Who’s up and down in the Oscars Best Picture race as voting hits final hours
The Producers Guild Awards nominations list hit inboxes on Thursday morning, one day after nominations for the 2025 BAFTA Awards and 2025 Writers Guild Awards were revealed. This further clarified the muddy and complicated Oscar race for Best Picture. Ahead, which movies are up and which are down as Oscar voting hits its final hours. The 2025 Oscar nominations will be announced next week.
UP: Anora and A Complete Unknown
There’s a caveat to this stat (more on that below), but of this year’s Best Picture contenders, only Anora and A Complete Unknown can tout nominations from the four top industry guilds (writers, actors, directors, and producers), and the BAFTA Awards in the Best Film category. Most expected Anora to be here — Sean Baker’s film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year and has been a frontrunner for Best Picture in the Gold Derby odds for months. But A Complete Unknown is surging at the right time and landed unexpected nominations from the Screen Actors Guild Awards for best ensemble (alongside three individual nominations for stars Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, and Monica Barbaro) and Directors Guild Awards for director James Mangold. At the rate it’s trending — the film also scored guild recognition for its cinematography and sound — it would not be unwise to expect A Complete Unknown to overperform at the Oscars.
UP: Conclave and Emilia Pérez
About that caveat: Conclave and Emilia Pérez also hit every significant guild in which each film was eligible (DGA Awards, SAG Awards best ensemble, and PGA Awards), as well as the BAFTA Awards Best Film category. However, because of the Writers Guild Awards rules, neither film’s script was eligible for recognition by that group. No matter in the end, as most expect Conclave and Emilia Pérez — the nominations leaders at the BAFTA Awards with 12 and 11 bids, respectively — to ultimately be among the top picks to win Best Picture at the Oscars.
STABLE: The Brutalist
The Brutalist was ineligible at the WGA Awards for director Brady Corbet and cowriter Mona Fastvold’s original screenplay and joined Anora, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, and Emilia Pérez as PGA Awards, DGA Awards, and BAFTA Best Film nominees. However, the A24 epic struggled to gain traction with the Screen Actors Guild Awards. The Brutalist missed a nomination for best ensemble. It landed only a single individual nomination — for Best Actor frontrunner Adrien Brody — while failing to push BAFTA Awards supporting actor and actress nominees Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones into their respective SAG Awards fields. Still, the strength of The Brutalist (which also won Best Drama at the Golden Globes) cannot be discounted. Its SAG acting snubs might speak more to the preference of the SAG Awards nominations committee (roughly 2,500 SAG-AFTRA members are chosen each year to select the annual nominees) than the film’s overall strength in the race.
TRENDING DOWN: Sing Sing
What to make of A24’s prison drama? Since it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, Sing Sing has been embraced by audiences for its life-affirming message of hope and second chances. But the issue has always been the size of that audience. Sing Sing barely made a dent in theaters after its release last summer, and while A24 has done a good job of keeping the little-seen feature in the conversation, it always felt like visibility was a real issue. (How else can we explain its failure to land among the Screen Actors Guild Awards best ensemble nominees, particularly since the actors’ guild has historically responded to underdog stories like the one presented in the film?) With the table set heading into the Oscar nominations, Sing Sing is without nominations from the SAG Awards, PGA Awards, and DGA Awards (like several other films, its adapted screenplay was ineligible at the WGA Awards). Even with a solid BAFTA showing, where it converted each of its longlist appearances into a corresponding nomination, the Greg Kwedar film must be considered outside the race until proven otherwise.
TRENDING DOWN: Nickel Boys
When Nickel Boys premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, the older crowd — a group with tastes that usually mirror older Academy members — had a mixed response to the form-breaking film. But critics embraced Nickel Boys, and at least some thought it could mirror another Telluride debut, Women Talking, by landing among the Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay nominees. While the screenplay bid for director and cowriter RaMell Ross remains in play (Nickel Boys hit the WGA Awards and BAFTA Awards in the category), its Best Picture hopes have taken a hit. Nickel Boys failed to land on the PGA Awards list for Best Picture and was ignored by the Screen Actors Guild. (Ross received a first-time feature director nomination from the DGA Awards.) For the film’s supporters, consider it a pleasant surprise if the Amazon MGM Studios feature gets an Oscar nomination for Best Picture next week.
TRENDING UP: September 5
In September, Paramount’s ticking-clock thriller about the Israeli hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics was predicted in some circles to win Best Picture. But the film’s rollout has been muted, and like Sing Sing, visibility has been an issue. Anecdotal evidence suggests that when voters see September 5, they respond to September 5. Still, until the PGA Awards nominations were revealed on Thursday, the film missed several significant nominations — including being shut out by the SAG Awards, DGA Awards, and BAFTA Awards. (The screenplay was ineligible for consideration at the WGA Awards.) But with an ostensible open slot in the Best Picture field — assuming the other nine nominees are Anora, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune: Part Two, Emilia Pérez, A Real Pain, The Substance, and Wicked — September 5 might have the edge over Sing Sing and Nickel Boys thanks to the producers branch.