Nominations voting is from January 8-12, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 17, 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
Ever since “My Octopus Teacher” won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the 93rd Academy Awards it has felt like the Academy’s Documentary branch has not just avoided voting for most contenders they deem too populist, but for any contenders distributed by the film’s distributor Netflix as well.
Despite arguably being the biggest platform for documentaries, the closest Netflix has had to a Best Documentary Feature nod since then is last awards season, when it acquired “To Kill a Tiger” after the film had already received its Oscar nomination.
But this year Netflix went hard, acquiring the majority of buzzy titles coming out of Sundance, including Festival Favorite winner “Daughters.” “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin,” which also won the Audience Award for its section, and a Best Director prize at the January festival, has garnered the most major nominations across the several documentary awards that happen in the winter, and has an added advantage of being an international film, which aligns with the Documentary branch’s tastes (a good chunk of the films that made the shortlist have subtitles.)
The biggest question though is if “Will & Harper,” what many would call the documentary hit of the year, can make the cut. The answer would be that it needs to campaign even harder, because again, there is a chance that its broad appeal and accessibility via Netflix is working against it.
Though Mati Diop’s “Dahomey,” which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale 2024, is shorter than the average contender, and a bit unconventional, it stands out as a frontrunner by making both the Best Documentary Feature shortlist and the Best International Feature shortlist. Other recent films to do so include 2024 winner “20 Days in Mariupol,” fellow nominee “Four Daughters,” and “Flee” two years ago (which got a Best Animated Feature nomination as well.)
Speaking of those films, the last two Best Documentary Feature winners, “20 Days in Mariupol” and “Navalny,” heavily focused on abuse of power in Russia. With three making a trend, Sundance Jury Prize winner “Porcelain War,” about Ukrainian artists who join the war against Russia, seems to fit what voters are looking for.
Elsewhere, the film that’s had the most momentum of all is “No Other Land,” which was both not chosen as Palestine’s Best International Feature submission, and still does not have a distributor, yet it has been a critics awards darling, and was a big winner at the IDA Awards. “The Bibi Files,” about Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption charges, also making the shortlist, despite being one of the harder contenders to screen outside the Academy portal, shows that the Israel-Palestine conflict is also top of mind with voters.
Lastly, National Geographic Films has had a great track record the last few years, getting their top contender nominated for the Oscar, and given the amount of accolades “Sugarcane” has received (the film about the horrors of Native American residential schools also won a Directing Award at Sundance,) it seems like it’s in a good position to make the cut this season. Other than that, the American documentaries listed just don’t have conflict on the same scale, meaning voters feel they have less of an urgency to spotlight them.
Contenders for the shortlist of 15 are listed in alphabetical order below.
Frontrunners:
“Dahomey”
“No Other Land”
“Porcelain War”
“The Remarkable Life of Ibelin”
“Sugarcane”
Contenders:
“The Bibi Files”
“Black Box Diaries”
“Daughters”
“Eno”
“Frida”
“Hollywoodgate”
“Queendom”
“Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”
“Union”
“Will & Harper”
