The Oscars: Who Will Win and Who Should Win
It’s hardly going out on a limb to predict that Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” and Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” the two most passionately acclaimed and culturally significant American movies of 2025, will divide most of the spoils when the ninety-eighth Academy Awards are handed out, on March 15th. Nor would it be especially bold, at this point in the game, to predict a Best Picture win for either film. On paper, “One Battle After Another” looks nearly unstoppable; the sheer number of best-film prizes that it’s scooped up in recent months, from organizations including the Critics’ Choice Association, the Golden Globes, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and the Producers Guild of America, has vaulted it to a place of enviable statistical strength. But statistics can be defied, and “Sinners,” a much-praised box-office smash that earned a record-setting sixteen nominations, may have succeeded in positioning itself as an underdog with a momentum that may have crested at just the right time. Last week, during the final stretch of Oscars voting, Coogler’s film won the Screen Actors Guild’s top ensemble prize—an honor that has presaged more than a few Best Picture upsets over the years, including “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), “Crash” (2005), and “Parasite” (2019).
I’m predicting “One Battle After Another,” for reasons of prudence and personal preference. Whether I’m right or not is immaterial; what’s fascinating and heartening about this particular showdown is how ideally matched the two films are, how right they feel as kindred spirits. “Sinners” has its roots in Coogler’s original script, but his writing cleverly repurposes familiar horror-genre conventions; “One Battle After Another” is an adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel “Vineland,” but one so shaggily inventive as to feel sui generis. Both films are deeply enveloping, ensemble-driven action-thrillers about, among other things, the Sisyphean folly of resistance in a nation run by white supremacists. The films inhabit two separate points on a decades-spanning American historical continuum—“Sinners” unfolds during the Jim Crow era, “One Battle After Another” at an indeterminate moment closer to the present day—but they share a steadfast belief in the prevailing power of love, to say nothing of the potential of the next generation of rebels.
For this reason, whatever happens on Oscar Sunday, I suspect that the two front-runners will share the spotlight in a spirit as companionable as it is competitive. That speaks to the good grace and easy humility that Anderson and Coogler have demonstrated as they’ve accompanied their films and their gifted collaborators from awards show to awards show, racking up prizes and admirers along the way. But it also speaks to the rarity of what both pictures represent in a crisis-ridden film industry: the ideal of big-screen storytelling as something both audacious and accessible; the easy intersectionality of genre and politics; the glories of great ensemble acting; and all the good things that can happen when an artist’s personal stamp is brought to bear on the often impersonal apparatus of mainstream Hollywood.
To that point, it’s worth noting that “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” were both released by Warner Bros., whose efforts to support its prize ponies with awards campaigns of equal lavishness, sans favoritism or neglect, are the definition of a good problem to have. (The studio also has a less competitive Best Picture nominee, the racing blockbuster “F1.”) But Warner Bros.’ banner year has, in recent months, acquired the depressing air of a last hurrah. February brought the unhappy news that, after months of aggressive bidding, Paramount Skydance had beaten out Netflix to acquire Warner Discovery, the parent company of Warner Bros. Because Paramount is chaired by David Ellison, the son of the Trump-friendly tech billionaire Larry Ellison, the outcome was perceived by many in the industry as the greater of two evils. No surprise, then, that when “One Battle After Another” won the top honor at the P.G.A. Awards on February 28th, Anderson took the opportunity to salute Michael DeLuca and Pamela Abdy, the co-chairs and C.E.O.s of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, who are prized for their support of strong filmmaking voices. Such discerning artistic stewardship is rare in the upper echelons of the studio system; should the Paramount-Warner deal go through, it may become rarer still.
The best merger, in this instance, would have been no merger at all. That’s one reason that the South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s superb “No Other Choice,” a gleefully violent thriller set in the aftermath of a corporate takeover and mass layoffs, is one of the more topically resonant pictures that the Oscars could have chosen to honor, but didn’t. That the Academy routinely overlooks some of the finest accomplishments in cinema, year after year, is hardly news. And it’s why, in compiling my thoughts about who and what will win (and should win) in nine major categories, I’ve also included my personal laments for those achievements that didn’t even get nominated. May those great, neglected movies be seen and cherished long after this year’s Oscars are a memory.
