Best Picture
Anora (2024)	The Brutalist (2024)	A Complete Unknown (2024)	Conclave (2024)	Dune: Part Two (2024)
Emilia Pérez (2024, Fr.)	I'm Still Here (2024, Braz.)	Nickel Boys (2024)	The Substance (2024)	Wicked (2024)

Best Animated Feature Film
Flow (2024)	Inside Out 2 (2024)	Memoir of a Snail (2024, Australia)	Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)	The Wild Robot (2024)

Actor:
Adrien Brody in "The Brutalist," Timothée Chalamet in "A Complete Unknown," Colman Domingo in "Sing Sing," Ralph Fiennes in "Conclave," Sebastian Stan in "The Apprentice"
Actress:
Cynthia Erivo in "Wicked," Karla Sofía Gascón in "Emilia Pérez," Mikey Madison in "Anora," Demi Moore in "The Substance," Fernanda Torres in "I'm Still Here"
Supporting Actor:
Yura Borisov in "Anora," Kieran Culkin in "A Real Pain," Edward Norton in "A Complete Unknown," Guy Pearce in "The Brutalist," Jeremy Strong in "The Apprentice"
Supporting Actress:
Monica Barbaro in "A Complete Unknown," Ariana Grande in "Wicked," Felicity Jones in "The Brutalist," Isabella Rossellini in "Conclave," Zoe Saldaña in "Emilia Pérez"
Director:
Sean Baker for "Anora," Brady Corbet for "The Brutalist," James Mangold for "A Complete Unknown," Jacques Audiard for "Emilia Pérez," Coralie Fargeat for "The Substance"

The announcement of the nominations across 23 categories for the 97th Academy Awards were held on January 23, 2025, delayed twice by wildfires that ravaged the Southern California area. The ceremony for the presentation of the awards was scheduled for March 2, 2025.

Netflix led the race with 16 nominations (mostly due to Emilia Perez), followed by A24's 14 nominations (mostly for The Brutalist) (double its total from the previous year), Comcast-owned Universal with 13 nominations, Focus Features with 12 nominations, Walt Disney Co.'s Searchlight with 10 nominations (mostly for A Complete Unknown), and other studios with lower tallies. [Note: If one totalled all of the Universal's nods to include Focus Features and DreamWorks Animation, Universal's total would be 25.] Although Apple had a strong showing the previous year (with 13 nominations, but no Oscar wins), this year it was devoid of any nominations.

Most of the blockbusting films (including Marvel's super-hero films such as Deadpool & Wolverine) were not represented in the Best Picture lineup. The biggest domestic hits amongst the 10 nominees were Wicked (at $466 million) and Dune: Part Two (at $282 million). According to the LA Times, this year's 10 Best Picture nominees brought in $877 million in domestic box office and $1.7 billion globally, marking a 37% drop from last year's 10 Best Picture nominee totals.

The Best Picture Category:

There were 10 nominated films in the Best Picture category, and there was no clear front-runner. It was unusual for two musicals to be nominated for Best Picture (Wicked and Emilia Perez). This also happened most recently in 2018 with Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and A Star is Born (2018), and also in 1968 (Oliver! and Funny Girl were two of the five nominated films that year). It was also the 6th consecutive year that at least one film nominated for Best Picture was directed by a woman.

The wide-ranging films (in descending order based upon the number of nominations) included a mixture of theatrically-released features, and other little-seen and poorly-attended films, some of which were released for streaming platforms.

