Reactions: 2025 Oscar Nominations
The 97th Academy Award nominations have finally been announced. Emilia Perez is the nomination leader with 13 nominations, closely followed by The Brutalist and Wicked with 10 nominations apiece, and A Complete Unknown and Conclave scoring eight nominations each.
The nominations were announced January 23 by Bowen Yang and Rachel Sennott, and as the nominations were being announced, I had the sneaking suspicion these were going to be more predictable than most pundits thought. And they were – up until Best Picture came around (more on that below).
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The 2024 film year was an interesting one at the box office. In March, Dune Part Two (nominated today for five Academy Awards) gave us the follow-up to the saga of Paul Atreides, who declared himself Lisan al Gaib, and we were off to the races. Then in May, we had a lot of industry Chicken Littles screaming that the sky was falling when The Fall Guy flopped at the box office; the film was overhyped and simply not very good.
The year also brought us numerous sequels and IP cash-ins, including Deadpool and Wolverine, Inside Out 2, Twisters, Gladiator II, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, all of which bounced the box office back in a big way. Interestingly, only Inside Out 2 and Gladiator II scored Oscar nominations, but not in any major categories (they are nominated for Animated Feature and Costume Design, respectively).
The big story at the box office this year was Wicked, which scored 10 nominations this morning, and was a critical and box-office success. I am glad Wicked was the 2024 box-office splash to make it with Oscars; it’s a deserving film.
Outside of the box office, some of the biggest critical successes of the year did show up in a major way at the Oscars. From Cannes, the Palme d'or winner Anora scored six nominations, including Best Picture. The Substance won Best Screenplay at Cannes and replicated this nomination at the Oscars, earning a total of five nominations including Best Picture, and Coralie Fargeat for Best Director. Emilia Perez won two prizes at Cannes and is the nomination leader. The Brutalist won the Best Director prize at Venice. These films are all very accomplished, but why do these nominations also feel a bit hollow this year?
2024 was a great year in movies — do not let people tell you it wasn’t. It was. Challengers, which should have at a minimum been nominated for Best Score (it won the Globe), was an incredible film. A24 should have done a better job with Sing Sing’s campaign; they truly dropped the ball on this movie, it’s harder to access than any other film they have released. All We Imagine as Light was a beautiful film, and critics did a great job honoring it, even though India did not make the film its submission for foreign feature; it missed nominations like Original Screenplay, and it should have bumped the incredibly basic September 5. In Hard Truths, Marianne Jean-Baptiste gave a devastating performance about anger and pain, and won every major critics’ prize -– but missed the Best Actress Oscar nomination. Denzel Washington should have been a nominee for Gladiator II. Say what you will about the film itself, but he is stellar in that movie.
I think there are small victories in the nominations that bear mentioning. The Substance with five nominations is a huge win. The Academy generally does not do horror, especially body horror. I’m Still Here in Best Picture is a cool and lovely surprise, and Nickel Boys getting a spot in the 10 Best Picture nominations is, in my opinion, the best nomination this morning. But no Cinematography nomination, and no acting nomination for Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, is criminal.
The Academy waded into honoring stories about black and brown folks this year, but it was essentially dipping a toe in the water. This is the first time in 47 years that all the Best Actress nominees were in a Best Picture nominee, a truly wild statistic. No Other Land, a film made by a Palestinian and Israeli collective, which still has no distribution, made it into the Documentary Feature category. These are the big wins of the day, in my opinion, because they show the Academy pushing the art form and celebrating film in some truly unique ways.
Then you have Emilia Perez. I am not going to beat up on this film too much; the internet has done that enough. I will simply say this feels like the Academy patting itself on the back for celebrating representation. The Academy and the industry at large has made Perez the “bold choice” this year. On one hand, I love that a film with a trans lead is the most nominated film at the Oscars. I just wish it was in a better film. It misses the mark on quality and representation for me, and it also was ignored at the GLAAD Media Awards, just a day before the Oscar nomination announcement. I saw an interview where Hellboy star Ron Perlman called Perez his favorite film of the year. To quote Sally Fields in Steel Magnolias, “I wanna know why!”
It’s a headscratcher – but again, I think it’s the Academy thinking it is being daring by honoring this film, which is audacious in many ways. But it is not the step forward the Academy thinks it is. Another sign of this not fully being a win was Will & Harper, a documentary on Netflix that digs into trans identity, but which missed out on two potential nominations in the Documentary Feature and Song categories. The Academy often picks and chooses what type of queer stories matter in their own way; they stick within their comfort zone, and that is what these nominations feel like to me.
Several of these nominees feel like they are just here. I thought A Complete Unknown was one of the better music biopics, but eight nominations feels steep. I liked Conclave too — very entertaining, and better than I expected it to be -– but again, eight nominations? The Apprentice scored two acting Oscar nominations. Physician, heal thyself – no thank you. I think there is and should be a balance in what exists in these nominations, between quality and entertainment, and there is no pleasing everyone. But in this overwhelmingly white voting body, there is often too much comfort in the straight caucasity that prevents this group from engaging with stories outside of their own reality. I know Emilia Perez being the nomination leader may appear to challenge this, but the film was written by a straight white French auteur. I think that says it all.
We have tough years ahead of us, and I want to share some advice with the Academy at large: We need voters to embrace challenging work. Today the Academy chose the easy route with many of the nominations (not all), and we need to push folks to engage with deeper material about things that are not about their lives or their experiences. Please dig deeper.
The 2025 Oscars will air on Sunday, March 2, 7pm EST on ABC/Hulu.
What did YOU think of the 2025 Oscar nominations? Leave a comment below!
