Predict the 2025 Academy Awards already? I can hear your incredulous gasps, and it’s not that I don’t sympathize. But it’s a 24/7/365 kinda world, and since we’re in a leap year, that means we’re already a day behind. The truth is, we truly don’t know anything for certain as we gaze into the crystal ball and look toward next year’s Oscar race. But that’s what makes year-ahead predictions so much fun. Anything could happen! After talking about the same two dozen movies for the last few months, now we get to open the windows and let a gust of new movies blow through.

As we glance ahead, though, it’s natural to wonder what the events of the most recent Oscar season can tell us about what to expect from the new one. What lessons do we learn from the Oppenheimer juggernaut, the Emma Stone Oscar run, the successes of European fare like Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest?

We don’t expect this year to copy last year’s results too closely, any more than Oppenheimer followed the same path as Everything Everywhere All at Once. But the Oscar past always manages to be an indicator of the future in some way or another. For starters, we’ve got quite a few sequels to best-picture nominees on the release schedule this year.

BACK AGAIN

There was a time when the only sequels that had a prayer of showing up in a best-picture lineup had the words The Godfather in them. The Hollywood ecosystem (and the number of best-picture nominees) has changed since then, meaning movies like Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun: Maverick don’t have to see their Oscar hopes dashed by sequel snobbery. Still, a sequel seen as an obvious step down from the original film will probably have a hard time amassing the kind of momentum needed to sustain an Oscar campaign.

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two has already gotten past that first hurdle, surpassing the first film’s box office numbers and earning rave reviews from critics. Dune: Part One pulled in 10 Oscar nominations and a whopping six wins. How much better could the sequel do come awards time? Oppenheimer showed that there is a taste for large-scale blockbusters in best picture, but Dune: Part Two isn’t exactly about a real-life tortured soul who helped win World War II for the United States.

Mad Max: Fury Road did its own share of defying precedent when it screamed into the 2015 Oscar race. The fourth film in the Mad Max series leveled up in every conceivable way, ultimately earning 10 Oscar nominations and six wins (just like Dune). George Miller is again in the director’s chair for the franchise’s upcoming prequel film, Furiosa, which will see Anya Taylor-Joy step into the role that Charlize Theron played so definitively in the last film. But accomplished as Fury Road was, so much of its Oscar narrative was tied up with the element of surprise. How will Furiosa stack up to sky-high expectations instead—and can it surpass Fury Road in one of the few ways possible by scoring an acting nomination for Taylor-Joy?

Joker was another movie whose run to a best-picture nomination came as a surprise. Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix this year return with Joker: Folie à Deux, a tale of mad love between the title character and Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga). Clever casting may well win over a contingent of Joker skeptics from the first time around—surely plenty of people who dismissed the film out of hand might be interested in seeing what Gaga gets up to here. Certainly, the press tour won’t be boring.

Twenty-three years ago, a sword-and-sandal action flick took the best-picture Oscar. The question is, can Ridley Scott once again make an awards contender out of Gladiator? And is he even interested in doing so? Russell Crowe’s Maximus died at the end of the first film, but Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, and Pedro Pascal look to shore up the sequel’s star power. But Gladiator isn’t universally remembered as a great Oscar winner (defeating Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon didn’t help), which could make a double dip all the less likely.

THE BIG ONES

The above four films are all hoping that best picture’s recent trend toward maximalism (Oppenheimer, Barbie, Top Gun, Avatar, Dune) won’t end in 2025. A handful of nonsequels have the same hope—and there are few swings bigger than what Kevin Costner is attempting with Horizon: An American Saga. The Oscar-winning director of Dances With Wolves is making Westerns again—this time with an incredibly ambitious plan to release four films, two of which will debut this year: Chapter 1 on June 28 and Chapter 2 on August 16. Westerns aren’t exactly dominant at the Oscars these days; in the last 10 years, only three have cracked the best-picture lineup. But Costner is an Oscar legacy, and if he succeeds either critically or commercially with these movies, it will be quite an awards narrative.

At the complete opposite end of the spectrum is the big-screen adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical Wicked. If you watched this year’s Oscars, you know that Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are already out there promoting their performances as Elphaba and Glinda, respectively. Let’s hope they don’t burn themselves out by Thanksgiving, which is when the film premieres. Few movies are more presold than this one, but big, splashy movie musicals have been in free fall recently. Even Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, which scored a handful of nominations and a win for Ariana DeBose, got a tepid reception from audiences. There’s also the fact that while Wicked is incredibly popular, it’s not exactly revered as great musical theater.