Best Picture
The Best Picture race is a procedural singularity; it’s the only category that boasts ten nominees and the only category that uses a preferential ballot, in which voters are asked to rank their favorites in order from one to ten. For that reason, I have ranked all ten myself numerically above. “One Battle After Another” sits comfortably at the top; it’s the work of a great filmmaker in exhilarating form, maximizes the talents of a magnificent cast, and, like so many of Anderson’s films, fuses freewheeling instinct and meticulous preparation. It’s also a portrait of life under authoritarianism that fully perceives the terror, the pathos, and the comedy of its intensely harrowing situations—a quality that unites it, in subject and accomplishment, with Mendonça’s “The Secret Agent,” a superbly layered thriller that reinhabits and deconstructs the day-to-day perils of a life in hiding. That quality of cinematic expansiveness, of an abundance of swirling, teeming ideas matched to sterling performances and bravura technique, is what would also make worthy winners of both “Marty Supreme” and “Sinners.”
After those four, a fairly steep dropoff. I have qualified admiration for Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet,” a drama of such emotional force that I can almost forgive its intellectually reductive view of Shakespeare’s life and art. I was largely held, too, by the exquisite hues and basement-sicko thrills of “Bugonia,” even if the director Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone did more trenchant work together in “Poor Things” (2023)—a better Frankenstein movie, incidentally, than this year’s “Frankenstein,” notwithstanding the unsurprising intricacy of Guillermo del Toro’s world-building and the scarred poignancy of Jacob Elordi’s performance as the Creature. “F1,” directed by Joseph Kosinski, is an engrossing blockbuster of no particular depth or resonance, but I’d say it fulfills its promise to the audience better than either of the two remaining nominees. Despite the aching depths of Joel Edgerton’s central performance, Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams” is like a Terrence Malick woodland epic that’s been carefully shellacked and sanded down. As for Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” it’s well-acted ersatz humanism: a blueprint pretending to be a house, a gauzy stock photograph in a shiny frame.
Will win: “One Battle After Another”
Should win: “One Battle After Another”
Should’ve been nominated: “Sirāt”
Best Director
Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”
Ryan Coogler, “Sinners”
Josh Safdie, “Marty Supreme”
Joachim Trier, “Sentimental Value”
Chloé Zhao, “Hamnet”
The last time the top two races diverged was in 2022, when “CODA” won Best Picture and Jane Campion (“The Power of the Dog”) won Best Director. I’m not expecting a split outcome this year, though if one does occur, nearly everyone agrees that it will favor “Sinners” for Best Picture. Anderson’s hold on the directing trophy is too secure—and indeed, it’s felt inevitable since “One Battle After Another” opened last fall, earning the year’s most roundly ecstatic reviews and becoming the highest-grossing picture of Anderson’s career. Given the peaks of that career, which include “Boogie Nights” (1997), “There Will Be Blood” (2007), “The Master” (2012), and “Phantom Thread” (2017), you might expect Anderson to have won an Oscar, or several, by now. He has, in fact, gone glaringly unrewarded for a filmmaker who is routinely hailed as a latter-day Welles, Altman, or Kubrick. Then again, Welles, Altman, and Kubrick never won a directing Oscar. In that respect, at least, Anderson is about to take leave of their company.
Will win: Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”
Should win: Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”
Should’ve been nominated: Julia Loktev, “My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow”
Best Actress
Jessie Buckley, “Hamnet”
Rose Byrne, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Kate Hudson, “Song Sung Blue”
Renate Reinsve, “Sentimental Value”
Emma Stone, “Bugonia”
This is, remarkably, the only acting race that can be called with any confidence: Jessie Buckley’s victory has been a foregone conclusion all season long. As Agnes, the neglected wife of William Shakespeare and the grief-stricken mother of their children, Buckley gives us not just rawness but fullness of emotion; there’s an uncanny balance to this performance, a sense in which the tempestuous and the serene are miraculously reconciled. I suspect that “Hamnet” might have been a stronger contender over all if its director, Zhao, had not already won top honors for “Nomadland” (2020); even so, her latest film has many fans (and eight nominations), and Buckley will be the logical beneficiary of that admiration. The lack of comparable across-the-board support for “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a darker, pricklier tale of embattled motherhood, is precisely why Rose Byrne will have to content herself with a nomination for her brilliantly sustained and ferociously funny performance in the central role.
