Oscar odds update: Festival winners emerge as serious contenders

Matthew Stewart
·3 min read

In the 12 weeks since Gold Derby’s 2025 Oscars predictions center launched, over 3,800 users have made their nominee picks in nine major categories. The season’s most significant period of change so far coincided with the conduction of the annual Venice, Telluride, and Toronto film festivals, the awards portions of which have given the general public a clearer idea of which movies will ultimately appeal to academy voters.

One of the past week’s most interesting developments was the surprising coronation of “The Life of Chuck” as the Toronto festival’s newest People’s Choice Award winner. Many believed runners-up “Anora” and “Emilia Pérez” had better shots at the coveted prize, but neither ended up in the position to directly follow “American Fiction” as the 13th such honoree in a row to earn Best Picture and Screenplay Oscar nominations. Since being added to our predictions center last Sunday, “The Life of Chuck” has jumped to 16th place in the highest category, with our All-Star Top 24 (those readers who did the best with their predictions for the past two years) currently standing as its strongest group of advocates.

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The all-stars also join the Top 24 (those who did best last year) in being particularly supportive of “The Brutalist,” which the latter subset expects to win both male acting awards despite the fact that lead and supporting cast members Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce rank fairly far behind Colman Domingo (“Sing Sing”) and Kieran Culkin (“A Real Pain”) overall. Both groups do agree with the general consensus that “Anora” will win Best Picture, while our editors and experts are respectively sticking with “Conclave” and “Emilia Pérez” in that race.

At this point, the murkiest acting category is the supporting male one, where the editors and all-stars currently favor Clarence Maclin (“Sing Sing”) over Culkin and Pearce, the latter of whom just broke into the overall top five at the expense of early summer frontrunner Samuel L. Jackson (“The Piano Lesson”). Other notable deviations from the crowd include Ralph Fiennes (“Conclave”) topping the editors’ Best Actor list and Zoe Saldana (“Emilia Pérez”) being the experts’ pick for Best Supporting Actress over Danielle Deadwyler (“The Piano Lesson”).

As the conclusion of the 2024 Emmys season has caused our community of 2025 Oscars predictors to rapidly grow, “The Brutalist” and “Emilia Pérez” have received the most notable across-the-board bumps while non-festival players “Dune: Part Two” and “Sing Sing” have taken the biggest hits. Four-category leader “Anora” is presently viewed as the year’s strongest contender, but, with more than five months left until the bestowing of the trophies, that could easily change.

Be on the lookout for new state of the Oscars race updates every Thursday leading up to the nominations announcement on January 17.

Make your predictions at Gold Derby now. Download our free and easy app for Apple/iPhone devices or Android (Google Play) to compete against legions of other fans plus our experts and editors for best prediction accuracy scores. See our latest prediction champs. Can you top our esteemed leaderboards next? Always remember to keep your predictions updated because they impact our latest racetrack odds, which terrify Hollywood chiefs and stars. Don’t miss the fun. Speak up and share your huffy opinions in our famous forums where 5,000 showbiz leaders lurk every day to track latest awards buzz. Everybody wants to know: What do you think? Who do you predict and why?

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