals a live-wire alternative. If he wins, he’ll rather poetically steal Brody’s own record as the youngest Best Actor in Oscar history.

In Best Actress, it’s a generational face-off tailor-made for awards season dramatics. Finally earning her first Oscar nomination at 62, veteran star Demi Moore has reinvented herself in spectacular fashion with The Substance — an audacious body-horror satire that turns the industry’s anxieties about ageing into a grotesque, unforgettable nightmare. Mikey Madison, meanwhile, has ridden a wave of Cannes momentum into her first nomination, her raw performance in Anora being hailed as something of a revelation. Does the Academy reward Moore’s decades-long resilience, or do they crown Madison as the future?

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Further down the ballot, there’s a clash of titans in the writing categories. Conclave has dominated Adapted Screenplay, its tightly wound adaptation of Robert Harris’s novel winning the BAFTA, Critics Choice, and the USC Scripter. But Nickel Boys, based on Colson Whitehead’s blistering Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, has strong support, especially after its Writers Guild win. In Original Screenplay, Anora, A Real Pain, and The Substance have all taken key precursors, making the race a three-way toss-up, though the odds tend to favour the Best Picture favourite in this case.