In a less competitive year, the lovely, lived-in soulfulness of Kate Hudson’s work in “Song Sung Blue” might have loomed as a potential spoiler, though her mere return to Oscar contention—her last nomination came twenty-five years ago, for “Almost Famous” (2000)—will surely draw votes regardless. So, too, will Renate Reinsve, whose nomination for “Sentimental Value” counts, in my book, as the nomination she didn’t receive for “The Worst Person in the World”; in both films, she evinces the kind of emotional legibility that can charge even a wordless closeup with meaning. Stone, who won her second Best Actress Oscar two years ago, will not win a third one so soon, though the mere fact that voters nominated her for “Bugonia”—a mesmerizing performance that she barely campaigned for—speaks to the near-Streepian regard in which she’s held.
Will win: Jessie Buckley, “Hamnet”
Should win: Rose Byrne, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Should’ve been nominated: Kathleen Chalfant, “Familiar Touch”
Best Actor
Timothée Chalamet, “Marty Supreme”
Leonardo DiCaprio, “One Battle After Another”
Ethan Hawke, “Blue Moon”
Michael B. Jordan, “Sinners”
Wagner Moura, “The Secret Agent”
An all-timer of a race, in terms of both the staggering quality of the nominated performances and the fiendish unpredictability of the outcome. Initially, it seemed that Timothée Chalamet, a three-time nominee at age thirty, would win handily, prevailing on the strength of not only his non-stop rush of a performance in “Marty Supreme” but also his much-admired turn as a young Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown” (2024), which almost netted him a statuette last year. But the momentum has since shifted, perhaps decisively, in favor of Michael B. Jordan, whose bourbon-smooth performance in “Sinners” nabbed an Actor Award from the Screen Actors Guild last week. What happened? More than a few believe that Chalamet’s clever yet immodest campaign tactics have ultimately backfired; Jordan has been a model of humility by comparison, as borne out by his Actor speech, which was all the more graceful and moving for having been delivered in an obvious state of shock. And although Oscar voters have historically been reluctant to award younger performers in this category, Jordan may represent the more palatable choice on that front: he’s nine years older than Chalamet and has been acting since he was twelve. He has to be considered the favorite going into Oscar night, with gusts of industry love for “Sinners” very much at his back.
Given the similar strength of “One Battle After Another,” it’s a shame that Leonardo DiCaprio hasn’t won more honors for his irresistible performance as a faded revolutionary turned bedraggled-stoner girl dad. True, DiCaprio already has an Oscar, albeit for one of his least interesting roles, in “The Revenant” (2015); this, by contrast, stands among the best things he’s ever done, and it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t take him for granted. The same goes for Ethan Hawke, who has long struck me as the most consistently adventurous and versatile American actor working today; his performance in Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon,” as the legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart, is a gabby tour de force of wit, mischief, and pathos. Both DiCaprio and Hawke, in their distinct ways, pull off dazzling transformations and consciously undermine their own star power. Yet star power has its uses, to say nothing of its pleasures; witness Wagner Moura, who, in “The Secret Agent,” delivers the year’s most intoxicating performance—a blast of pure movie-idol charisma, with a rich backbeat of melancholy. In a way, this haunting performance holds up a mirror to Jordan’s achievement in “Sinners”: Moura isn’t playing twins, but he does seem to be housing two souls in one body, hailing from before and after a life-rupturing tragedy, as he makes his perilous journey home.
Will win: Michael B. Jordan, “Sinners”
Should win: Wagner Moura, “The Secret Agent”
Should’ve been nominated: Abou Sangaré, “Souleymane’s Story”
Best Supporting Actress
Elle Fanning, “Sentimental Value”
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, “Sentimental Value”
Amy Madigan, “Weapons”
Wunmi Mosaku, “Sinners”
Teyana Taylor, “One Battle After Another”
Another hard-to-call race, but one that seems to be crystallizing around Amy Madigan. Her hilarious, chilling, much-memed performance as Gladys, the auntie antagonist of “Weapons,” was just a pie-in-the-sky awards hopeful months ago, only to gain traction with critics and industry voters and emerge, in the home stretch, as a plausible front-runner. Given the general dearth of Oscar-winning horror performances, a Madigan victory would carry undeniable shades of Ruth Gordon, who was crowned Best Supporting Actress for her witchy turn in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968). Madigan’s appeal, though, goes beyond the nature of her role or the strength of her work; she’s a beloved seventy-five-year-old Hollywood veteran who was last nominated for an Oscar in 1986. Comeback narratives can be overblown, but this one, like Gladys’s mind-control powers, will prove awfully hard to resist.
