2025 Oscar Predictions: Emilia Perez for Best Picture?

A Turkish Critic's 2025 Oscar Predictions: Why This Year Is Brutally Hard to Call

On January 31, 2025, a writer posting under the name "illumina" on the Turkish site Ekşi Şeyler published a full slate of 2025 Oscar predictions, covering 23 categories, short films included, just weeks before the 97th Academy Awards were set to begin handing out trophies in the early hours of March 3, 2025, Turkish time.

What makes the piece worth reading is not confidence. It is the opposite. He admits right away that this is a tough year to call, and anyone who nails 90 percent this time around deserves a standing ovation. He sets his own bar lower: 17 or more of his 23 picks, about 70 percent, counts as a pass. Anything under 17, he calls a fail. The reasoning is simple enough. A crowd of films meets in the middle, and most categories are fiercely contested.

He also drops a brag. By his own account, his 2024 Oscar predictions hit a 90 percent success rate and beat out a number of American media outlets. That figure is self-reported and unverifiable, so treat it as the story he tells about himself rather than a checked result.

But it is his mood that really sets the tone. February, the run-up to the ceremony, is his favorite part of winter. And even though he thinks 2024 was a weak year for cinema, he finds the 2025 race far more entertaining. He is upfront about it: he loves chaos, arguments, a scrambled field and plenty of surprises. He rates last year's movies well above this year's, yet he still finds this year's show more fun to watch.

Twenty-three categories, seventeen to pass. A critic who would rather see the race blow up than go to form. That is the frame he sets before he names a single winner.

The Locked-In Picks: Supporting Acting, Costumes, Makeup, and the International Race

If you want the categories where the 2025 Oscar predictions feel less like a gamble and more like a sure thing, start here. Kieran Culkin is the pick for Best Supporting Actor for his work in A Real Pain. Zoe Saldana takes Best Supporting Actress for Emilia Perez. Wicked wins Best Costume Design. The Substance wins Best Makeup and Hairstyling. And Dune: Part Two sweeps both Best Sound and Best Visual Effects. Those six races carry the least suspense heading into the March 2, 2025 ceremony in Los Angeles, which reaches Turkish screens in the early hours of March 3.

Culkin doesn't make voters think too hard. He walks in, owns his scenes, walks out. No campaign drama, no last-minute controversy, just an actor at the top of his game in a small film voters actually watched.

Saldana is the other near-lock. Watching her in Emilia Perez is like watching someone give a full acting recital inside a musical. She sings, she moves, she shifts gears mid-scene. There are other names on the ballot, but none of them sparked the same "did you see her?" buzz all winter.

Where the crafts categories get interesting

Wicked for costumes is almost too easy. The wardrobe is one of the film's loudest arguments for existing. Every gown, every uniform, every stitch of Oz carries weight, and voters who spent two hours enchanted by the visuals will remember the clothes when they fill out their ballots.

The Substance in makeup and hairstyling is a different kind of lock. The film lives or dies on its prosthetics and body-transformation work. The Academy loves rewarding exactly this kind of technical ambition, and nothing else in the category comes close to what The Substance pulled off.

Dune: Part Two doubling up in sound and visual effects is the safest bet of the night. The film missed the biggest categories, but the craft branches know what Denis Villeneuve's team built. The sandworms, the ships, the desert storms, all of it was designed to be felt in a theater, and the sound branch in particular tends to reward that kind of scale.

The international race and the record it broke

Best International Feature goes to Emilia Perez. France submitted the film, and it is performed in Spanish. It arrived with 13 nominations, which broke the record for the most-nominated predominantly non-English-language film in Oscar history. That number alone tells you how the international branch feels about it.

The record matters because it reframes what an "international" film can be. Emilia Perez is not a quiet foreign-language drama that snuck into a few categories. It is a full-force contender that showed up everywhere, and the 13 nominations are the clearest signal that the Academy's international voters are not treating this as a consolation prize category.

Six categories, six clear favorites. The real chaos starts when the night's biggest prizes come up.

What makes these picks feel safe is not that the other nominees are weak. It is that the frontrunners in each of these races built their cases early and never lost momentum. Culkin, Saldana, Wicked's costumes, The Substance's prosthetics, and Dune's technical wall of sound and spectacle all peaked at the right moment and stayed there.

The international category is the one worth watching for a different reason. A win for Emilia Perez would cap a night where the film is expected to collect multiple trophies across several branches. France's submission, the Spanish-language performances, the 13 nominations, all of it points the same direction.

So these are the picks you can write down now. The harder questions, the ones about Best Picture and Best Director, belong to a different conversation entirely.

