Our wee nation, once a stranger to the Academy Awards, really has lost the run of itself. It looks as if the upcoming Oscar nominations – twice postponed by the Los Angeles wildfires, and now due on Thursday, January 23rd – will leave some mildly disappointed at the Irish performance.
Over the past decade the likes of Kerry Condon, Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Barry Keoghan and Saoirse Ronan have all got on to the final grid. Yet, barring miracles, there will be no Irish actors among the 2025 nominees. Okay, the Kneecap team can, after an astonishing performance in the Bafta nominations, now feel reasonably confident of a spot in the best-international-film category, but we now demand more than that.
No actors? How did this happen? Is it legal?
Blame the hubris on inflated expectations for Saoirse Ronan’s two 2024 releases. It once didn’t seem mad to predict both would generate nominations: best actress for Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun; best supporting actress for Steve McQueen’s Blitz. But the films failed to deliver in different ways. She was not even on Bafta’s longlist for McQueen’s disappointing feature. Ronan will be happy with this week’s best-actress nod, but it feels – in, as we shall see, a wildly volatile year for the category – as if chances of a corresponding Oscar nod remain slim. Remember Bafta lists six nominations rather than the Oscars’ five.
Paul Mescal, nominated two years ago for Aftersun, may once have had hopes of a best-actor nomination for Gladiator II, but Ridley Scott’s undisciplined epic has registered softly with precursor awards. Even Denzel Washington’s spot in best supporting actor, inked-in on release, now looks to be in doubt.
Cillian Murphy deserved a nomination for Small Things Like These, but the campaign for that much-liked film appears never to have got going. His failure to place on the Bafta longlist surely rules him out of Oscar contention.
[ The Oscars aren’t fair. Just look at what’s happening to Cillian MurphyOpens in new window ]
Irish hopes now rest on the little rock flick that could and on two likable short films. Rich Peppiatt’s Kneecap, after its triumphant Sundance premiere, looked like a certain Irish submission for best international feature – the award for films not in English – but few guessed it would, a year later, feel like a probable nominee. Six Bafta nominations, the most ever for a debut film, was considerably more than even its most optimistic supporters expected, so we must anoint the hip-hop romp as a likely finisher here.
With so few precursor awards, it is impossible to make valuable predictions in the short-film categories. But Portia A Buckley’s Clodagh and TJ O’Grady Peyton’s Room Taken – the latter with Colin Farrell as champion – seem well placed to convert places on the Oscar shortlist into nominations for best live-action short.
So, away from the flag-wrapping, what is of interest about this year’s race? Plenty. It is rare for only one of the major categories to look sewn up.
Barring a meteor strike, Kieran Culkin, a fine, unforced campaigner, will win best supporting actor for Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain. Elsewhere, chaos rules. As Angelina Jolie plummets, Demi Moore rises. Is Denzel really getting dumped? Much of social media is ranting about how it hates Emilia Pérez while that mad musical telenovela continues to stack up awards. Expect it to succeed with Oscar too. Indeed, I have it narrow favourite to score the most nominations.
Some argue that 2025 is a weak year, but any season that ends with a best-picture battle between Brady Corbet’s singularly odd The Brutalist and Sean Baker’s electric Anora is not at all bad. We here predict the big races, ranking potential nominees from most to least likely.
Best picture
- The Brutalist
- Anora
- Conclave
- Emilia Pérez
- Wicked
- Dune: Part Two
- Sing Sing
- A Complete Unknown
- The Substance
- Nickel Boys
The top eight seem nailed down. The Brutalist and Anora moved from toasts of, respectively, Venice and Cannes to the top of critics’ end-of-year lists. Conclave, Wicked and Dune massage different bits of the middle brow. Emilia Pérez lives to defy its detractors. A Complete Unknown is the “Oscar bait” pick. The worthy Sing Sing should survive. Then four films compete for two places. Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain could easily replace one of the bottom two. September 5, about the Black September attack on the Munich Olympics, may generate too much discomfort in the current political climate.