• Netflix's Emilia Pérez (with 13 nominations), an audacious and daring French-director made film in Spanish, a bizarre and provocative musical drama about a drug lord in Mexico seeking gender reassignment surgery; it included nominations for star Karla Sofía Gascón (Best Actress), Zoe Saldaña (Best Supporting Actress), Jacques Audiard (Best Director), Best Adapted Screenplay (also co-writer Audiard) and two of its songs ("El Mal" and "Mi Camino"), plus Best Original Score, Best Film Editing, Best Sound, Best Cinematography, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling; with 13 nominations, it became the most nominated non-English language film ever, surpassing both Roma (2018) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) with 10 nominations; it was also the first non-English language musical to be a Best Picture nominee
• Universal's reimagined musical fantasy Wicked (with 10 nominations) from un-nominated director John M. Chu was a lavish musical version (part 1) of The Wizard of Oz - derived from Stephen Schwartz' smash Broadway hit (and Winnie Holzman's book based on Gregory Maguire's novel), and from the characters in L. Frank Baum's Oz books and the original 1939 film; it included acting nominations for Cynthia Erivo (Best Actress) and Ariana Grande (Best Supporting Actress), plus others, but it lacked Best Director and Best Screenplay noms
• A24's The Brutalist (with 10 nominations) - the lengthy post-war dramatic epic included three acting nominations (Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones), plus a Best Director nod [Note: It was one of the longest Best Picture nominees, at 215 minutes.]
• Focus Features' Conclave (with 8 nominations), from un-nominated director Edward Berger, a gorgeously-produced, old-fashioned dramatic mystery-thriller and who-dun-it about the political maneuverings and machinations behind the scenes during the selection process for a new papal successor in the Vatican, led by Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), with some coaching from head nun Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini)
• Searchlight's A Complete Unknown (with 8 nominations), a biopic about folk-singer Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), and his contemporary Joan Baez (portrayed by Monica Barbaro); with a surprising array of nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay (for director James Mangold), and three acting noms (Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress)
• Neon's Anora (with 6 nominations), a twisted Cinderella fantasy and a perverse romantic comedy-drama (and Palme d'Or winner) with an ensemble cast about a 23 year-old Russian-American (Anora or "Ani"), working as a Manhattan strip-club lap dancer who was mismatched in a romance with immature, 21 year-old, spoiled Ivan (or "Vanya") Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Moscow billionaire oligarch Nikolai Zakharov; it included nominations for Best Actress (Mikey Madison), Best Supporting Actor (Yura Borisov), and three for Sean Baker (Best Director, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Screenplay)
• Warner Bros.' Dune: Part Two (with 5 nominations), from un-nominated co-writer/director Denis Villeneuve; it was a sequel about Duke Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) of the House Atreides and his mythical journey to unite with Chani and the Fremen, and to wage a vengeful war against the House Harkonnen; with a star-studded cast and magnificent production values, based upon the 1965 sci-fi novel by Frank Herbert; although the film outgrossed Villeneuve's first film and was superior to it, its nominations were mostly technical: Best Sound, Best Visual Effects, Best Cinematography, and Best Production Design
• Working Title Films' and Mubi's The Substance (with 5 nominations), a satirical, exploitational, no-holds barred body horror film about female self-loathing and a miracle "Substance" to bring back one's youth - resulting in a bloody Grand Guignol finale; it included nominations for Best Actress (Demi Moore), Best Director and Best Original Screenplay (Coralie Fargeat), and Best Makeup and Hairstyling
• Sony Pictures Classics' I'm Still Here (with 3 nominations) from un-nominated director Walter Salles was a family drama (spoken in Portuguese) about a military dictatorship in Brazil in 1971 and the dangers of fascism; it told about a family's brave resilience - led by the matriarch Eunice Paiva (a mother of five, portrayed by Fernanda Torres), after her husband was interrogated and never returned; it was also nominated for Best International Feature Film (for Brazil) and Best Actress
• Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios' Nickel Boys (with 2 nominations), was a faithful adaptation of Colson Whitehead's novel about the incarceration of an innocent teenaged black boy in a notorious, segregated reform school in 1960s Florida known for cruel and sometimes fatal punishments; the film was brilliantly filmed from the POV of the young protagonists; one of the co-writers was un-nominated director RaMell Ross who was credited with an additional nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay

The Best Director Category:

The Best Director nominees were all first-time Best Director nominees (the last instance this occurred was in 1997), and all were male except for Coralie Fargeat. This was only the second time that two French directors were nominated for Best Director in the same year (this also happened in 1974).