The Animation, Documentary and Short Film Races: From an Istanbul Hair Transplant to a 1993 Bosnian Train

Not every Oscar gets handed out in the last twenty minutes of the night. Some of the sharpest, strangest storytelling of the 97th Academy Awards sits in the smaller categories, and if you are building your own 2025 Oscar predictions, this is where the real character lives.

Start with Best Animated Feature. The Wild Robot is the pick here, and it is not a hard call to defend. It is the year's strongest animated film, the kind of movie that earns the trophy in its own lane and sends families home happy all over again.

Best Animated Short

Beautiful Men comes to the ceremony with one of the best premises on the entire ballot. Three balding brothers travel to Istanbul for a hair transplant operation, and the film follows the trouble they run into once they get there. It should take the category.

Best Documentary Short

I Am Ready, Warden is the one to watch, and be warned: it is a deeply sad film. The odds are high that it leaves a good chunk of the audience in tears before the winner's name is even read.

Best Live Action Short

The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent is a Croatian production set in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993, and it tells a tense, bottled-up story from that year. It is the strongest entry in the field and the one expected to win.

Best Documentary Feature

No Other Land has no real competition in this category. The film arrives carrying the weight of the Israel and Palestine conflict, and it is the clear favorite to take the Oscar. Watching it win, and watching what that win means, will be one of the more charged moments of the night.

Best Production Design

Wicked is the pick. The sets are the film's most persuasive argument, an enormous, hand-built world that you can feel the scale of in almost every frame. Production design is one of the night's more contested races, but Wicked's craft is hard to argue past.

Best Cinematography

The Brutalist earns this one, and it earns it fully. The film was shot on 70mm, and the images it produces are extraordinarily rich, the sort of thing that reminds you what the format was built for. Nobody should be surprised when it walks away with the trophy.

Two categories, two very different kinds of craft. One built a world out of paint and scaffolding, the other captured one on a strip of film most productions no longer bother with.

Editing, Music, and Screenplay: Where the Race Gets Trickiest

Ask anyone who fills out an Oscar ballot for fun and they will tell you the same thing: the craft categories are where confidence goes to die. For the 97th Academy Awards, handed out on March 2, 2025 in Los Angeles (the early hours of March 3 back in Turkey), one race above all others kept tripping up the 2025 Oscar predictions crowd. Best Editing.

The author of the forecast put it plainly: no category demanded more agonizing. The pick landed on Emilia Perez, with Conclave slotted second and Anora third. That is not a comfortable ranking. Editing is the spine of a film. If the cut wobbles, the whole thing limps, no matter how good the performances or the script happen to be. And this year, five of the ten Best Picture nominees also showed up in the editing field: Anora, The Brutalist, Conclave, Emilia Perez, and Wicked. That overlap is not trivia. It is a diagnostic tool, and the forecast leaned on it hard to thin the herd down the stretch.

Best Original Song: "El Mal"

Over in the music branch, the call was more settled. "El Mal," from Emilia Perez, was tapped to win Best Original Song. The track is performed by Zoe Saldana and Karla Sofia Gascon, and it carries a sound that stays with you. The write-up did not hedge here. It described the song as exquisite and deeply affecting, the kind of number that wins on impact alone.

Best Original Score: The Brutalist

Best Original Score went to The Brutalist. Daniel Blumberg's theme, the "Overture (Ship)" cue, was singled out as the strongest piece of music in the running. The prediction treated this as one of the safer bets of the night, a category where the emotional weight of the composition did the arguing.

Best Original Screenplay: Anora

Best Original Screenplay belonged, in this forecast, to Anora, written and directed by Sean Baker. Baker's script was called the finest original screenplay of the year, full stop. No hedging, no second place. Just a clean, confident pick for a film the author clearly adored.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Conclave

Best Adapted Screenplay was Conclave's moment to shine. The forecast framed it as a superb example of adaptation, the category where that film's strengths finally got their due. So across these five races, the predictions spread the love: two nods to Emilia Perez (editing and song), one to The Brutalist (score), one to Anora (original screenplay), and one to Conclave (adapted screenplay).

What makes this stretch of the ballot so fascinating is how little room it leaves for a clean sweep. A film can dominate the technical categories and still lose the big prize, and vice versa. That tension is exactly why the editing race mattered so much to the overall picture, and why the screenplay awards quietly shaped the night's narrative before Best Picture was even announced.

Best Actor and Actress: Adrien Brody's Second Oscar and Demi Moore's Career Peak

Adrien Brody won the Best Actor Oscar in 2003 for The Pianist, and in these 2025 Oscar predictions the call is that he takes the same prize a second time for The Brutalist. It is a rare thing for the Academy to hand an actor a second lead trophy more than two decades after the first, and it is exactly the kind of story the night was built to tell.