Best director
- Brady Corbet, for The Brutalist
- Sean Baker, for Anora
- Jacques Audiard, for Emilia Pérez
- Edward Berger, for Conclave
- Coralie Fargeat, for The Substance
The top four seem safe. All kinds of factors confuse the fifth slot. The Directors Guild of America went with James Mangold for the workmanlike A Complete Unknown. But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a tad more “international” and may be keener to include a woman. That could let in Payal Kapadia for All We Imagine as Light, but I’m going with Fargeat for what would be the closest thing to a gross-out movie ever to score so well with Oscar.
Best actor
- Adrien Brody, for The Brutalist
- Ralph Fiennes, for Conclave
- Timotheé Chalamet, for A Complete Unknown
- Colman Domingo, for Sing Sing
- Sebastian Stan, for The Apprentice
No clear winner, but the nominees are shaping up. The top four seem likely, but the British academy leaving out Cheshire’s own Daniel Craig for Queer from its six picks opens the possibility of Sebastian Stan. But for The Apprentice or A Different Man? I’m riskily tipping the Trump flick.
Best actress
- Mikey Madison, for Anora
- Karla Sofía Gascón, for Emilia Pérez
- Demi Moore, for The Substance
- Cynthia Erivo, for Wicked
- Fernanda Torres, for I’m Still Here
Who knows? Three weeks ago Moore seemed as much an outsider for a nomination as Angelina Jolie, captivating in Maria, was a dead cert. Then Jolie was left off the Bafta longlist. Then Moore won a Golden Globe for comedy actress. Then Moore got a Screen Actors Guild nomination while Jolie was stiffed. Regrettably, we now swap Jolie for the Golden Globe drama winner Fernanda Torres. Marianne Jean-Baptiste deserves it for Hard Truths.
Best supporting actor
- Kieran Culkin, for A Real Pain
- Guy Pearce, for The Brutalist
- Edward Norton, for A Complete Unknown
- Yura Borisov, for Anora
- Denzel Washington, for Gladiator II
The Screen Actors Guild threw another grenade in the prediction centre last week by leaving out Denzel Washington and Guy Pearce for Jonathan Bailey in Wicked and Jeremy Strong in The Apprentice. Strong is certainly a possibility. Washington also failed to score with Bafta, but it has never picked him. We nervously leave him in.
Best supporting actress
- Zoë Saldaña, for Emilia Pérez
- Ariana Grande, for Wicked
- Isabella Rossellini, for Conclave
- Felicity Jones, for The Brutalist
- Danielle Deadwyler, for The Piano Lesson
Only the top two seem safe. Everyone loves Rossellini, but voters may baulk at awarding such a tiny, tiny role (while Saldaña is basically a colead). If the academy really can warm to The Substance then Margaret Qualley may be in with a chance.
Best adapted screenplay
- Conclave
- Emilia Pérez
- Nickel Boys
- Sing Sing
- A Complete Unknown
One of those rare years when original screenplay seems a little more competitive. Conclave has the solid feel of good workmanship carried out by a responsible professional. Should win.
[ Success of Irish actors needs more public spending on film, says Oscar winnerOpens in new window ]
Best original screenplay
- Anora
- The Brutalist
- A Real Pain
- The Substance
- Hard Truths
The Substance? Well, it won that award at Cannes. Feels like a straight fight between two best-picture contenders for the prize. If Jean-Baptiste fails to get into best actress then this may be a lone chance for Mike Leigh’s much-admired Hard Truths to make a mark.
Best international feature
- Emilia Pérez
- The Seed of the Sacred Fig
- I’m Still Here
- Kneecap
- The Girl with the Needle
Not a particularly competitive year. If India had selected All We Imagine as Light it could have run Emilia Pérez close. After that breathtaking success with the Bafta nominations, Kneecap should be in. But don’t rule out Flow, from Latvia, or From Ground Zero, from Palestine.
Best animated feature
- The Wild Robot
- Flow
- Inside Out 2
- Memoir of a Snail
- Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
The only question here is whether they’ll want to honour the unexpected hugeness of Moana 2. The Wild Robot, a hit at the box office and with critics, looks like a certain winner, but remember The Boy and the Heron got past Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse last year. The lovely Latvian reverie Flow could repeat that trick.
Best documentary feature
- No Other Land
- Sugarcane
- Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
- Daughters
- Dahomey
No Other Land, a searing piece about the displacement of Palestinian peoples, could win despite struggling for distribution in the United States. One suspects that would, on balance, be a popular result in the hall.
