Where do Dune Part Two, Megalopolis, and more stand in the 2025 Oscar season? Let’s take a first look at next year’s Oscar race!
It’s been just about one month since the 2025 Oscar season, but it’s never too early to start thinking about next year’s ceremony and take a first look at next year’s Academy Awards race! As the first few months of 2024 have gone by, we’ve seen movies begin to have their stock go up and down. With many of the major festivals still to come and only a handful of major releases already out, it will be fascinating to see the way this will change over the course of the coming months, as we see what anticipated films end up exceeding or coming up short of expectations. But with several months remaining until the Oscar nominations, there are definitely a few films that have started to separate themselves from the pack. Let’s take a look at which movies have more chances to make it to the 2025 Oscar race!
STOCK UP: DUNE PART TWO
The obvious major top story of the year so far in film is Denis Villeneuve’s much-anticipated Dune Part Two, which hit theaters and took the movie world by storm. A year after seeing Oppenheimer emerge as an early favorite and run away with Best Picture, it’s fair to wonder if we’re going to be seeing the same thing when the 2025 Oscars roll around. The first Dune film scored 10 Oscar nominations and six wins, and it’s fair to assume we could be looking at a similar performance, if not even better.
After missing out on a Best Director nomination in 2022, the most interesting question is going to be whether or not Villeneuve will secure a nomination this time around. But it feels like a no-brainer to predict that Dune Part Two at the very least will dominate many of the below-the-line technical categories.
STOCK UP: SING SING AND COLMAN DOMINGO
After his first Best Actor nomination last year for Rustin, Colman Domingo appears to be primed to repeat with another standout performance in Sing Sing. The film, which premiered last year at the Toronto International Film Festival and received rave reviews both at TIFF and at South by Southwest in March, could be another favorite to compete for Best Picture behind the lead performance.
A24, of course, has been known to be able to flex its muscles and garner some major awards considerations for the films that it puts the majority of its support behind in the past few years. It’s safe to say that the A24 awards machine, plus an actor of Domingo’s caliber, could lead to Sing Sing being a major contender.
STOCK UP: FILMS IN COMPETITION AT CANNES
Three of the past four Best Picture lineups have featured the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or winner. Parasite won in 2019 before going on to win Best Picture, while Triangle of Sadness and Anatomy of a Fall have both gone on to score nominations. This has led to many people putting focus on this year’s festival to try to see who might end up among the Academy’s top 10 films this year.
Early attention is on Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos’ follow-up to Poor Things, as well as Ali Abbasi’s biopic featuring around the 1970s and 80s rise of Donald Trump, The Apprentice, as a couple of potential Best Picture nominees in competition later this month. But with legends like Francis Ford Coppola (Megalopolis) and Paul Schrader (Oh, Canada) also in that lineup, as well as new offerings from Sean Baker and Andrea Arnold among many others, it looks like there will be some stacked competition for this year’s Palme d’Or.
STOCK DOWN: FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA
It feels weird putting this as stock down, and it shouldn’t be interpreted as me being negative about the film as a whole. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga seems to have gotten positive reactions out of CinemaCon recently, and as far as we can tell there’s no reason to expect that this will be a step down from 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.
But as the film’s May 24 release date gets closer, it’s been fascinating to see many people discount this movie’s chances when it comes to Oscar nominations. After Fury Road won six Oscars and received 10 total nominations in 2016, it feels like it should be fair to expect that Furiosa would do just as well in terms of technical categories at least. As blockbusters continue to be more represented in categories like Best Picture, it feels like a movie like this should be getting a little more buzz but hopefully next month we’ll start to see the tide begin to turn in a positive direction.
STOCK DOWN: MEGALOPOLIS
Even with what I previously said about films in competition at Cannes, it’s feeling more and more like Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited passion project might turn out to be a miss this season.
When it comes time to make an early list of potential award favorites at the beginning of a new year, it’s always fair to jump straight to looking for major filmmakers and if they have any new work coming out in the next calendar year. And that’s where a film like Megalopolis looks so intriguing on paper. Having one of our greatest filmmakers putting together an amazing ensemble of performers to do a big, bold project that seems to want to experiment with the form feels like it should be building buzz like crazy.
But through test screenings, it looks more and more likely that it’s going to have a hard time finding a landing place in the normal studio structure. Hopefully Megalopolis can get positive reactions once it’s screened at Cannes, and we’ll get to have a lot of people be able to see the film this year and see if it can be in the mix.
AN EXTREMELY EARLY 2025 OSCAR SEASON TOP 10 (AS OF APRIL 18, 2024):
- Dune Part Two
- Sing Sing
- Blitz
- Conclave
- Kinds of Kindness
- The Nickel Boys
- The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat
- Joker: Folie à Deux
- The Apprentice
- The Piano Lesson
First four out: May December, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Color Purple, All of Us Strangers
The 97th Academy Awards will take place on Sunday, March 2, 2025 – a week sooner than the 2024 ceremony. The nominations will be announced on January 17.
