2025 Oscars: Best Actress Predictions
Marcus Jones
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
While Netflix doesn’t have the best track record with getting actors an Oscar, it does have an amazing track record at getting its stars a nomination. “Roma” star Yalitza Aparicio, “Blonde” star Ana de Armas, and even “Nyad” star Annette Bening to an extent are examples of performances that were not considered shoo-ins on nomination day, yet they happened.
So ultimately, the streaming service’s move to acquire Angelina Jolie vehicle “Maria” — even though it already has a strong, potential history-making contender in “Emilia Pérez” lead Karla Sofía Gascón — has so far read as confidence that both women can get some shine rather than showing a real preference for one performer over the other. Jolie seems a little more secure as someone who has already won an Oscar before, is making a much publicized comeback, and is in a biopic. But Gascón is the one who’s in a film with a much better shot at getting multiple Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Should she make the cut, she would be the first transgender person to receive an acting nomination.
Coming out of fall festivals, another beat relevant to the Best Actress race is “Babygirl” star Nicole Kidman actually winning the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at Venice over Jolie. Although one could argue that this year’s jury led by French star Isabelle Huppert made little effort to make choices predictive of the Oscar race (for example, the Volpi Cup for Best Actor went to one of her former colleagues Vincent Lindon, whose performance in “The Quiet Son” is unlikely to make it onto voters’ radars), all reports so far from “Babygirl” screenings convey that Kidman delivers a bold, crowd pleasing performance deserving of more awards attention.
Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” also a major winner at Venice, receiving the Golden Lion, boasts two Best Actress contenders in Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, which would normally mean both women get in. But the race this year is already so tight that a mix of vote splitting and apathy for the film puts neither actress in a high position to be nominated (Swinton would be the more likely choice though.) That being a Sony Pictures Classics release as well creates an interesting wrinkle because that distributor also has “The Outrun” and “I’m Still Here,” which are completely built around acclaimed performances from respective leads Saoirse Ronan and Fernanda Torres.
Torres is definitely a dark horse, as “I’m Still Here” is likely to be nominated in Best International Feature against Gascón-starrer “Emilia Pérez,” but Ronan is the one out of all of them most likely to be nominated. 1) The 30-year-old Irish actress already has four Oscar nominations, but has never won. 2) Ronan is also a Best Supporting Actress contender for “Blitz” this year, so that publicity run will complement the smaller Sundance gem.
It is hard not to put Mikey Madison as the last frontrunner, given how her film “Anora” won the Palme d’Or, and then similar to “Parasite” was the runner-up for the People’s Choice Award at TIFF. But all that said, no one is fully safe considering the caliber of performances hustling for more attention from the Academy.
Demi Moore (“The Substance”), Marianne Jean-Baptiste (“Hard Truths”), and Pamela Anderson (“The Last Showgirl”) all received amazing reviews out of their films’ TIFF premieres, and are iconic enough to where voters would take interest in giving their films a try (though the ick factor to “The Substance” is its own hindrance,) but are mostly held back by being at smaller distributors that do not have as much money to execute a months-long awards campaign.
Weirdly, this is a year where the Golden Globes will kind of matter, as match-ups like Madison versus Gascón in Musical/Comedy, and Jolie versus Ronan in Drama (Kidman could go either way,) could help determine who is most ahead.
Contenders are listed in alphabetical order, below. No actor will be deemed a frontrunner until I have seen the film.
Frontrunners:
Karla Sofía Gascón (“Emilia Pérez”)
Angelina Jolie (“Maria”)
Nicole Kidman (“Babygirl”)
Mikey Madison (“Anora”)
Saoirse Ronan (“The Outrun”)
Contenders:
Amy Adams (“Nightbitch”)
Pamela Anderson (“The Last Showgirl”)
Ryan Destiny (“The Fire Inside”)
Cynthia Erivo (“Wicked”)
Marianne Jean-Baptiste (“Hard Truths”)
Demi Moore (“The Substance”)
Julianne Moore (“The Room Next Door”)
Tilda Swinton (“The Room Next Door”)
Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”)
Zendaya (“Challengers”)
Long Shots:
Anna Kendrick (“Woman of the Hour”)
Kirsten Dunst (“Civil War”)
Lily Colias (“Good One”)
Lily Gladstone (“Fancy Dance”)
Kani Kusruti (“All We Imagine as Light”)
Julia Louis-Dreyfus (“Tuesday”)
Florence Pugh (“We Live in Time”)
Renate Reinsve (“Armand”)
June Squibb (“Thelma”)
Kate Winslet (“Lee”)
