Who Will Win at the 2025 Oscars: From Demi Moore vs. Mikey Madison to Adrien Brody vs. Timothée Chalamet

Last year was a stellar one for movies, but the Oscars banquet table can seat only so many contenders — bagging a nomination becomes a frantic game of musical chairs. Just look at the terrific films and stars left standing, shut out. Well, you can always say you gave it your best shot, Babygirl’s Nicole Kidman, and then some! Sorry, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga — not a single one for you! Game over, Challengers!  Meanwhile, back at the table, Flow, a magical, mystical Latvian cartoon about a cat, is up for both Best Picture and Best International Film. Mee-yow.

Overall, though, this has turned out to be a nail-bitingly exciting, constantly evolving competition, one that saw the frontrunner — Netflix’s Emilia Pérez, lauded with 13 nominations — lose most of its momentum thanks to the social-media history of its star, Best Actress contender Karla Sofía Gascon. Now the main event, which will be hosted by the dry-as-a-saltine Conan O'Brien, is only hours away,

Related: How Flow, a Latvian Animated Movie with No Dialogue, Is Upending the Awards Race: The Story Is 'Universal' (Exclusive)

So: It’s time to make some final Oscar predictions.

Best Picture

As the buzz for director Brady Corbet’s gargantuan epic The Brutalist has died down, or maybe just passed away altogether, the race has narrowed down to two excellent but very different movies. Anora, director Sean Baker’s funny but unexpectedly heartbreaking film about the misadventures of  a guileless erotic dancer (Mikey Madison), has the raw, vital energy of what used to be called independent cinema. Then you have Conclave, director Edward Berger’s Vatican thriller. A gleamingly polished, impeccably mounted production with an A-list cast, it’s like vintage ensemble trash — The Poseidon Adventure, say — decorated to look like the Sistine Chapel. This is not a bad thing.

My hunch is that the Academy will go with Conclave.

Best Actress

Demi Moore, whose movie credits date back to the start of the 1980s, has won virtually nothing of note in all those years. Her nomination for The Substance, a satiric body-horror movie in which she plays an aging star undone by what’s supposed to be a revitalizing serum, is the sort of Hollywood comeback that thrills the Academy. The movie’s repulsively gory finale doesn’t seem to have been held against either Moore or the film. (Its other nominations include Best Picture, even though Death Becomes Her, which won for Special Effects back in 1993, remains a much wittier film on the same theme.) But, like many performances in Moore’s career, what impresses most isn't her acting so much as the muscular will power of a major (if now middle-aged) star. Her being nominated for playing a grotesque has-been is, at the very least, a delicious irony.

But what about Anora’s Mikey Madison, Moore’s chief rival for the prize? She gives a breakthrough performance that has real electricity and presence, humor and pathos.  I’d be delighted to see her win, but Moore has that special … substance. And you just know her speech will kill.

Best Actor

For what seemed like the longest time — just imagine calendar pages turning over and flying away, the way they do in old movies — Adrien Brody was the presumptive winner for The Brutalist. And with good reason: His performance as a Jewish Hungarian architect lost in postwar America seemed to embody a whole historical era. Beyond that, it was of a piece with his previous Oscar-winning performance as a man desperately evading the Nazis in The Pianist — a bookend, almost. But the award will probably end up going to Timothée Chalamet. You may or may not think that his young Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown captured the soul of an elusive genius (I don't), but the film was the perfect vehicle for one of the millennium's genuine romantic idols (Chalamet, dummy. Not Dylan). I’d award Brody — or even Colman Domingo, theatrically monumental as a convicted man staging plays in Sing Sing. Still, the prize will go home with the charismatic Chalamet, fresh off his win at the SAG Awards, where he bucked the tradition of humble-brag acceptance speeches by proclaiming, “I want to be one of the greats.” As Dylan would say, he’s a hypnotist collector.

No, I’m not altogether sure what that means, either. Let's hope it's apt.

Related: Timothée Chalamet Surprises as Best Actor Winner at 2025 SAG Awards: 'I Was Not Expecting This at All'

Best Supporting Actress

Zoe Saldaña is just about the only survivor of that capsized juggernaut Emilia Pérez, and there’s little reason to doubt that the high tide that’s borne her aloft all through awards season won’t conclude with an Oscar win for her sharp performance as a druglord's fixer. But there may be a spoiler: Conclave’s Isabella Rossellini. Her performance as a nun who confronts the College of Cardinals boils down to just one scene, but that scene is crucial to the film — and so is Rossellini, making the most of her few lines. It’s as if she'd been handed a single bunch of grapes and given it enough of a stomp to produce an entire barrel of wine (and it’s not plonk, either). Plus she’s the daughter of revered actress Ingrid Bergman. And did you know she raises ducks and chickens, one of them named Andy Warhol? But who knows how much Bergman, let alone poultry, matters to today's Academy. The winner will be Saldaña. 

Best Supporting Actor

Kieran Culkin for A Real Pain. Next!

Related: Kieran Culkin Misses His BAFTA Award Win Because He's in New York with a 'Family Member Who's Quite Sick'

Best Director

Anora’s Sean Baker has been favored to win since he was honored by the Directors Guild of America, and he should prevail — he’s an adventurous but unpretentious original, capable of capturing what feels like an unvarnished, often tarnished slice of American life. (Check out 2017’s The Florida Project, a shattering portrait of childhood drifting toward disaster.) If the category had included Conclave’s Edward Berger, cool-eyed and dramatically sure-footed, this might have been a more interesting race. But that didn’t happen, even though the film is nominated for eight awards — chalk Berger up as one more casualty of musical chairs. So: Baker. 

Best Animated Feature

Flow, which didn't arrive in theaters until late last November, was a revelation in the age of digital cartoons: The wordless story of a cat trying to survive in a world where humans have fled (or been drowned by) catastrophic floods, the film is a dream-like fantasy anchored by startlingly realistic imagery of nature. If you've been longing for a few moments of zen in these turbulent days, here 's the movie for you. But Flow is up against both Pixar's Inside Out 2 and Dreamworks Animation's The Wild Robot, both big, well-reviewed hits. Robot, in particular, has a strong chance of winning. Its take on nature is a good deal more rhapsodically lush than Flow's, and audiences will have shed more tears over the tale of a nurturing robot than a Latvian cartoon about a water-soaked kitty. But Flow will win because of its sheer novelty and its strange, irresistible spell.

Conan O'Brien hosts the 2025 Oscars, which will air live from the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 2, at 7 p.m. ET on ABC and Hulu.

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