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
While the other acting categories have a very clear frontrunner, the Best Actor Oscar race is pretty evenly split between “A Complete Unknown” star Timothée Chalamet and “The Brutalist” star Adrien Brody, with “The Apprentice” star Sebastian Stan coming in at the 11th hour as the dark horse.
Focusing on the former pair of actors, one fascinating element linking the pair is that, were Chalamet to win, he would break Brody’s record for youngest ever Best Actor winner. (The young Oscar nominee is around nine months younger than “The Pianist” star was when he received an Academy Award in 2003.) Part of Brody’s awards campaign has been a focus on “The Brutalist” being the best role he’s had in the two decades since his Oscar win.
That could very well be the right strategy, and the Academy in recent years has been all about breaking expectations, but it would be an unprecedented feat for Brody to win again for what is only his second Academy Award nomination. What actually does have precedent is a young actor winning the Oscar for a biopic in particular, with Eddie Redmayne (“The Theory of Everything”) and Rami Malek (“Bohemian Rhapsody”) being recent examples.
While Brody mounts a more traditional comeback campaign, Chalamet is bringing forward something exciting and new, whether it’s being a guest commentator on “College GameDay” or taking on host and musical guest duties on “Saturday Night Live,” debuting new arrangements of obscure Bob Dylan songs. The Academy is still a little more buttoned up, so his individualized efforts may go unnoticed by older voters, but the way he has shaken up awards campaigning is pretty charming to the average viewer. There is a worry as well that if he does not win the Oscar now, Chalamet will suffer through the same fate as an actor like Al Pacino or Leonardo DiCaprio, finally winning an Oscar for a lesser role just because he’s overdue.
As for Stan, the reason why he has been a dark horse is that his campaign has been more appealing than the actual film he’s been nominated for. “The Apprentice” is clearly a favorite among international voters of the Academy, as teased by the actor’s Golden Globes and BAFTA nominations for the film in which he plays a young Donald Trump, but his turn in “A Different Man” has been the performance that critics were pushing. His overall narrative around making sure Hollywood is a place that still takes risks is one that voters can get behind, but having to talk about Trump more often in these times can be disjointing.
Though Domingo and Fiennes are making welcome returns to the Oscar race, the former’s film “Sing Sing” is frustratingly little seen, and the latter just has not been campaigning for “Conclave” at the same level as his peers. Doing more things like his live comedic monologue reading during the CNN New Year’s Eve special would have actually given him more of a chance to win.
Nominees are listed in order of likelihood to win.
Timothée Chalamet (“A Complete Unknown”)
Adrien Brody (“The Brutalist”)
Sebastian Stan (“The Apprentice”)
Ralph Fiennes (“Conclave”)
Colman Domingo (“Sing Sing”)
