Awards Season: Part Two – “Anora” Becomes Best Picture Front-Runner as Chaotic Awards Season Nears Finish Line

by Jacob Jones

​If you’ve been following the 2025 Oscar race for any amount of time, you’ve likely heard pundits and critics such as myself decree this season as some form of “unpredictable,” “chaotic,” or “completely up in the air.” Not only have these terms been used to describe the race itself, they’ve also been used to describe – at one point or another – almost every category that race encompasses, from Best Animated Feature to Best Actress in a Leading Role to Best Picture itself. With the Golden Globes offering key support in some surprise areas like Best Actress – for which Fernanda Torres won in the Drama category – as well as handing Best Animated Feature to Janus Films’ Flow and Best Original Score to Challengers, momentum began to shift every which way, ultimately culminating in the Oscar nominations, which included both Torres in Best Actress, as well as multi-category nominee Flow in Best Animated and Best International Feature, though Challengers unfortunately score no nominations itself. The international branch of both the Golden Globes and AMPAS also managed to push Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong to nominations for their film The Apprentice, beating out more domestic favorites like Daniel Craig for his role in Queer and SAG nominee Jonathan Bailey, who plays Prince Fiyero in Wicked.
 
Still, even with the Oscar nominations in place, it remained – for a time – entirely unclear who exactly the front-runners were. Would The Brutalist triumph in all expected categories despite its minor AI controversy? Would international behemoth Emilia Pérez survive the eventual onslaught of foot-shooting racism its star and campaign focus tweeted out or spoke aloud without the studio or filmmakers’ prior approval? Was Anora’s lack of an intimacy coordinator as much of a scandal to industry voters as it was to Film Twitter? It seems, for most questions raised by the race to this point, we may finally have some answers (though none have as yet been etched in gold).

​​PGA, DGA, and WGA
 
The PGA and DGA Awards were held on the same date, February 8, mere miles from one another, both giving their top prizes to Anora, the former for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures and the latter for Best Director of a Feature Film, which was given to Sean Baker. The Producers’ Guild also named The Wild Robot as the Best Produced Animated Feature of the year, and gave its Outstanding Documentary Production win to Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, which also took home the BAFTA for Best Documentary despite not even being shortlisted for the Academy Awards or nominated at the DGAs. The Directors Guild instead put their support behind directors Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev for their Ukraine doc Porcelain War, which follows the experience of artists in the country during the current Russian occupation. RaMell Ross was also awarded Best First-Time Feature Film for his adaptation of Nickel Boys, despite the not his first as a director (he was previously Oscar nominated in 2019 in Best Documentary Feature for his actual directing debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening). Ross was not amongst the Best Directing nominees for this year’s Oscars, though the film did manage to secure nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture.
 
As to the WGAs (which were held on Feb 15), while there were a great number of disqualified films which did not meet the requirements for a nomination – Emilia Pérez, The Substance, and Conclave among them – the winner selections nonetheless did give yet another boost to Anora in Original Screenplay, though A Real Pain is certainly still in play for the Oscar, and Nickel Boys’ Adapted Screenplay victory is unlikely to triumph with AMPAS over Conclave’s all-but-certain dominance in the category.

​BAFTAs, Indie Spirits, and SAG
 
Moving on to slightly less consequential ceremonies (save for one), the BAFTAs and the Indie Spirit Awards both yielded some surprise wins on the whole, seemingly splitting two Oscar narratives – one for Conclave and one for Anora – right down the middle, with each film taking home Best Picture from those awards bodies, respectively. Lead actress Mikey Madison and director Sean Baker also picked up Indie Spirit wins in their respective categories, with Madison’s being a repeat of her win at the BAFTAs. Madison wasn’t the only repeat contender, however, as Jesse Eisenberg managed to snag both a BAFTA and an Indie Spirit win for the Screenplay to his film A Real Pain, giving a major boost to his chances at taking home the Oscar in the Best Original Screenplay category. Of course, Adrien Brody picked up another Best Actor win for his work in The Brutalist, a film for which the BAFTAs awarded Brady Corbet its Best Director prize, though Best Casting went to Anora. Still, a running narrative began to emerge that ultimately culminated at the SAG Awards, which streamed live on Netflix last night: don’t underestimate the power of the papacy. (Or, rather, watch out for Conclave).
 
There were some not entirely unexpected surprises at the SAG Awards, chiefly that Timothée Chalamet became the youngest winner ever for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Motion Picture, thus placing his stamp firmly on the race against Adrien Brody for the Oscar, and this wasn’t the only confirmation of an honest-to-god race in an ultra-competitive Oscar category. Demi Moore also took home the SAG Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Motion Picture for her work in Coralie Fargeat’s body horror sensation The Substance, putting her neck and neck with Mikey Madison for an Oscar win this coming Sunday. In fact, the only certainties in above-the-line categories for this year’s Oscars come in the form of Supporting sweeps, those being for Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain) and Zoë Saldaña (Emilia Pérez), both of whom have yet to lose a major award for which they were nominated in the lead-up to the big night. And of course, at the evening’s end, Conclave was awarded Best Ensemble Cast in a Motion Picture, essentially the “Best Picture” prize of the SAG Awards, besting Anora (and leaving that film SAG-less, only the third film after Brokeback Mountain and The Hurt Locker to be so after netting PGA, DGA, and WGA wins.) While it seems unlikely that Conclave’s BAFTA/SAG victory has enough steam this late in the race to conquer Anora’s PGA/DGA/WGA-winning conquest for Best Picture at the Oscars, especially with Oscar voting having closed before the SAG Awards took place, the overall unpredictability of this award’s season indicates that there is one cinematic sin we must fear above all others: certainty.

​The Oscars will air live on ABC and stream on Hulu on Sunday, March 2 at 7:00 p.m. EST.

​- The Friendly Film Fan