Oscars 2025: Best Actress and Best Actor

We’re saving the nominal top prizes (Best Picture and Best Director) for tomorrow, but frankly, these are always my two favorite Oscar categories to analyze. Not because they’re competitive—though one of this year’s races is downright tantalizing in its plausible outcomes—but because the pool of acting talent in contemporary cinema is incredibly deep, and it’s always rewarding (if challenging) to whittle the list of contenders down to my personal favorites. I routinely argue that the word “snub” has no proper place in movie-award discourse, and the Best Actor and Best Actress races most plainly illustrate why.

BEST ACTRESS

NOMINEES
Jessie Buckley—Hamnet
Rose Byrne—If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Kate Hudson—Song Sung Blue
Renate Reinsve—Sentimental Value
Emma Stone—Bugonia

WILL WIN
Right, so remember what I was saying about one of this year’s lead acting categories being extremely competitive? It’s the other one. Buckley has swept all of the precursor awards, she gets to articulate virulent grief, and she heads a Best Picture nominee. Unless you’re gambling with someone else’s money, there’s no reason to bet on anyone else.

SHOULD WIN
Reinsve. I like all of the other nominees just fine: Buckley’s voluble pain, Byrne’s faltering resilience, Hudson’s relaxed charm, Stone’s cagey intelligence. But Reinsve is doing something alchemical in Sentimental Value in how she invisibly processes her part’s rippling emotions without resorting to histrionics. She’s an actress playing an actress, and she somehow conveys the character’s technique without revealing any of her own. Brilliant stuff.

MOVIEMANIFESTO’S BALLOT
Susan Chardy—On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Daisy Edgar-Jones—On Swift Horses
Jennifer Lawrence—Die My Love
Renate Reinsve—Sentimental Value
Anya Taylor-Joy—The Gorge

Chardy is achingly vulnerable. So is Edgar-Jones, even as she also expresses fiery resolve and brimming desire. Lawrence fearlessly upends post-partum stereotypes. Playing a deadly Lithuanian sniper (fuck yeah!), Taylor-Joy’s forcible charisma hints at the enjoyable movie that could have been before it descends into video-game inanity.

MovieManifesto’s winner: Daisy Edgar-Jones—On Swift Horses.

MOVIEMANIFESTO’S BALLOT: SECOND TIER
Rose Byrne—If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Renate Reinsve—Armand
Amanda Seyfried—The Testament of Ann Lee
Mia Threapleton—The Phoenician Scheme
Lexi Venter—Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight

Reinsve had a pretty good year. Seyfried embeds herself into the role so deeply, it feels nigh spiritual, which recursively enhances the performance’s power. Sliding effortlessly into Wes Anderson’s ensemble, Threapleton holds her own alongside Benicio del Toro and everyone else. Venter is remarkably for how she allows us to experience events from her perspective.

BEST ACTOR

NOMINEES
Timothée Chalamet—Marty Supreme
Leonardo DiCaprio—One Battle After Another
Ethan Hawke—Blue Moon
Michael B. Jordan—Sinners
Wagner Moura—The Secret Agent

WILL WIN
And here we have the most suspenseful/least settled race of the entire ceremony. Seriously, you can make a case for any one of these five. DiCaprio has no apparent momentum, but if One Battle After Another shifts into sweep overdrive, he could ride the wave. Moura won at the Golden Globes, and if the heavy hitters split votes, he could sneak in à la Adrien Brody in 2002 (for The Pianist). Hawke, improbably, is the only nominee who portrayed a real person (Academy catnip), and he contorts himself physically to boot; he’s also a beloved performer who’s never won before. In a vacuum, I’d probably pick Hawke, but he just hasn’t won anything so far, and it seems unlikely that the Oscars will swerve so radically from the consensus.

Ultimately, I suspect this comes down to Chalamet versus Jordan. There are plenty of reasons to predict the latter: He won at SAG, he plays dual roles, and he’s the star of a movie that racked up 16 total nominations and which has at least an outside shot at scooping Best Picture. But I’m going with Chalamet. Maybe the Academy regrets passing on him last year (when they instead gave Brody his second trophy), maybe his agitated acting style (and aggressive campaigning) strikes a chord, or maybe voters are just looking for a spot to honor Marty Supreme. (Also, maybe the insufferable online discourse surrounding him over the past few weeks is totally meaningless when it comes to actual people casting actual ballots.) Sure, it’s entirely possible that Chalamet is one of those actors who receives a ton of nominations early in his career but never closes the deal (think Amy Adams or Saoirse Ronan or, until 2015, DiCaprio himself). But this feels like his time.

SHOULD WIN
Phenomenal group here, with four of the nominees making my own ballot—an unprecedented level of alignment. And that’s no disrespect to Moura, who’s excellent in his restraint and quiet sadness. Chalamet’s technique may be antic, but there’s real emotion buried beneath all of that volatility. Similarly, Hawke doesn’t rest on pure imitative techniques, instead imbuing his tragic figure with sharp wit and winsome loneliness. And while Jordan’s twin parts create the potential for showmanship, he blurs the two characters perfectly, making room for flamboyance while also underlining their steely tenacity.

Still, I’m taking the guy I always seem to take in DiCaprio. He’s a ferociously charismatic performer, so it’s jarring how he undercuts his own star power in One Battle—or it would be, if he weren’t so lively and funny and free of vanity. He’s one of the greats, even—or maybe especially—when he can barely get off the couch.

MOVIEMANIFESTO’S BALLOT
Timothée Chalamet—Marty Supreme
Leonardo DiCaprio—One Battle After Another
Ethan Hawke—Blue Moon
Michael B. Jordan—Sinners
Robert Pattinson—Mickey 17

Joining four actual Oscar nominees (wild!), Pattinson is kind of half-Jordan, half-DiCaprio; he plays multiple characters while fearlessly subverting his own magnetism, resulting in a performance that’s both hilarious and genuinely touching.

MovieManifesto’s winner: Leonardo DiCaprio—One Battle After Another.

MOVIEMANIFESTO’S BALLOT: SECOND TIER
Riz Ahmed—Relay
Benicio del Toro—The Phoenician Scheme
Liam Neeson—The Naked Gun
Théodore Pellerin—Lurker
Channing Tatum—Roofman

Ahmed’s silence speaks volumes. Del Toro is rigidly controlled and entirely electric. Neeson is hysterical precisely because he refuses to be in on the joke. Pellerin embodies the toxicity and danger of social-media obsession with chilling realism. Tatum is a born charmer who also makes you cry.

Honorable mention (this was a hellaciously good year for this category): Daniel Day-Lewis—Anemone; Joel Edgerton—Train Dreams; Michael Fassbender—Black Bag; Jonathan Majors—Magazine Dreams; Paul Mescal—The History of Sound; Joaquin Phoenix—Eddington; James Sweeney—Twinless (and maybe Dylan O’Brien too); Denzel Washington—Highest 2 Lowest.

Coming tomorrow: Best Director and Best Picture.