A Madigan triumph would be all the more impressive considering she’s the lone nominee for “Weapons”; all four of her competitors hail from Best Picture contenders with broader support. In “Sentimental Value,” Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, as the younger and more forgiving of two neglected daughters, incarnates a graceful stillness; Elle Fanning, riffing humorously and movingly on her own stardom, has a luminous openness that nicely punctures the movie’s tasteful surface. Wunmi Mosaku gives my favorite performance in “Sinners,” and if her character—a skilled Hoodoo healer, and thus this category’s good-witch counterpoint to Madigan’s bad witch—feels a touch underwritten, which makes the sombre gravity of her work all the more impressive. You want more of Mosaku, just as you want more of Teyana Taylor in “One Battle After Another,” though in the latter case the effect feels more intentional. Taylor plays a leftist revolutionary whose devil-may-care recklessness sets the story in motion; she vanishes abruptly soon after, but she also haunts the movie to the end. It’s the rare actor whose absence can leave more of an impression than another’s presence.
Will win: Amy Madigan, “Weapons”
Should win: Teyana Taylor, “One Battle After Another”
Should’ve been nominated: Marisa Abela, “Black Bag”
Best Supporting Actor
Benicio del Toro, “One Battle After Another”
Jacob Elordi, “Frankenstein”
Delroy Lindo, “Sinners”
Sean Penn, “One Battle After Another”
Stellan Skarsgård, “Sentimental Value”
Sean Penn has famously little use for awards campaigns, awards shows, and awards, even, or especially, when he keeps winning them. He’s basically the anti-Chalamet. In 2022, Penn loaned one of his two Oscar statuettes to Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, as a gesture of solidarity. He once said, in a 1999 interview, “I never want them to consider me for a Golden Globe for the rest of my goddam career.” For all that, he did show up at the Globes this year, where he lost to Stellan Skarsgård. More recently, Penn was a no-show at the BAFTAs and the Actor Awards; he won at both. He now appears to be cruising his way to a third Oscar that he may not want and that, as his many detractors claim, he certainly doesn’t need. But voters may not care; they love him, and they love the dark, twisted extremes to which he pushes himself in “One Battle After Another”: as a white-supremacist horror show named Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, he leaves you uncertain whether to lean in or to recoil. If Penn and Madigan do win in their respective categories, it will be the greatest collective showing for screen villainy since 2010, when the supporting-actor trophies went to Mo’Nique (“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”) and Christoph Waltz (“Inglourious Basterds”).
Penn’s ascendancy marks the latest of a few reversals in this category: earlier in the season, a shower of critics’ prizes suggested that his “One Battle” co-star Benicio del Toro (a past Best Supporting Actor winner himself, for “Traffic”) might have the edge. Del Toro’s character, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, is certainly the movie’s most delightful creation: he’s a heroically laid-back embodiment of matter-of-fact competence and cool, as easy to love as Lockjaw is to loathe. But then, Jacob Elordi won the Critics’ Choice Award for “Frankenstein,” raising the possibility that he would become, at twenty-eight, the second-youngest Oscar winner in this category. The momentum seemed to shift again with Skarsgård’s Golden Globe victory, auguring the chance of an Oscar win in acknowledgment of his long and under-acknowledged career. Even so, voters in the mood to honor an overdue veteran might also gravitate toward Delroy Lindo, whose nomination for his splendidly irascible performance in “Sinners” was the category’s biggest surprise. If he does pip Penn at the post, more than a few will consider it justice for 2021, when Lindo was egregiously overlooked for a Best Actor nomination for his career-crowning work in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.” It will also be a clear sign of a “Sinners” surge in the offing.