• 53 year-old Sean Baker for Anora, an entertaining comedy-drama about a whirlwind fairy-tale "Cinderella" courtship between a Russian-speaking Brooklynite and the spoiled son of a rich Russian oligarch, with tangled complications when demands were made to annul their quickie marriage
• 36 year-old Brady Corbet for The Brutalist, a survey of 30 years in the life and struggles of Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth attempting to live the American dream
• 61 year-old James Mangold for A Complete Unknown, a biographical drama about unknown, 19 year-old folksinger Bob Dylan whose revolutionary singing and song-writing style captivated Greenwich Village and its musical icons (Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez)
  [Note: Mangold was previously nominated two times: Best Adapted Screenplay for Logan (2017), Best Picture for Ford v Ferrari (2019). He also was double-nominated this year with a Best Adapted Screenplay nod for A Complete Unknown.]
• 72 year-old French filmmaker Jacques Audiard for Emilia Pérez, an unpredictable, mixed-genre film (a crime-thriller-romance-musical) with three female leads, about a feared cartel leader named Manitas (trans-actress Karla Sofía Gascón) who hired a lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) to facilitate his transition (via surgery) and sex change to become a new and better person - Emilia Pérez (also Karla Sofía Gascón); Emilia then atoned for his/her past by creating La Lucecita ('The Little Light'), a foundation to locate the remains of the 'desaparecidos' - the disappeared; some considered the film empowering and transformational, while others thought it to be an audacious and distracting mess about identity - both exhausting and unbelievable
  [Note: Audiard was also triple-nominated this year for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Song ("El Mal") for Emilia Perez.]
• 48 year-old French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat for The Substance, an outrageous, unapologetic, visceral and stunning body-horror drama about ingesting a black market substance to return to one's youthfulness via a schizophrenic self (with two personas)
  [Note: Fargeat became the 10th female Best Director nominee.]

There were 20 nominations in the lead and supporting acting categories. In total, three of the twenty acting nominations were for non-English language performances. 13 of the nominees were first-timers. The only nominee who was a previous Oscar winner for an acting role was Adrien Brody.

The Best Actor Category:

The Best Actor nominees included an impressive line-up of previous Best Actor nominees (with one winner, and one newcomer)

• 51 year-old Adrien Brody for The Brutalist (with his 2nd Best Actor nomination, following an earlier win), for his role as a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust (concentration camp) survivor László Tóth who immigrated to the U.S. after World War II - separated from his family including his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones)
  [Note: Brody won Best Actor for his first nomination for The Pianist (2002).]
• 29 year-old French-American actor Timothée Chalamet (with his 2nd Best Actor nomination, with no wins) for his role as 19 year-old troubadour Bob Dylan in a biopic set in the early 1960s - A Complete Unknown
  [Note: Chalamet became the youngest two-time Best Actor nominee since James Dean in the 1950s. He was previously nominated for Best Actor for Call Me by Your Name (2017).]
• 55 year-old Colman Domingo (with his 2nd Best Actor nomination, with no wins) for his role as John "Divine G" Whitfield who was unfairly incarcerated at the maximum security Sing Sing prison in NY for 10 years, but transformed and rehabilitated by theatrical arts and his relationship with fellow prisoner Divine Eye (ex-gangster Clarence Maclin), in the prison drama Sing Sing (with a total of 3 nominations, including Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Song ("Like a Bird"))
  [Note: Domingo became the first person to earn Best Actor Oscar noms in back-to-back years, since Denzel Washington's similar noms for Fences (2016) and Roman J. Israel, Esq. (2017). Domingo was previously nominated for his role as civil rights activist Bayard Rustin in Rustin (2023).]
• 62 year-old Ralph Fiennes (with his 3rd Best Actor nomination, with no wins) for his role as Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence who was responsible for leading the choice among rivals for a papal successor, and maneuvering through the intrigue, trade-offs, and surprise twists, in Conclave
  [Note: Fiennes was first nominated as Best Actor for Schindler's List (1993), and then received a 2nd Best Actor nomination for The English Patient (1996).]
• 42 year-old Romanian-American actor Sebastian Stan (with his first nomination) for his role as a young and uneasy Donald Trump in the faux-biopic about Trump's early career in the 1970s as a wanna-be NYC real estate developer-mogul, in Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi's The Apprentice from a researched first screenplay by Gabriel Sherman