Speaking of defying gravity: That’s what many of us will do if the legendary Francis Ford Coppola returns with his long-awaited passion project, Megalopolis, and it turns out to be great. The Godfather and Apocalypse Now director used his own money to help finance this decades-in-the-making project: a science fiction drama featuring an all-star cast that includes Adam Driver, Forest Whitaker, and Nathalie Emmanuel. Reports last year that there was “chaos” on the set (which Coppola disputed) could not possibly dampen the excitement for this movie. Even a sliver of a possibility that the Coppola of old could be back for one last triumph is enough to have people penciling him in on lists of best-director possibilities.

OLD MASTERS

Coppola isn’t the only legend with a new film expected out this year. And if the likes of Martin Scorsese and Spielberg have proved anything in the last two years, it’s that Oscar voters are still plenty impressed by vanguard directors (at least when it comes to nominations).

Steven Soderbergh has the high-concept horror movie Presence, which premiered at Sundance but is probably too small to compete for Oscars. It’s been a long time since Soderbergh was an Oscar contender—even his great movies don’t seem to get an awards push—but he’s never one to be ignored.

Clint Eastwood has arguably been over-rewarded by the establishment over the years, but his next one could be a pulpy crowd-pleaser. Nicholas Hoult and Toni Collette star in Juror No. 2, a thriller in which a juror in a criminal trial realizes he may be at fault for the victim’s death. Maybe this will just be silly fun, but it would be nice to see Eastwood rebound from the likes of Cry Macho and The Mule with a movie everybody can enjoy.

James L. Brooks last made a movie in 2010, and it was the disappointing rom-com How Do You Know. Thank goodness he’s getting another bite at the apple with Ella McCay, a comedy about a young politician trying to balance life and family. Barbie’s Emma Mackey is in the lead role, with a supporting cast that includes Jamie Lee Curtis, Ayo Edebiri, Albert Brooks, and Woody Harrelson. Brooks, an Oscar winner for Terms of Endearment and a best-picture nominee for Broadcast News, Jerry Maguire, and As Good as It Gets, wrote the script himself, and filming began in February.

Speaking of Oscar winners, Robert Zemeckis is reteaming with his Forrest Gump duo of Tom Hanks and Robin Wright for Here. The film, based on a 1989 comic strip that became a graphic novel, centers on the inhabitants of a single room and spans many years, from the past into the future. If Gump feels like it came out a billion years ago, that’s because this summer will mark its 30th anniversary. Zemeckis hasn’t made a great movie in a long time, but Hanks and Wright together again does hold some promise.

The most promise, among the forthcoming works of all these old masters, might be held by the latest film from Mike Leigh*.* The English director of Topsy-Turvy and Another Year has only crossed paths with Oscar fleetingly, most significantly with his 1996 film, Secrets & Lies, which was nominated for best picture, best director, best actress, and best supporting actress for Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Leigh and Jean-Baptiste are reuniting for Hard Truths, which promises to be another of Leigh’s well-observed slices of British life. The current plot description calls the film an “ongoing exploration of the contemporary world with a tragicomic study of human strengths and weaknesses.” Sounds about right.

THE NEW BATCH

I suppose the following filmmakers are only “new blood” as compared to the previous group of directors, who boast decades of experience. Still, there is no doubt that these filmmakers have some of the most intriguing and exciting projects set to premiere this year, any one of which could wind up mounting a major Oscar campaign.

Fresh off Poor Things’ four Oscar wins from its 11 nominations, Yorgos Lanthimos already has his next film lined up, and it’s a reteaming with reigning best actress Emma Stone. Kinds of Kindness has been described as an anthology film in which multiple actors play a different part in each of the film’s three segments. Stone will be joined by Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and Hong Chau. Between his last two films, Lanthimos has directed his actors to five Oscar nominations and two wins, so keep an eye on this ensemble.

Steve McQueen, the director of 12 Years a Slave, is set to return this year with his first feature-length narrative film since 2018’s Widows. With Blitz, McQueen will dramatize the experience of Londoners amid the Blitz attacks during World War II. Saoirse Ronan and Harris Dickinson—the former a four-time nominee; the latter an actor who, after performances in Triangle of Sadness and The Iron Claw, seems just about ready to break through with his first nomination—headline the cast.

