Timothee Chalamet deserves best actor, and Demi has the edge

Awards season, that strange wilderness of glory-giving and spotlight-shining, seems to get weirder every year. And while we might be inclined to say it also gets increasingly harder to predict, there are some mathematical truisms to the Oscars that make certain outcomes inevitable.

Wait, does that mean we already know who will win the Oscars? The answer is no … and yes. So, this is what we know. Awards season begins every December with a suite of critic-led awards, including the Gotham Awards in New York, and the New York and LA Critics Circle awards.

Elle Fanning and Timothée Chalamet, who’s up for a best actor award, in A Complete Unknown.Credit:

Coupled with the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards, these are the winners of passionate opinion. They speak the wit and wisdom of either critics whose learned eye has been honed to find the next hit, or film journalists who don’t always get it right but do have an uncanny knack for spotting the fast bunny in the herd.

The second half of awards season shifts into a much more complicated game: the industry itself, where the writers, directors, actors and producers give out awards in each of their guilds: the WGA, the DGA, the SAG and the PGA Awards. They also don’t always get it right, but what they do represent is a group that roughly mirrors the voting membership of the Academy. The various paired groups don’t vote in lockstep, but sometimes they fall into curious synchronicity.

The one to watch there is, of course, the Producers Guild of America, who have predicted the winner of the best picture Oscar in seven out of the past 10 years. It doesn’t seal the deal but it certainly makes Anora, which won best picture at this year’s PGAs, the one to beat.

Karla Sofía Gascón in the scandal-plagued Emilia Perez.Credit:

There is also the X factor of how the show’s producers, Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan, top what many considered to be a fairly solid 2024 Academy Awards telecast. It had American TV’s genuinely lovely everyman Jimmy Kimmel as host, wrestler-turned-film star John Cena with no clothes on, and Ryan Gosling singing I’m Just Ken. Where do you go from there?

It even pulled a respectable TV audience – almost 20 million viewers in the US, a slight increase on the year before – at a time when awards ceremonies feel like a tired genre and most of them have audience figures tracking in the wrong direction. So, let’s break it all down.

BEST PICTURE

In Sean Baker’s Anora, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) and Anora (Mikey Madison) are a mismatch made in heaven.Credit:

The nominees: Anora, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune: Part Two, Emilia Pérez, I’m Still Here, Nickel Boys, The Substance, Wicked.
So what’s what? Some years a single film takes the lead and becomes unstoppable in the race to the Oscars. This is not that year. Early in the game The Brutalist dominated chatter, then Emilia Pérez, until a social media scandal sank the film’s star and the film with it. And then Anora won the PGA, DGA and Critics Choice, all on the one weekend. At that point, it became a one-horse race.
Who should win? I mean, how long is a piece of string? The popular choice? Wicked. The actual best film? A Complete Unknown. But the winner on Oscar night?
Who will win? Anora.

BEST DIRECTING

The nominees: Sean Baker (Anora), Brady Corbet (The Brutalist), James Mangold (A Complete Unknown), Jacques Audiard (Emilia Pérez), Coralie Fargeat (The Substance).
So what’s what? You would think, after winning at the Directors Guild Awards, that Sean Baker would be a shoo-in. But the DGA-Oscar tie-up isn’t as clear as the PGA-Oscar tie-up.
Who should win? Hard to say, but surely it’s down to either Sean Baker or Brady Corbet.
Who will win? Sean Baker. The maths doesn’t lock in the deal, but an Anora-Baker best picture/best directing double seems to make sense this year.

BEST ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE

Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan, with Edward Norton (left) as Pete Seeger.Credit:

The nominees: Adrien Brody (The Brutalist), Timothée Chalamet (A Complete Unknown), Colman Domingo (Sing Sing), Ralph Fiennes (Conclave), Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice).
So what’s what? This Oscar has, for the longest part of this year’s awards season, been Brody’s to lose. The Brutalist was an early favourite, and the reasonably mixed vibe across the category – great performances, but nothing that seemed a length ahead – more or less left it in Brody’s hands. Then Chalamet won at the SAG Awards and suddenly there are two leading competitors in the final length.
Who should win? Timothée Chalamet, for a truly luminous performance.
Who will win? A hard call, but Adrien Brody is giving off Oscar-winning vibes.

BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE

Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a TV exercise show presenter deemed past it by her station boss (Dennis Quaid), in The Substance.Credit: Madman

The nominees: Cynthia Erivo (Wicked), Karla Sofía Gascón (Emilia Pérez), Mikey Madison (Anora), Demi Moore (The Substance), Fernanda Torres (I’m Still Here as Eunice Paiva)
So what’s what? This category was always going to be an actress’ journey, the question really became which actress? Initially it felt like it could be Pamela Anderson, whose turn in The Last Showgirl was properly revelatory. But then she didn’t even get a nomination. Karla Sofía Gascón was in with a shot but was sunk by her social media scandal.
Who should win? Fernanda Torres, for a stunning performance.
Who will win? Demi Moore, whose comeback story became the season’s comeback story.

BEST ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

The Brutalist presents a visionary architect, Laszlo Toth (played by Adrien Brody), and his relationship with wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce).Credit: AP

The nominees: Yura Borisov (Anora), Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain), Edward Norton (A Complete Unknown), Guy Pearce (The Brutalist), Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice).
So what’s what? A wide field of interesting and compelling performances. Guy Pearce would be the Australian favourite, but it’s challenging to split the field when there’s an establishment favourite (Ed Norton) and a truly great method actor (Jeremy Strong) in the mix.
Who should win? Guy Pearce, whose skill seems to sharpen with each new role.
Who will win? Kieran Culkin, whose natural brilliance seems to have led him on a winning two-year streak through Hollywood.

BEST ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

The nominees: Monica Barbaro (A Complete Unknown), Ariana Grande (Wicked), Felicity Jones (The Brutalist), Isabella Rossellini (Conclave), Zoe Saldaña (Emilia Pérez).
So what’s what? Perhaps the only single-horse race in the entire Oscar line-up, though there might be a lot of establishment sentiment around Rossellini, who still delivers exceptional work, or even Ariana Grande, whose fingernail-holding press tour was the talk of the town.
Who should win? Monica Barbaro, who never quite got into the centre of the spotlight in A Complete Unknown, but was genuinely brilliant.
Who will win? Zoe Saldaña, who has held the line in this category for most of the awards season.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

Roz (Lupita N’yongo), and Brightbill (Kit Connor).Credit:

The nominees: Flow, Inside Out 2, Memoir of a Snail, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, The Wild Robot.
So what’s what? Not the category you would think could turn into an Oscar battlefield, yet in 2025 there was a lot going on in animated cinema. Stuff got hectic. Australia obviously has skin in this game – Adam Elliot and Liz Kearney’s Memoir of a Snail, which is a haunting and complex masterpiece – but the problem is this year there was a lot of haunting and complex masterpieces, including Gints Zilbalodis’ dazzling Flow, starring a cat, a dog, a capybara and a ring-tailed lemur and no dialogue.
Who should win? Memoir of a Snail because Grace Pudel is my spirit animal.
Who will win? The Wild Robot, through sheer magnitude of momentum. It also won best feature at this year’s Annie Awards, which recognise excellence in animated film and TV.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya in Dune: Part Two.Credit:

The nominees: The Brutalist (Lol Crawley), Dune: Part Two (Greig Fraser), Emilia Pérez (Paul Guilhaume), Maria (Ed Lachman), Nosferatu (Jarin Blaschke).
So what’s what? This is one of the night’s really tough categories: The Brutalist is an obvious standout, along with Dune: Part Two – remember, the first part of Dune won this category in 2021 – and Blaschke’s visually complex Nosferatu. Australia has skin in the game here too: Greig Fraser, the genius madman who shot The Mandalorian, also filmed Dune: Part Two.
Who should win? Greig Fraser for Dune: Part Two, because he’s Australian.
Who will win? Greig Fraser for Dune: Part Two, because the visual scope of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune duology is properly breathtaking, and Fraser’s work on it is peerless.

The 2025 Oscars will screen on the Seven Network on Monday, March 3 at 11am.

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