The best film of the year won’t win at the 2025 Oscars

You may still feel very much in the well-fed, sofa-lolling phase of Twixmas, but it’s now 2025 and with the Golden Globes looming on Sunday, we’re being plunged into awards season already.

It seems aggressively early to be thinking about the best film of the past 12 months being crowned at various showbiz bashes over the next few weeks, culminating in the Oscars on March 2.

But the thing is, it won’t be.

While we like to think in tidy terms of worthy films picking up a selection of gongs, it really most often comes down to films that capture the zeitgeist – and yes, are often (but not always) very good – which also spend a boatload on gruelling publicity campaigns.

It would have been very hard to not ‘hold any space’ for the months-long Wicked press tour, for example.

As always, Oscar winners are therefore not the final word in what is ‘best’ in cinema; we need only cast our minds back to Green Book triumphing over BlacKkKlansman and The Favourite in 2019, Crash nabbing the win from Brokeback Mountain in 2006 or even Shakespeare in Love being the best film of 1998 over Saving Private Ryan.

This year, there’s no clear front-runner like Oppenheimer in 2024, which mostly had to contend with Barbie but ultimately proved a comfortable victor at various awards ceremonies.

There will probably be be a lot of votes split between the likes of indie darling Sean Baker’s Anora, the five-star juggernaut of Wicked and epic late arrival The Brutalist.

There’s also Netflix’s bold but divisive crime musical Emilia Pérez, which is considered a favourite too.

All of these could be the type of film that Academy voting members like to reward. But there are also many movies that generated earlier (or slightly quieter) buzz and look like they’re going to be left out in the cold – Love Lies Bleeding, My Old Ass and The Outrun among others.

2025 is also a year where the Bafta and Oscar nominations and winners could be very different. I expect to see more love for the likes of Sir Steve McQueen’s heart-pounding Blitz and the audacious Robbie Williams ‘CGI monkey biopic’ Better Man on this side of the pond, for example.

It’s also hard to predict which way the wind might be blowing from this year’s Golden Globes nominations when they get to cheat a little and put forward double the acting nominees because of splitting their categories into drama and musical/comedy.

So they’re not really making any bold statements on Sunday, as the first to show their hand, because they have more cards to play with: we can see the expected headline acting nominations (Daniel Craig for Queer, Angelina Jolie for Maria, Nicole Kidman for Babygirl), for example. Those all fall into the daring, ‘transformational’ category so beloved by the Academy, with established stars taking on real-life figures (Jolie as opera diva Maria Callas) or unusual roles (Craig as a struggling gay drug addict after years of 007 suaveness; Kidman as a messy CEO going to vulnerable new places on screen with her age-gap work affair).

Newcomer Mikey Madison actually goes into the homestretch as this season’s most awarded actress for her breakout role in Anora; that and the popularity of a modern-day dramadey about a sex worker might prove irresistible to Academy voters too, who love a breakthrough as much as comeback (see: Brendan Fraser’s best actor win in 2023 for The Whale).

But it’s also had divisive reviews, the same as Cannes darling Emilia Pérez. That would certainly be the statement film to win at this year’s Oscars, offering a very tempting chance to break records in the best actress category too for its trans star Karla Sofía Gascón.

However, it’s also a bit of a controversial choice, with writer-director Jacques Audiard criticised for the way he depicts Gascón’s character’s transition and apparent redemption from a brutal life as a cartel boss onscreen.

It’s also curious that one of the favourites from Venice, Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language debut The Room Next Door, is seemingly being entirely shut out, despite earning a – quite frankly – insane standing ovation at the festival of nearly 20 minutes.

Wicked could end up proving to be this year’s Barbie too, where its robust popularity and commercial success – as well as the fact it’s a musical – put it at a disadvantage in the minds of voters prioritising a more ‘highbrow’ or ‘worthy’ winner.

In terms of genre snobbery, horror is normally looked down upon compared to drama, but The Substance also had a triumphant, gross-out debut at Cannes and was considered one of the must-watch films of the year – whatever your thoughts on its controversial ending sequence. Nosferatu has recently wowed critics too with Robert Eggers’ bold gothic visuals and an excellent acting ensemble, but looks like it will fall between the cracks thanks to its late release in the eligibility window.

If I have to put my money anywhere at the moment, I would say it’s on The Brutalist for best picture at the 2025 Oscars, thanks to its sweeping narrative that takes in the life of a Jewish Hungarian immigrant to America and the life he struggles to build for himself from scratch. Not only would its star Adrien Brody be a worthy second-time best actor winner himself, but the narrative of the ‘little film that could’ – costing under $10million (£7.9m) to make and seemingly coming out of nowhere at Venice – is my personal catnip.

But, as proved by the considerations above, ‘best’ rarely – if ever – comes into it. And while that might be a depressing thought for the 2025 awards season, it also acts as testament to the fierce competition between the (mostly) very good films in contention.

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