American Honey director Andrea Arnold wrote and directed the upcoming Bird, a film whose storyline is being kept under wraps, but which stars incredibly buzzy actors Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski. This is the movie that Keoghan ditched Gladiator 2 for, so one imagines it must be worth it.

Irish director John Crowley enjoyed a breakthrough in 2015 with the Oscar-nominated Brooklyn, then took a step back in adapting The Goldfinch in 2019. His next film, expected this year, is We Live in Time, sold to A24 in North America. Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield will play a couple whose story is shown through snapshots of their lives. Pugh and Garfield are two actors who recently enjoyed Oscar breakthroughs of their own, so voters should be plenty familiar with them.

Elsewhere, Luca Guadagnino is back with another story about sexy young people, this time on the professional tennis tour. Challengers, starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist, was supposed to open Venice last year before the actors strike led Amazon MGM to pull it from the 2023 calendar. It’s now a spring 2024 movie, leaving it a long way from awards season. But a good movie is a good movie, and Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All) has made plenty of those.

Director Joshua Oppenheimer is a two-time Oscar nominee for his feature documentaries, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. His next film is a dramatic fantasy musical about the last human family called The End. Even with his documentaries, Oppenheimer has exhibited great creativity and a willingness to push past genre boundaries. Here, with a cast that includes Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George MacKay, he’s going to get the chance to really show his stuff.

In 2022, German filmmaker Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front made a late run at awards season. His upcoming Conclave, for Focus Features, is a thriller centered around the selection of a new pope. Ralph Fiennes stars alongside Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini.

Finally, one of the more reliable clues to a film’s Oscar hopes is an opening date in November or December, particularly Christmas Day. Those movies are often ones that hold an appeal for the widest possible audiences. So what to make of this year’s Christmas Day release, Nosferatu, from The Witch and The Lighthouse director Robert Eggers? Eggers set out to remake the 1922 German expressionist film Nosferatu, which itself was a loose adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel Dracula. Bill Skarsgård, not afraid to play a terrifying supernatural monster, is playing Count Orlok, while Lily-Rose Depp plays the woman he’s infatuated with. The last time an acclaimed director took the “gothic romance” route with a vampire story and released it in the general vicinity of the holidays, we got Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. We should be so lucky if Eggers turns in something half as incredible.

THE PERFORMANCES

Oscar season isn’t just about the filmmakers, of course. There are a ton of thrilling performances on deck in 2024 films. We already mentioned Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie à Deux, though it cannot be overstated how wide a range of possibilities exists for what that performance will turn out to be.

While one should look out for the cast members in the above-mentioned movies, there’s also reason to keep an eye on folks like André Holland, who will star in The Actor from director Duke Johnson (Anomalisa). Holland plays a New York actor who wakes up in 1950s Ohio after being attacked, with no memory of who he is. Both Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel could be big deals in David Lowery’s Mother Mary, which has Hathaway playing a musician opposite Coel’s iconic fashion designer. Samuel L. Jackson will reprise his Tony-nominated performance in director Malcolm (son of Denzel) Washington’s adaptation of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson. And best-actor winner Adrien Brody plays a Hungarian Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor in director Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist.

Actors playing real-life figures can be irresistible for the Oscars (see two of this year’s winners in the acting categories), so keep an eye on Angelina Jolie as opera singer Maria Callas in Maria. The Oscar winner is partnering with director Pablo Larraín, who knows his way around this kind of material; his film Jackie got Natalie Portman a nomination for playing Jacqueline Kennedy, and the same went for Kristen Stewart when she played Princess Diana in Spencer.

Then there are a number of films that have already hit the festival circuit and had performances precertified as bangers. Netflix went on a shopping trip at Toronto last year, picking up Richard Linklater’s lively Hit Man, which features a tremendously charming lead performance from Glen Powell, as well as His Three Daughters, Azazel Jacobs’s domestic dramedy starring Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon, and Elizabeth Olsen. Any of the three would be deserving of an awards campaign, though Lyonne feels like the one with the most light on her.

Sundance incubated a good bit of buzz for Saoirse Ronan as a recovering addict in The Outrun, as well as for Sebastian Stan in A Different Man, which sees him play a man who undergoes facial reconstructive surgery but becomes obsessed with a man portraying his former self in a play. Stan just recently won the acting prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, giving his awards possibilities a little push.

