2025 Oscar Nominees: Pick Your Winner and Contender

2025 Oscar Nominees

: Pick Your Winner and Contender

A 2025 Oscar Nominees will remain the pinnacle of film industry awards and in the coming months everyone will start predicting who the most popular movies of 2025 will be. Competition for Best Picture is more competitive than ever in this pot, as a pot of blockbuster sequels and auteur-driven dramas with indies scrambling to get in.

In this article we will dissect the expected early frontrunners, contenders to be dark horses and biggest snubs that may face the biggest night in Academy History – The 97th Academy Awards.

Early Frontrunners for Best Picture in 2025

1. Superman: Legacy (DC Studios)

Director: James Gunn
Why It Could Win: DC films have been a bit of mixed bag for years, so James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy is supposed to bring new air of wide open heart on the Man of Steel. Early reviews indicate it finds that sweet spot of spectacle with heart, akin to The Dark Knight(2008) won a Best Picture nomination. Should it be nominated for both critical respect and box office success, the superhero curse at the Oscars may be broken.

2. The Piano Lesson (Netflix)

Director: Denzel Washington
Why It Could Win: Netflix Drama, Based On August Wilson Pulitzer Prize Play Adapted By Samuel L. Jacksonstars John David Washington Adaptation: Denzel’s prior take on the same (2016) Fences got him multiple Oscar bids and if that same unvarnished emotional heft follows in The Piano Lesson, it could be an enormous film.

3. Megalopolis (Universal Pictures)

Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Why It Could Win: Coppola’s 40-year labor of love directed by Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker and Nathalie Emmanuel is a high stakes, high reward epic might play out exactly like that. It has got huge ambition and does deliver on that, if it can make the most of it — a big budget sci-fi movie about reinventing society this summer and landing somewhere similar to this Odessey or Everything Everything… A 2021.

4. Blitz (Apple Original Films)

Director: Steve McQueen
Why It Could Win: Blitz (The World War II drama from the director of 12 Years a Slave) With a star-studded cast (Saoirse Ronan, Harris Dickinson) and Apple’s high stakes awards game, it could turn out to be a #criticacollaboration.

5. A Complete Unknown (Searchlight Pictures)

Director: James Mangold
Why It Could Win: A Timothée Chalamet biopic of Bob Dylan. In which the artist challenges himself by moving from folk to electric music. If Chalamet turns in a breakout performance (like Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody), it might reign at the awards.

Potential Dark Horse Contenders

6. The Nickel Boys (Amazon MGM Studios)

Director: RaMell Ross
Why It Could Surprise: An absolutely horrifying drama set based on the Pulitzer-winning novel by Colson Whitehead feels like Oscar-bait to me If done correctly, it has the chance to join 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight.

7. Queer (A24)

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Why It Could Surprise: Comeback of a long lost W.S Burroughs adaptation, with Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, story is set in 1940s Mexico and deals with secret love, revealed existential despair. A24 touch (Everything Every Where All At Once, Moonlight) could be a sleeper.

8. Wolves (Warner Bros.)

Director: Jon Watts
Why It Could Surprise: A coming-of-age drama featuring George MacKay, Juliette Binoche with comparisons to Call Me By Your Name in its poetic storytelling. It could also emotionally connect and sneak into the awards race.

Biggest Potential Snubs

9. Gladiator 2 (Paramount Pictures)

Director: Ridley Scott

Why It Might Miss Out: Massively funded and starrised (Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington) aside, sequels never win Best Picture (there’s an exception for the Godfather Part II I guess). If it’s more spectacle than substance, the Academy might just not see it.

10. Juror No. 2 (Warner Bros.)

Director: Clint Eastwood
Why It Might Miss Out: Eastwood films usually get plenty of Oscar talk, but his latter day efforts (Cry Macho, The Mule) have not matched the storewounds of his best work (Million Dollar Baby, Unforgiven) in recent years. This legal thriller is not expected to surprise the critics, but it just might fall foul of them..

Final Predictions: Who Will Win Best Picture in 2025?

Right now, the race seems to be between:

• Megalopolis (if it’s a masterpiece)
• The Piano Lesson (if it’s as powerful as Fences)
• A Complete Unknown (if Chalamet delivers an Oscar-worthy performance)

However, surprises always happen—could an indie film like Queer or The Nickel Boys steal the spotlight?

Conclusion

2025 Oscar Nominees – The 2025 Academy Awards seem to be shaping up as one of the most intriguing contests in quite awhile, hot competition with high-budget epics, low-budget dramas and much-anticipated rom-coms vying for the best picture title Ultimately, these are typically emotional and auteur driven — usually in the form of  superhero films or sequels.