The Best Actress Category:

The Best Actress nominees were all of the major stars of five of the Best Picture nominated films. [It was the first time in 47 years that all of the Best Actress nominees were in Best Picture-nominated films.] Most of them were first-time nominees. Two of the nominees in the category were recognized for non-English language performances:

• 38 year-old British-actress Cynthia Erivo (with her third nomination and no wins) for her role as Elphaba Thropp, a misunderstood young woman because of her green skin - the future Wicked Witch of the West, in the fantasy musical Wicked
  [Note: Erivo was previously nominated as Best Actress for Harriet (2019), and for the same film's Original Song "Stand Up".]
• 52 year-old Spanish-born actress Karla Sofía Gascón (with her first nomination) for her role as the title character in Emilia Pérez, a male Mexican drug cartel lord (named Juan "Manitas" del Monte) who transitioned through surgery to become Emilia Perez, and then attempted to atone for his past sins
  [Note: It was the first Oscar nomination for an openly-trans actress in Academy history.]
• 25 year-old Mikey Madison (with her first nomination) for her role as the title character: 23 year-old NYC stripper and sex-worker Anora "Ani" Mikheeva involved in a fairy-tale love story with the immature son of a Russian oligarch, before the relationship uncomfortably disintegrated, in Anora
• 62 year-old Demi Moore (with her first nomination) for her role as fired 50 year-old aerobics fitness-show actress Elisabeth Sparkle, who then went on to use a black-market "substance" to make her younger - with unpredictable consequences, in The Substance
• 59 year-old Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres (with her first nomination) for her role as a resilient, Brazilian lawyer-activist and mother Eunice Paiva during a military dictatorship in the early 1970s that executed her husband after an interrogation, in I'm Still Here
  [Note: Torres became only the second Brazilian to be nominated in the Best Actress category, following her mother Fernanda Montenegro's nomination for Best Actress in Central Station (1998).]

The Best Supporting Actor Category:

Four of the Best Supporting Actor nominees were first-time nominees, and none were previous Oscar winners:

• 32 year-old Russian actor Yura Borisov (with his first nomination) for his role as quiet and respectful Russian henchman Igor, in Anora
• 42 year-old Kieran Culkin (with his first nomination) for his memorable role as annoying Jewish cousin Benjamin "Benji" Kaplan during a challenging trip to Poland with his cousin (director Jesse Eisenberg) to discover their family's history and Holocaust experience, in the slightly-bleak A Real Pain
• 55 year-old Edward Norton (with his 4th nomination, with no wins) for his portrayal of legendary, iconic folk-singer and activist Pete Seeger, in A Complete Unknown
  [Note: Norton was previously nominated for two supporting roles: in Primal Fear (1996) and in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), and for his lead role as angry neo-Nazi Derek Vineyard, in American History X (1998).]
• 57 year-old Australian actor Guy Pearce (with his first nomination) for his role as industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren, who became the benefactor of immigrant Laszlo (Adrien Brody), in The Brutalist
• 46 year-old Jeremy Strong (with his first nomination) for his role as cutthroat attorney Roy Cohn, one of Donald Trump's early and ruthless mentors or fixers, in the origin story The Apprentice

The Best Supporting Actress Category:

The Best Supporting Actress nominees were mostly first-time nominees. One of the nominees in the category was for non-English language performances:

• 34 year-old Monica Barbaro (with her first nomination) for her role as folk singer-songwriter and social-justice activist Joan Baez, a contemporary love interest of Bob Dylan, in A Complete Unknown
• 31 year-old pop icon and singer Ariana Grande (with her first nomination) for her role as Glinda the Good, in the fantasy musical Wicked
• 41 year-old British actress Felicity Jones (with her second nomination, with no wins) for her role as Erzsébet Tóth - the wife of American immigrant Laszlo (Adrien Brody) who fled from Europe in 1947 to America, in the epic period drama The Brutalist spanning three decades
  [Note: Felicity Jones was previous nominated for Best Actress for her role as Jane Hawking, in the biopic The Theory of Everything (2014).]
• 72 year-old Italian actress Isabella Rossellini (with her first nomination) for her minor but pivotal role as Sister Agnes, in the dramatic papal thriller Conclave
• 46 year-old Zoe Saldaña (with her first nomination) for her role as Mexican attorney Rita Mora Castro, in Emilia Pérez

