2025 Oscars: Best Editing Predictions
- Final voting for the 97th Oscars is February 11-18, with the telecast airing live on ABC on March 2 at 7 p.m. ET/ 4 p.m. PT.
Final voting is February 11-18. The 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2, and air live on ABC at 7 p.m. ET/ 4 p.m. PT. We update our picks throughout awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions .
The State of the Race
The Best Editing Oscar nominees are “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” “Conclave,” “Emilia Pérez,” and “Wicked.” “Conclave” is the favorite as a dark and moody Vatican conspiracy thriller, with “The Brutalist” gathering momentum for its epic drama about the struggle of post-Holocaust immigrants.
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“Conclave,” Edward Berger’s follow-up to “All Quiet on the Western Front,” concerns the selection of a new pope at the Vatican in an interior battlefield within the sequestered conclave of the Sistine Chapel. Cardinal Lawrence (Oscar-nominated Ralph Fiennes) administers the ritual while dealing with a crisis of faith. This becomes exacerbated by his discovery of corruption and conspiracy within the Vatican, forcing him to play detective behind the scenes of the conclave. Editor Nick Emerson handles the slow burn of moving the mystery along in confined spaces, mostly in the dark, balancing the outward drama with the inward one. Attention is always focused on Lawrence’s psychological struggle, both directly and indirectly, through his sharp cutting.
Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” is an epic post-Holocaust immigrant story set in Pennsylvania about architecture. It pits architect László Tóth (Oscar-nominated Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jew and Auschwitz survivor, against industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Oscar-nominated Guy Pearce), who hires him to design an Institute as a tribute to his late mother. The 215-minute film, shot in VistaVision, contains a rare intermission as a throwback to the old roadshow engagements. It’s divided into two sections (“Part 1: The Enigma of Arrival” and “Part 2: The Hard Core of Beauty”) with an epilogue. Editor Dávid Jancsó used Toth’s passion project as a stylistic reference for how he structured the film since the clean, geometric precision of the Brutalism influenced the cutting patterns, with long, unbroken shots interspersed with sharp, abrupt cuts, creating a rhythm that reflected the architect’s post-war trauma.
“Emilia Pérez,” the musical crime thriller from Jacques Audiard, stars Oscar-nominated Zoe Saldaña as Rita, a disgruntled lawyer fed up with the corruption in Mexico City, who assists drug lord Manitas Del Monte in undergoing gender confirmation surgery to become the titular woman (both played by Oscar-nominated Karla Sofía Gascón). It’s like an operatic fever dream about transformation with gaudy, neon-lit musical numbers in sharp contrast to the rough naturalism of the violence. Go-to editor Juliette Welfling cut against the start and stop rhythm of traditional musicals with sequences that flowed naturally from dialogue to musical moments as part of a hybrid dramatic structure.
“Anora” director Sean Baker becomes only the eighth director nominated for editing. Young sex worker Ani (Oscar-nominated Mikey Madison) has a sexual fling with Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the immature son of a Russian oligarch, and they impulsively marry in Vegas. But then Vanya’s godfather intervenes to have the marriage annulled, prompting Vanya to run away, followed by a frantic search to find him in Brooklyn. But, like Eric Rohmer, Baker switches things up with the introduction of henchman Igor (Yura Borisov), who turns out to be more sensitive and caring than expected, prompting a bittersweet ending in a car in the snow.
Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked” tells the origin story of Elphaba/the Wicked Witch (Oscar-nominated Cynthia Erivo) and Galinda/Glinda the Good Witch (Oscar-nominated Ariana Grande). Chu’s favorite editor, Myron Kerstein, got a crash course in VFX-heavy movies to prepare for the workflow. The populist film offers tonal shifts, constantly going from light to dark, and blending different genres in focusing on the friendship between Elphaba and Glinda. The highlights are the Ozdust Ballroom solo dance, where the two students at Shiz University bond together, and Elphaba’s “Defying Gravity” showstopper, which has been extended from the Broadway production to raise the dramatic and emotional stakes.
Nominees are listed below in order of likelihood they will win.
Contenders
“Conclave” (Nick Emerson)
“The Brutalist” (Dávid Jancsó)
“Emilia Pérez” (Juliette Welfling)
“Anora” (Sean Baker)
“Wicked” (Myron Kerstein)
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