2025 Oscars: Best Original Screenplay 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
While the 2025 winners of the BAFTA Awards threw everything into flux, the surprise Best Actress win for “Anora” star Mikey Madison supports the idea that the Palme d’Or winner will still be dominant at the Oscars. After all, it has now won top prize at the PGA Awards, the DGA Awards, and the WGA Awards, so filmmaker Sean Baker has plenty of peers in his corner. And the UK-based awards body is not all that predictive of Best Original Screenplay anyways, aligning with the Academy only five out of 10 times in the past decade.
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As for the person who did actually win the BAFTA Award this year, “A Real Pain” filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg occupies a unique position where he can actually bank on Oscar voters taking kind to him based on his acting work, but without Best Picture and Best Director nominations for the film, and his co-star Kieran Culkin’s Best Supporting Actor win seeming so secure, there is nothing really compelling voters to give him the consideration needed to actually win.
The person with the best shot of besting Baker in this particular category is actually “The Substance” writer/director Coralie Fargeat, who not only won Best Screenplay at Cannes for her body horror satire, but also just won the Critics Choice Award for Best Original Screenplay. That said, “Anora” won the equivalent of Best Picture with both of those awards bodies, so that feels like a trump card to those stats, but stranger wins have happened.
Should “The Brutalist” screenwriters Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold win the Academy Award, it would be the second year in a row that Best Original Screenplay would go to a couple, but the more realistic campaign would be to challenge Baker for Best Director, as Corbet just won that category at the BAFTAs.
Finally, “September 5” was a PGA Award nominee, and that group has preferential ballots, so there is strong support for the Paramount Pictures release. But no nominations elsewhere makes it hard to believe it could win over any of the other nominees, which have more nominations and people involved that are expected to win Oscars.
Nominees are listed in order of likelihood to win.
Sean Baker (“Anora”)
Coralie Fargeat (“The Substance”)
Jesse Eisenberg (“A Real Pain”)
Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold (“The Brutalist”)
Moritz Binder, Alex David, and Tim Fehlbaum (“September 5”)
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