Oscars 2025: Best Picture and Best Director

And at last, we’ve arrived at the top dogs. If you’ve missed our prior analysis of all feature categories at this year’s Oscars, you can find specific breakdowns at the following links:

Best Actress and Best Actor
The screenplays
Best Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress
The big techies
The odds and ends

BEST DIRECTOR

NOMINEES
Chloé Zhao—Hamnet
Josh Safdie—Marty Supreme
Paul Thomas Anderson—One Battle After Another
Joachim Trier—Sentimental Value
Ryan Coogler—Sinners

WILL WIN
Anderson. You can try to make a case for Coogler, especially if you think Sinners is winning Best Picture. But Anderson has swept the precursors, and even if Sinners pulls the upset in the top prize, the Academy has split its two biggest awards plenty of times in the recent past (though not since 2021, when CODA won Best Picture but Jane Campion won for directing The Power of the Dog). There’s no point predicting anyone else.

SHOULD WIN
There’s invariably overlap between this award and Best Picture, though I always try to analyze them independently, focusing more here on particular filmmaking craft than overall excellence. This year, there’s no such distinction to parse. One Battle After Another is masterful in terms of technique, tone, performance, and flair. Anderson is the right choice.

MOVIEMANIFESTO’S BALLOT
Paul Thomas Anderson—One Battle After Another
Wes Anderson—The Phoenician Scheme
Ryan Coogler—Sinners
Michael Angelo Covino—Splitsville
Zach Cregger—Weapons

The other Anderson remains a maestro of rigorous craftsmanship. Coogler may be a mere runner-up in this field, but his bravura style and his monumental ambition deserve respect. Covino reminds people that comedies can benefit from directorial authorship. Cregger is merciless in his execution.

MovieManifesto’s winner: Paul Thomas Anderson—One Battle After Another.

BEST PICTURE

NOMINEES
Bugonia
F1
Frankenstein
Hamnet
Marty Supreme
One Battle After Another
The Secret Agent
Sentimental Value
Sinners
Train Dreams

WILL WIN
This is closer than a lot of people seem to think. Or maybe it’s less close than other people think. I dunno, it depends on how you gauge the collective winds. The ultimate question is this: Has Sinners acquired enough momentum to dethrone One Battle After Another from its season-long front-runner perch?

And the unsatisfying answer is: maybe, but probably not. Sinners has one big card in its hand, having won Best Ensemble Cast at the Actors Awards (aka SAG). Of course, the last time a movie won SAG but lost Best Picture was… last year, when Conclave’s apparent late-season blitz got absolutely trampled by Anora at the Oscars. Beyond that, One Battle has won virtually everything besides SAG—most notably the Producers Guild Award, which to my knowledge is the only precursor that uses the Academy’s preferential ballot system. (The last PGA winner to be pipped at the Oscars was 1917, which lost to Parasite six years ago.)

Can you construct a plausible argument for Sinners? Sure. It has the most total nominations, it’s culturally relevant, it’s both intellectually provocative and robustly entertaining, and it also happens to be really fucking good. But it’s still the underdog. One Battle After Another wins this one. (But if Coogler wins Best Director, I’m changing my pick on the fly.)

SHOULD WIN
Of these 10 nominees, I’d classify five of them—Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value, and Sinners—as broadly Best Picture-worthy. I’d also be totally fine with either Train Dreams or The Secret Agent winning; they’re quality films. (To round things out, Bugonia and Frankenstein are both solid but a cut below, whereas F1 is pleasant but kinda stupid.)

Now, a normal person might just pick whichever nominee they like the most, but normalcy doesn’t really apply at the Oscars—especially not when Best Picture is involved. I generally disfavor my most beloved movies claiming the top prize, given the insufferable backlash it inevitably attracts. Maybe that’s silly—who cares what other people think about what the Oscars thought?—but there’s something to be said for protecting your most cherished works of art from public assailment. That means I’m knocking out both One Battle After Another and Sentimental Value, my two favorite films of 2025. Similarly, while a Hamnet win would be amusing because it would make so many people irrationally angry, that beauty has already been stigmatized enough. As for Marty Supreme, I like it a lot, especially Timothée Chalamet’s lead performance, but I’m still not sure it’s uniformly good enough to deserve the Academy’s highest honor.

That leaves Sinners, which strikes the right balance. It’s a very good movie, but I don’t love it quite so much that I couldn’t handle its reputation being arbitrarily tarnished. It’s also the type of movie that I’d love to see win Best Picture: a no-holds-barred genre flick with a predominantly Black cast and crew that refined industry expectations about what a Hollywood hit can be. We need more movies like Sinners, even if there will never be another movie quite like Sinners.

MOVIEMANIFESTO’S BALLOT
Hmm, a curated list of my personal favorite movies of 2025? Where could you find such a thing??

That’s all for now. We’ll be back after the show with a quick recap of how we did. Enjoy the Oscars, everyone!