Predicting an Unpredictable Oscars

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Predictions for an Unpredictable Oscars

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By Ben Elliott

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Going into most Oscar nights, you have a good idea who is going to win. But, like everything else in the world right now, this year’s Academy Awards are wildly unsettled. Outside of Jessie Buckley’s apparent lock on Best Actress for Hamnet, almost every other major award is up for grabs this Sunday.

Two friends chasing floating legs in a red room from House, 1977

Sinners, 2025

With all of the precursor awards in place, Picture and Director looks like a jump ball between front-runners One Battle After Another and Sinners. If the Academy members opt to split these categories between the two, I’d expect One Battle to take the top prize with Sinners’ Ryan Coogler making history as the first Black filmmaker to win Best Director.

Weapons’ Amy Madigan seems to be pulling away with late-breaking momentum in Supporting Actress, but when it comes to Supporting Actor, get ready to throw a dart. Precursor awards have been all over the place, and while One Battle After Another’s Sean Penn currently has the edge in betting markets, I wouldn’t be shocked to see his co-star Benicio Del Toro toasting his second win with a “few small beers.”

A young woman holding a severed head in House, 1977

One Battle After Another, 2025

Meanwhile, the Best Actor race ushered in this year’s Oscar scandal when Marty Supreme’s Timothée Chalamet glibly dismissed opera and ballet in an interview. If Chalamet ends up losing, don’t blame it on opera-gate: the viral controversy broke after voting had already ended. Instead, chalk it up to the fact that this was always a stacked category, with all five nominees having a path to winning.

All of this uncertainty makes it hard to fill out a ballot, as I hope you will on Sunday when we watch Hollywood’s Big Night on the big screen at The Triplex. But these kinds of hard decisions are exactly what you want at the Oscars: nominees so strong that you may be disappointed when something loses, but you won’t be mad about anything winning.

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