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

Me (five weeks or so ago): “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.”

Me (now): Oh no! My web site was hacked!

No, don’t go worrying about my cyber-security. I am using the verb “hacked” in the sense of “written by a complete and utter hack.” But we all knew that going in.

In fairness, everybody had conceded that these were actually the most unpredictable Oscars in quite some time. Between mumblings about the use of AI and some actor’s tweets from a few years ago plus some surprises at various other awards ceremonies and people’s sentiments changing about what’s the current flavor of the month, the indicators were all over the map.

Once again, my personal preferences were actually reliable indicators on a par with my pure predictions. Makes you think I should just put out my personal preferences each year instead of my own three different categories for each award, but I can’t do that because that would only reduce the odds of me getting anything right.

In the end, the only ones I missed completely were Animated Feature—which I should probably just stop forecasting because I never see any animated features anymore—and also a little minor category called Best Picture. That one is just a bit harder to get right because of math. When you have ten nominees, even with taking two guesses, the probability is just that much lower for landing on the right one. You can boost your odds a bit by just automatically eliminating any Best Picture nominee that wasn’t also nominated for Best Director and then maybe a bit more by eliminating any contender that was also nominated for Best International Feature—since that scenario always seems to result in the double nominee getting the international prize and not the overall top prize. This year that approach got us down to four likely contenders, and I still missed the winner completely. While I liked Anora a lot and am very pleased that it won, I just judged Dune: Part Two to be the best movie and so gave it my Most Deserving nod. Maybe a third rule in predicting Best Picture should be to eliminate any film in the science fiction category, but that wouldn’t have helped me because Dune: Part Two had already been eliminated because its director Denis Villeneuve had not been nominated.

A corollary to the sci-fi rule might be to also discard any flicks of the horror genre. There was a lot of chatter out there, however, that this might finally be the year in which a horror movie, i.e. The Substance, would get a major Oscar. I stopped believing most things I hear a long time ago, but maybe I should just stop believing anything I hear. I stand by the fact that predicting The Brutalist was the right call for Most Likely, given the buzz at the time. And let’s acknowledge that movie was impressive for being what was essentially an independent movie made for not that much money (given its scale) by Hollywood standards. It didn’t really occur to me that an even cheaper and even more independent movie could actually beat it—particularly one that would inevitably have the various recipients affirming to a billion people around the world that they stand with and support sex workers—but we should all celebrate that it did.

All in all, I was pretty satisfied with how the awards were divided out. Just don’t get me started on Adrien Brody. [For my thoughts on the awards ceremony, click here.]