Brody's competition included Timothée Chalamet, who played Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. The Dylan turn drew real admiration, and it deserved to. Still, the argument here leans on sheer acting weight: Brody's performance reads as the heavier lift, and the Academy was expected to score it that way. There is something almost unfair about the matchup. Chalamet got the transformation, the voice, the mannerisms, the whole impersonation game. Brody got silence, a Hungarian accent, and decades of a man's life collapsing inward. One is a magic trick you can watch being performed. The other is harder to catch in the act.

Over in Best Actress, the field was reportedly one of the most unsettled of the entire season, and the prediction landed on Demi Moore for The Substance. Moore was competing against Mikey Madison and Karla Sofía Gascón, and by the account here she walks away with it. The reasoning is not sentimental. The Substance is described as the peak of Moore's career, a role that is genuinely difficult to pull off, and she carries it. That is the whole case, and it is a strong one.

It helps that the part asks for something most actors never get asked to do. Moore has spent decades as a movie star, which is a different job from being a character actor, and The Substance let her use both halves of that at once. The body horror, the vanity, the rage, the humiliation. None of it works if the actress in the middle of it is protecting her own image. Moore, by this reading, does not protect a thing.

So the acting races split the way the rest of the night was expected to split. A veteran actor collecting a long-overdue second statue, and a veteran actress finally getting the one that had been missing from a career that spanned far longer than most Oscar voters care to remember. Two career stories, two trophies, and one very loud room.

The Elimination Game: How the Critic Narrowed Ten Best Picture Nominees to Two

Start with the full slate. The ten films up for Best Picture at the 97th Academy Awards were Anora, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune: Part Two, Emilia Perez, I'm Still Here, Nickel Boys, The Substance, and Wicked. Ten names, one trophy, and a voting body of thousands who each fill out a ballot in their own way. So how do you get from ten to a real shortlist? You borrow a trick from the editing room.

Editing is the skeleton of a film. If the cuts don't hold, nothing else saves it. A gorgeous performance inside a movie that stumbles from scene to scene still feels broken, so the editing branch is a surprisingly honest filter for which nominees are actually built to last. Five of the ten Best Picture contenders also landed a Best Editing nomination: Anora, The Brutalist, Conclave, Emilia Perez, and Wicked. That single overlap slices the field in half. The other five, A Complete Unknown, Dune: Part Two, I'm Still Here, Nickel Boys, and The Substance, quietly exit the conversation right there.

Five left. Now bring in the directors. The Best Director nominees did not include Conclave or Wicked, which tells you the Academy admired both films without ever believing in them as the biggest prize of the night. A movie can win Best Picture without a directing nod, but it is rare, and it usually needs a groundswell that neither of these two had. So Conclave and Wicked are gone. Three remain: Anora, The Brutalist, and Emilia Perez, the trio that swept the major categories and looked, on paper, like the only real contenders.

Now the math gets interesting, and this is where the 2025 Oscar predictions conversation turns on a detail most viewers never think about. Every active Academy member can vote for Best Picture, no matter which branch they belong to. The sound designer, the costume artist, the documentarian, all of them get a say in the top category. That means a film with nominations scattered across many crafts has more voters who have already watched it, already liked it, and already have a reason to check its name. Emilia Perez and The Brutalist both fit that profile. Anora, by comparison, carried fewer total nominations, and among these three finalists it was the weakest link for exactly that reason. Fewer branches, fewer natural allies, less accumulated goodwill. So Anora drops out of the prediction, leaving two.

That is the whole method in miniature: use editing to cut the field, use directing to cut it again, then let the nomination count and the open Best Picture ballot do the rest. It is not a formula that guarantees a correct answer, and the critic behind it was the first to admit the year was brutal to forecast. But it turns a chaotic ten-film race into a story with a shape, and a shape is what you need when the envelope finally opens.

Best Director Goes to Brady Corbet, Best Picture to Emilia Perez

Here was the forecast, stated plainly: Brady Corbet for Best Director, and Emilia Perez for Best Picture. That was the call going into the 97th Academy Awards. It did not hold. The actual results went the other way, with Sean Baker taking Best Director for Anora and Anora taking Best Picture.

Still, the reasoning is worth walking through, because it shows exactly how the 2025 Oscar predictions were being built that year.

The Brutalist was not a tidy little movie. It was shot on 70mm film, a format almost nobody uses anymore, and it carried the weight of a passion project for Corbet, who poured years into getting it made. Preparation, shooting, editing: the whole thing demanded more time and effort than most films ever ask for. The bet was that the Academy would look at that grind and reward it with Best Director.

