Events 

RECAP: The 2025 Oscars 🏆

March 2nd, 2025 marks the end of the fiscal movie year with the 97th Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars. An Oscar is the pinnacle of moviemaking that marks an achievement in performance, direction, production, and so many other components that make up the great films we see.

This was probably the most fascinating Oscar Award race I’ve seen since I started writing about films.

Maybe I was too blinded by my pure enjoyment of storytelling on screen to understand this before, but witnessing the smear campaign tactics that were gaining steam leading up to and during the award season was not something I ever considered when accounting for who will/should win.

Those political-level smear campaigns were targeted at Emilia Perez and The Brutalist, which opened the door for a movie like Anora to win five of the major Oscar awards.

For Emilia Perez, it started off with the fact that the film was made by a French director who had never been to Mexico, which led to Mexicans (allegedly) boycotting the film for their dislike of how it depicted their country and people, and then, of course, the final nail in the coffin was when actress Karla Sofía Gascón was discovered to have hate-filled discriminatory remarks about past Oscar winners posted all over her Twitter. The funny part is Emilia Perez received a ton of love throughout the festival season, even winning the Jury Prize at Cannes, but all the noise against it started gaining steam once it became the honest favourite to win Best Picture. It wasn’t a film I personally enjoyed, yet I still understood the Oscar appeal.

Then we have The Brutalist.

In a year that was riddled with conversational debates about how AI should be used in conjunction with art, a movie this great having traces of its authenticity being marred by the potential presence of AI in scenes and/or performance was enough to lessen its credibility when it came to the awards of Best Director and Best Picture. As someone who is learning to get better at writing, I’m of the mindset that unless it’s clearly indicated you used AI in your art (I know some people are using it these days to write…), it shouldn’t be considered for an award.

After hearing they used AI to modify Adrien Brody’s accent, I became more inclined to favour Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Bob Dylan because he literally learned how to sing! I’m not a Bob Dylan guy, so those songs weren’t for me, but seeing the similarities to the real-life figure made it harder not to appreciate Timothée’s dedication to his craft.
Adrien with his body language alone was tremendous, so I’m not hating that he won; it’s just the AI of it all makes you wonder more about the totality of his performance in a way I wouldn’t have otherwise.

That leaves us with the only other viable option, which was Anora.

“What Uncut Gems was for degenerate gambling, ANORA was for opportunistic strippers.” is what I wrote in my review for Anora, and it still tracks.

Mikey Madison winning Best Actress was probably the most surprising win of the night because of how much Demi Moore had to do in what I would consider a more powerful/meaningful performance in The Substance. Anora winning big feels like an ushering in of a new age of Hollywood. Mikey Madison is a fresh face, and Sean Baker can now be considered an award-winning director after becoming the first person to win four awards for a single film in one night.

Sean Baker mentioned something in one of his speeches about the movie-going experience and how we have to reclaim it, but in all honesty that “battle cry” he was speaking of needed to be redirected at himself. A lot of the films last year seemed to be strategically released for the awards season, which is part of the problem he speaks of. Films like Anora and The Brutalist were slowly rolled out one city at a time, with very little promotion other than word of mouth. In all honesty, it feels like they were gatekeeping these films for a very targeted VOTING audience and not considering the general public. People get mad about superhero movies, but at least you know when those are coming out.

Eight out of ten of these films were released between November and December, and in my opinion, the one that should’ve received more praise than it did was released in February of 2024, which was Dune: Part Two. Dune: Part Two not playing the long award season game played against it, but the fanfare it garnered and the rare feat it achieved by being infinitely better than the first installment should’ve worked in its favour.

Conclave is the one film lost in all of this. I didn’t consider it to win because it didn’t have enough buzz going into tonight. In a few years time I think people will look back on it with a lot more praise than it’s getting in the current moment.

Art is subjective, so maybe I’m giving it too much thought, or maybe the art of subjectivity has become lost—who knows.

Oscars have a habit of relying on established names, and this year it seems like they went in the direction of establishing new names for the future. I’m just curious what the future will say when looking back on the winners of tonight’s awards. 

Thanks for reading! 📚