Will win: Sean Penn, “One Battle After Another”
Should win: Benicio del Toro, “One Battle After Another”
Should’ve been nominated: Andrew Scott, “Blue Moon”
Best Original Screenplay
Robert Kaplow, “Blue Moon”
Jafar Panahi, “It Was Just an Accident”
Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, “Marty Supreme”
Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, “Sentimental Value”
Ryan Coogler, “Sinners”
There is no one I’d rather see or hear on the Oscars stage at this moment than the great Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, whose “It Was Just an Accident” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, wound up on many critics’ year-end lists (my own included), and cemented its director’s reputation as a moral and artistic giant among cinema’s dissident artists. But the film has faltered with voters, and its ridiculous omission from the Best Picture race suggests that, even with an increasingly international membership, the Academy is still a bit at sea when it comes to recognizing the full scope of world cinema. One meaningful course correction would be to honor Panahi’s script, which draws heavily on his and others’ experiences in Tehran’s Evin Prison; it’s at once a perfectly honed exercise in screw-tightening suspense and a breathtaking articulation of moral anguish and political fury. The other masterly script in this category, “Blue Moon,” began as a series of monologues, which the screenwriter Robert Kaplow reworked over several years into a piece that breathes naturally within strict temporal and locational confines, beautifully distills the wit and intellectual élan of the New York theatre world, and stands as the year’s richest disquisition on art, entertainment, and the eternal clash between so-called populist and élitist sensibilities.
Josh Safdie’s unnerving direction of “Marty Supreme” has received so much attention that the non-stop whirligig invention of his script, co-written with Ronald Bronstein, is in danger of being underappreciated. The writing in “Sentimental Value” has been overappreciated, especially since Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt have done better work before; they were nominated in this category in 2022, for “The Worst Person in the World,” and should have won. This year, Coogler will win handily for his “Sinners” script, which is rigorously attuned to the deals and negotiations involved in opening a nineteen-thirties Southern juke joint, and buoyed by a thrilling eruption of ideas about Black art and white cultural vampirism. It’s a major, if somewhat lopsided, achievement; the film doesn’t fully sustain its intellectual energy or emotional force into the second half, in which its subversions of genre begin to feel like concessions.
Will win: Ryan Coogler, “Sinners”
Should win: Jafar Panahi, “It Was Just an Accident”
Should’ve been nominated: Philippe Lesage, “Who by Fire”
Best Adapted Screenplay
Will Tracy, “Bugonia”
Guillermo del Toro, “Frankenstein”
Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell, “Hamnet”
Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”
Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar, “Train Dreams”
Only two of the scripts in this category succeed in expanding and enriching, rather than diminishing, the scope of their original source material. One is the near-certain winner, “One Battle After Another,” which imaginatively recasts the setting, period, and characters of “Vineland” in a madcap world that is recognizably of a piece with Anderson’s earlier films (including, of course, his earlier Pynchon adaptation, “Inherent Vice”). The other is “Bugonia,” an English-language remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s “Save the Green Planet!,” which became a cult hit when it opened in Korean theatres, in 2003. Decades later, the story’s paranoid-thriller premise feels as potent and malleable as ever, and it benefits considerably from Will Tracy’s sharp ear for the language of political one-upmanship, whether it takes the form of soul-deadening neoliberal corporate-speak or violent incel conspiracy mongering.
Will win: Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”
Should win: Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”
Should’ve been nominated: Ira Sachs, “Peter Hujar’s Day”
Best International Feature
“It Was Just an Accident”
“The Secret Agent”
“Sentimental Value”
“Sirāt”
“The Voice of Hind Rajab”
It used to be fairly easy to predict the outcome here: go with the film that’s also nominated for Best Picture, if you’re fortunate enough to have a non-English-language film that’s nominated for Best Picture. These days, though, you’re likely to have at least two, as is the case this year. “Sentimental Value” is the safer choice by far; it has enviably broad support, with nine nominations, four of them for acting, and it’s the only Best International Feature contender that was recognized for both its writing and its direction. But perhaps this is no time to play it safe: “The Secret Agent” is the richer of the two films, and it has been consistently recognized as the year’s top international title by numerous organizations worldwide. And although the film managed only one acting nomination, for Wagner Moura, its appearance in the Oscars’ newly installed Best Casting category suggests a welcome level of discernment that will prove representative, I hope, of the Academy at large.
Looking at the three remaining nominees, I wish that “It Was Just an Accident,” once expected to run the table in this category, was being treated as more than a much-admired also-ran. I wish that “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” in seeking to illuminate the tragedy of a young Palestinian girl’s murder by Israeli military forces, had trusted its story enough to tell it in a less formally dubious and exploitative way. Most of all, I wish—or, rather, I hope—that “Sirāt,” by turns the most wrenching and the most electrifying film I saw in 2025, will continue to blow the minds of every audience that encounters it. It’s playing in U.S. theatres now, and, more than any other film nominated this year, it’s a journey worth taking.
Will win: “The Secret Agent”
Should win: “Sirāt”
Should’ve been nominated: “Sound of Falling” ♦