And Colman Domingo, coming off his first Oscar nomination for Rustin, may well be back in the race with Sing Sing, which played to good (if drowned-out) reviews in Toronto but was something of a sensation at South by Southwest. Domingo plays a man who’s incarcerated at the titular prison and finds release through a theater program.

THE PEDIGREE

Oscar campaigns live for a good prestige adaptation of a book or play—look no further than Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Poor Things, and American Fiction just this year. Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, about an abusive reform school in 1960s Florida and the friendship two young boys struck up while there, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2020. It’s being adapted by director RaMell Ross, whose documentary feature, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, was nominated for an Academy Award. The cast includes Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, whose performance in Origin earlier this year got some Oscar buzz that never quite manifested into awards recognition.

The work of celebrated playwright August Wilson has been a recurring fixture at the Oscars as of late, with Denzel Washington’s adaptation of Fences and George C. Wolfe’s adaptation of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom having received multiple nominations and several wins combined. Next up is The Piano Lesson, directed by Washington’s younger son, Malcolm Washington, and starring his eldest son, John David Washington, who acts alongside Danielle Deadwyler, Corey Hawkins, and—in the role that recently earned him a Tony nod—Samuel L. Jackson.

William S. Burroughs wrote Queer in the 1950s, though it wouldn’t be published until 1985. While previous film adaptations have been attempted, it’s Luca Guadagnino who is taking it to the big screen. If the film does in fact open this year, Guadagnino will be doubling up with Challengers. He cast Daniel Craig to play the lead role, a man who has fled to Mexico City ahead of a drug bust and becomes infatuated with a young US Navy serviceman there.

Honestly, if you’re looking for pedigree, you won’t find any more ironclad than Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The oft-produced play (also often adapted into movies) should give stars Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, and Ben Foster plenty of room to act their faces off as a family struggling to cope with their matriarch’s morphine addiction and do every actor’s favorite thing: come to terms with circumstances.

THE WILD CARDS

If the success of movies like Poor Things and Barbie this year and Everything Everywhere All at Once last year proved anything, it’s that Oscar voters like to be shaken out of their expectations every now and then. The following handful of movies very well may not appeal to the Academy demographic. But if they do connect, it could be cause for great commotion.

Tyler Perry has been a force in the film industry for decades, yet he’s never come close to the awards conversation. Might that change now that he’s directing Kerry Washington in Six Triple Eight as the leader of an all-female, all-Black military battalion tasked with delivering a three-year backlog of mail in World War II? Oscar voters love a director who’s decided to “get serious,” and Washington seems like an ideal candidate to put this movie on her back.

Speaking of true-life stories, the one person we may not want to hear any more about come this fall is Donald Trump. But it’s hard not to be at least a little curious about The Apprentice, a story about the origins of Trump’s business empire, starring Sebastian Stan as a young Trump and Succession’s Jeremy Strong as attorney Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor. The film’s director, Ali Abbasi (Border; Holy Spider), has the chops to deliver something substantial…if the election doesn’t torpedo the public’s appetite for it.

Fifteen years ago, director Lee Daniels directed Mo’Nique to a best-supporting-actress Oscar in Precious. The pair subsequently had a long and painful falling-out, one that was only patched up over the last few years. Now they’re back together again for the horror film The Deliverance, joined by an all-star cast that also includes Andra Day, Glenn Close, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and Rob Morgan. If Daniels’s career has shown anything, with movies like The Paperboy, The Butler, and Shadowboxer, it’s that his aesthetic is a perfect fit for the horror genre.

Finally, the legend of Saturday Night Live has been well and often told among comedy nerds and TV obsessives. But it’s never been made into a movie. With SNL 1975, director Jason Reitman is about to change that, showcasing the events that led up to the premiere of the iconic sketch-comedy show. The cast is one eyes emoji after another, starting with The Fabelmans’ Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels, Licorice Pizza’s Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersol, Bottoms’ Rachel Sennott as writer Rosie Shuster, and May December’s Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase. Reitman’s career has been a roller-coaster ride since Juno and Up in the Air made him a two-time best-director nominee. But if he can convey the wild energy necessary to tell this story while corralling its many moving parts, the result could be unmissable.