Nominations voting is from January 8-17, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 23, 2025. Final voting is February 11-18, 2025. And finally, the 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2 and air live on ABC at 7:00 p.m. ET/ 4:00 p.m. PT. We update our picks through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions.
The State of the Race
There were so many performances from 2024 worthy of a Best Actress nomination that any version of the final lineup would come with a tinge of disappointment that one person got left off. But what an exciting assortment of women that nabbed the five nomination spots!
Clearly Cannes wielded the most influence over this category, with three out of the five nominated films having premiered in competition at the French film festival last May. Technically, “Emilia Pérez” star Karla Sofía Gascón was the winner there, though her jury prize for Best Actress was shared with her costars Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz (a group winning the award was a testament to the caliber of female performances at the festival.) Though things were going in Gascón’s favor around the time the film had its brief theatrical run, and Netflix premiere, the first trans woman to ever be nominated for Best Actress is no longer seen as the prospective winner.
Though she has many people holding out hope, and would honestly have been the clear favorite 10 to 15 years ago, when the Oscar more often went to the Academy’s favorite ingénue of the year, “Anora” star Mikey Madison is trending downward as well, with mostly regional critics awards under her belt.
Ultimately, all Cannes films have to find a second wind in order to stay in the awards conversation, and “The Substance” ended up doing the best job of that this year. Though Moore was already pegged as a likely Oscar nominee coming out of that first festival, the film, written and directed by French auteur Coralie Fargeat, had been described as too gruesomely gory for the Academy’s tastes. But the film ended up being more of a box office hit than the majority of its fellow Best Picture nominees, and the voters still really respect a successful theatrical run when it happens for a film that clearly takes risks.
It was always the genre aspect holding Moore’s Oscar prospects back, but now that it is apparent that enough voters gave her film a chance, she has about as winning a narrative as one can have entering an acting Oscar race. Not only is “The Substance” a comeback for her, but it’s a performance that is incredibly bold, and indicative of how she has always had more to offer, even when she was one of the most successful actresses in the world.
Interestingly, “Wicked” star Cynthia Erivo is the only former Best Actress nominee to be back in the mix, but “Wicked: For Good” is set up to be an even better showcase of her talent (notwithstanding “Defying Gravity,”) so it is hard to see any voters being super eager to give her the Oscar now.
If there is a fellow nominee that could impede Moore’s momentum, it is “I’m Still Here” star Fernanda Torres. Her turn in Brazil’s Best International Feature submission, which also got a surprise Best Picture nomination, is a more traditional awards contender, though the performance is more subtle than what we often see in the standout clips the telecast plays of the Best Actress nominees. Adding to her appeal is the legacy aspect, with her being the second Brazilian to ever be nominated for the award, after her mother Fernanda Montenegro became the first in 1999 for another Walter Salles film, “Central Station.” Hers is the film most voters are discovering as final voting approaches, and recency bias can be an influential factor in determining who wins.
Nominees are listed in order of likelihood to win.
Demi Moore (“The Substance”)
Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”)
Mikey Madison (“Anora”)
Karla Sofía Gascón (“Emilia Pérez”)
Cynthia Erivo (“Wicked”)
