My 2025 Academy Award Predictions (for movies released in 2024)

This is a tricky year for predicting Oscar® winners. But aren’t they all?

As of this writing—the day after the nominations were announced—the oddsmakers and the journalists seem to mostly think the big prizes will go to Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. Why do I have a queasy feeling about that? Well, for one thing, because I am making my forecasts before seeing that movie since it only opened in Ireland today, and I’m not about to venture out to see it right away because the country got ravaged over night by what is being called the biggest storm in Ireland’s history. It was dubbed Éowyn by the meteorologists, which is kind of cool since that is a Lord of the Rings name. The not so cool part is that a lot of the secondary roads are strewn with fallen trees and electrical poles and a lot of homes and businesses don’t have power. I don’t even know which, if any, cinemas near me are even operating.

So, why don’t I just wait until I get a chance to see The Brutalist before making my predictions? If you are seriously wondering that, then you haven’t been reading this web site very many years. The answer is 1) I have an admittedly silly self-imposed rule that I have to concoct and publish my predictions as soon as possible after the nominees are known, and 2) I never see many, if not most, of the nominees before making my choices anyway.

The queasy feeling comes from the fact that I suspect that, by the time the voting is finished, the cinemarati will have brutally turned on The Brutalist. It’s what they do. They love it now because it is new and shiny, unlike movies that have been out there for months, but something will turn up that will sour them on it. There has already been some sniffing and tut-tutting about its belatedly acknowledged use of CGI. If that doesn’t do it, they’ll find something else. Same goes for Demi Moore. She got a boost from a certain fake awards show, but it’s likely to dawn on the voters in her category at some point that those awards are fake. How do we know those awards (which shall remain nameless) are fake? Well, aside from the fact nobody knows any of the people who supposedly vote for them, there is also the fact that they are presented under the auspices of Dick Clark Productions, and everybody knows that Dick Clark has been dead for more than a dozen years.

It’s too much trouble, though, to do all the psychological analysis necessary to second guess the awards voters, so I’m just going to go with Brady Corbet’s film for best picture, director and actor anyway. And I’ll go with Demi too, even though in my heart of hearts I’m not sure I really believe they will give such a major award to a body horror movie. So there you have it. These are my most insincere predictions yet.

Just imagine my surprise at the end of the year when I checked and realized that the best movie I had seen (by my own peculiar standards) was Denis Villenueve’s Dune sequel. So, my “should win” picks reflect that. There are also a couple of nods to Josh Margolin’s Thelma, which I thought was a pretty cool flick. And I also had to do some pandering to any Irish readers I might still have by expressing this island’s outrage that there was no recognition for Tim Mielants’s Small Things Like These and, especially, Rich Peppiatt’s Kneecap.

Let’s all revisit these forecasts five weeks or so from now and all have a good laugh. If it goes really badly for me, I can always claim that my web site was hacked.