There was a catch, though. The same film drew criticism for trying to be bigger than it actually was. The epic drama had obvious problems, and the editing had them too. It was not the kind of movie that sweeps every major category. That tension, admiration for the effort versus doubt about the execution, is what made the director race feel open.

Emilia Perez looked like the safer Best Picture pick. It had the most nominations of any film across all categories, and it did not miss a single critical category. That breadth mattered, because of how the Academy's voting works. Members who vote in their own branch, say editing or sound, also get a vote for Best Picture. A film that shows up everywhere gets more chances to collect those votes.

Conclave and Wicked did not receive Best Director nominations, which knocked them out of the top race. Anora, The Brutalist, and Emilia Perez all landed in the key categories, but Anora had the fewest nominations of the three, which made it look like the weakest link. That is how the prediction settled on two different films splitting the night: Corbet for Director, Emilia Perez for Picture.

The actual ceremony went the other way. Anora won Best Picture, and Sean Baker won Best Director. As for the film that was supposed to dominate, the forecast had Emilia Perez converting five of its nominations, and it converted two. The Brutalist ended with three. Anora took five. So the 2025 Oscar predictions got the shape of the night wrong, even if the analysis behind them was sharp.

The Heart Wants Anora: A Critic's Personal Hope vs. Cold Academy Math

Strip away the spreadsheets for a second. If this were a pure gut call, Sean Baker's Anora sweeps the night: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress for Mikey Madison, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing. That is the heart talking. The head, unfortunately, has been running the numbers for weeks, and the numbers keep pointing somewhere else.

Here is why the heart is so stubborn about this one. Emilia Perez and The Brutalist both left me cold in the same specific way: I felt every minute of their runtime, and the flaws kept poking through the surface. Anora did the opposite. I struggled to find anything genuinely wrong with it. Every parameter, from the writing to the pacing to Madison's performance, lands. It is the rare film where I finished it and could not name the weak link, because there is not one.

And that, weirdly, might be the problem.

The Academy does not reward "flawless." It rewards a feeling. As the story goes, the voting logic here can push a near-perfect film into second place for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. The political atmosphere of the moment, the reflexive pull toward a bigger statement, the sense that a film has to be "truly perfect, a four-out-of-four" to survive the math. If you fall even slightly short of that impossible bar, the gap between you and the frontrunner closes faster than it should. Watching Anora run into that wall is the part of this whole exercise that genuinely stings.

So here is my honest hope, stated plainly: I want to be wrong. I want Anora to run the table on March 2, 2025 at the 97th Academy Awards, and I want the speech to be Sean Baker's and the statuette to be Mikey Madison's, because those two earned it more than anyone else in their categories. It is a long shot. I know it is a long shot. But if you are going to make 2025 Oscar predictions, you might as well make the one you actually believe in.

The Final Tally: How Many Oscars Each Film Was Predicted to Win

Here is where the 2025 Oscar predictions got sorted into a single ledger, written roughly 30 days before the 97th Academy Awards ceremony, which was held on March 2, 2025 in Los Angeles and aired in the early hours of March 3, 2025 in Turkey. The author's final tally handed Emilia Perez the biggest haul of the night with 5 awards, followed by The Brutalist at 4, then The Substance, Dune: Part Two and Wicked at 2 apiece, and a scattering of single wins for Conclave, Anora, A Real Pain, The Wild Robot and No Other Land.

That was the plan on paper. The actual ceremony told a very different story, and the gap between the two is worth walking through.

Look at the two rows that broke the whole sheet. Emilia Perez, the French submission performed in Spanish that carried 13 nominations, was expected to convert five of them. It converted two. Anora, written and directed by Sean Baker, was penciled in for a single award and instead took five, including Best Picture and Best Director, which went to Baker rather than to Brady Corbet for The Brutalist.

The smaller calls held up. The Substance landed its two, Dune: Part Two took its two, Wicked matched its two, and Conclave, A Real Pain, The Wild Robot and No Other Land each collected exactly the one that had been circled for them.

What the tally really shows is how thin the margin was at the top. The reasoning that put Emilia Perez over the line rested on its sheer volume of nominations and the Academy's rule letting members vote for Best Picture regardless of their branch. That logic pointed the right way and still landed on the wrong film. Anora, dismissed as the weakest link of the final three, turned out to be the one the room actually wanted.

Thirty days out, nobody writing that list could have known. The predictions were confident, specific, and wrong in exactly the places that mattered most.