Snubs or Overlooked Films or Nominees:

• Although Emilia Perez led with 13 nominations, Selena Gomez' Supporting Actress performance as Jessi Del Monte (the wife of a cartel leader who had trans-gender surgery) was unrepresented
• Focus Features' and director Robert Eggers’ remake - the vampire romance Nosferatu scored 4 nominations, but was completely overshadowed in the main categories; the same with A24's Sing Sing with recognition solely for Domingo's lead role
• Likewise, the strong supporting role of Margaret Qualley in The Substance was passed over
• A-lister Denzel Washington was overlooked for his role as Macrinus in director Ridley Scott's Gladiator II (with only one nomination - Best Costume Design)
• Daniel Craig was denied a nomination for his unique and melancholy performance as brilliant but debauched ex-pat William Lee living in post-WWII 1940s Mexico City, in director Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs' early 1950s second novel (a surrealist gay fever dream), Queer (with no nominations)
• John M. Chu was snubbed from receiving a Best Director nomination for Wicked, as was director RaMell Ross for Nickel Boys with its brilliant cinematography by Jomo Fray
• A number of actresses were denied nominations in the Best Actress category: Marianne Jean-Baptiste as wretched, unpleasant and mentally-ill British-Jamaican female named Pansy Deacon, a divisive suburban housewife in Hard Truths, Pamela Anderson as the title character - aging Las Vegas dancer Shelly in Gia Coppola's The Last Showgirl, and A-listers Nicole Kidman as powerful CEO and mother Romy in writer-director Halina Reijn's Babygirl, and Angelina Jolie as opera legend Maria Callas in the biopic Maria
• In the Best Director category, German-born Edward Berger was not nominated for Conclave, and Denis Villaneuve was again denied a nomination as director for the sequel to his 2021 space opera epic - Dune: Part Two
• In the category of Best Supporting Actress, Jamie Lee Curtis was snubbed for her role as Annette in the low-budget independent film The Last Showgirl
• In the Best Animated Feature Film category, Disney's $1 billion-dollar hit Moana 2 was pushed out by some smaller films
• Director Luca Guadagnino's popular sexy and romantic love triangle (between competitive athletes) and sports (tennis) drama Challengers was completely shut-out of any nominations - most egregiously for Best Cinematography; also devoid of nominations were Mike Leigh's Hard Truths and Payal Kapadia's intimate Indian drama All We Imagine as Light about two nurses in Mumbai struggling to survive amidst unfair injustices and inequalities due to gender, caste restrictions, and ethnic prejudices
• Although nominated for other awards, Searchlight's and actor-writer-director Jesse Eisenberg's comedy-drama and buddy-road film A Real Pain and A24's Sing Sing were not nominated for Best Picture or Best Director; fortunately both were nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and for acting awards
• A number of films didn't make any significant difference, for example: director Todd Phillips' and Warner Bros.' musical drama Joker: Folie à Deux - a sequel to his earlier film Joker (2019), Warner Bros.' and George Miller's Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, A24's A Different Man about a disfigured man (with a sole nomination for Best Makeup and Hairstyling), director Tim Fehlbaum's thriller September 5 (with a sole nomination for Best Original Screenplay) - a tense re-enactment of an Israeli-Olympic team hostage takeover by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Munich games viewed through the eyes of ABC-TV sports commentators, Neon's The Seed of the Sacred Fig (a nominee for Best International Feature Film from Germany), and Clint Eastwood's presumably final film - the traditionally-told and insightful legal thriller Juror #2 - a ludicrous but believable premise about a jury member (Nicholas Hoult) facing a dilemma after realizing that he may have committed the crime under investigation