2025 Oscars: Best Documentary Feature Predictions
- Nominations voting for the 97th Oscars will take place from January 8-17, 2025, with the official nominations announced on January 23, 2025.
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
“No Other Land,” the documentary from a Palestinian-Israeli collective about the destruction of the occupied West Bank town Masafer Yatta, where Palestinian families that have lived there for generations are being displaced, has had an incredible awards season run, despite not having distribution. But ultimately, its distribution situation has left the film out of some major races that would have given it a boost going into Oscars voting, like the PGA and DGA Awards.
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Meanwhile, “Porcelain War,” the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for the U.S. documentary category was nominated at both guild awards, winning at the latter. Then consider that the last two Best Documentary Feature winners also being about corruption in Russia, and its war with Ukraine. That makes predicting that this film about volunteer soldiers trying to maintain their identity as artists in the worst circumstances is going to win the Oscar feels like a safe bet.
The hope is voters do their due diligence though. For instance, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is quite an achievement, and has been recognized as such, earning many of the nominations the aforementioned film also got (PGA Awards were the one group that veered furthest from the Documentary branch’s tastes.) The two and a half hour long Johan Grimonprez film that is dense with educational information also tackles global issues, showing how what happened with Congolese independence in the 1960s was a warning for how countries can gain power in the most duplicitous ways even today.
Weirdly, though the Oscars is an American institution, “Sugarcane” marks the first time an Indigenous American filmmaker has been nominated for an Oscar, and yet the deep-seated issues the film addresses around North America’s treatment of Native American people may not seem international enough to gain traction with Academy voters.
With “Black Box Diaries,” the story the film is actually telling is one that many people across the world can relate to, but because it is told in first person, it moves away from this trend of voters going for a film with international applications. It’s worth noting too, though, that four out of five of the nominees have at least one of the directors as the subject of the film, so maybe tastes have changed a little.
Nominees are listed in order of likelihood to win.
“Porcelain War”
“No Other Land”
“Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”
“Sugarcane”
“Black Box Diaries”
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