The 97th Academy Awards, held on 2 March 2025, delivered the sort of results that make a room full of people argue over the sofa. Anora claimed Best Picture, Sean Baker took Best Director, and Mikey Madison won her first Oscar after a performance that felt both delicate and fearless. The major categories had clear winners, yet the overall picture was messier. A body-horror parable, a lavish musical, a dystopian epic and a Brazilian political drama all became part of the conversation.
That mix explains why this Oscars edition remains compelling after the speeches and statuettes have been packed away. The headline winners are easy to identify, but the craft awards reveal how the Academy is balancing spectacle, technical polish and stories that challenge comfortable expectations. There were also clear losers, deserved wins and a few choices likely to fuel debate through the rest of the year.
Anora was the decisive Best Picture winner. Sean Baker’s tale of an Armenian couple in New York is rough around the edges, frequently funny and emotionally bruising in equal measure. It avoids the polished anonymity of much prestige filmmaking. Its apartment scenes feel cramped and chaotic, while its central relationship has the combustible energy of a romance that might genuinely collapse if either person said the wrong thing.
Baker also won Best Original Screenplay and Best Director, giving Anora the strongest creative sweep of the night. That matters because the awards were not simply rewarding an outsider over bigger studio productions. They recognised a coherent artistic vision made without the usual machinery around it. Baker has always treated independent filmmaking as a marathon, and the speech for Best Picture felt like the culmination of that stubborn streak rather than a sudden fairy tale.
The wider results stopped Anora from running away with everything. Emilia Pérez received 13 nominations, but its two wins came through Zoe Saldaña’s performance and the song “El Mal”. Its vast campaign and enormous cultural footprint failed to produce the expected landslide. Wicked performed strongly in the craft categories, The Brutalist earned major acting and scoring recognition, and Dune: Part Two secured a deserved visual-effects victory. It was a night won through several distinct films rather than one obvious heavyweight.
Adrien Brody finally received an Oscar for The Brutalist, decades after his breakout performance in The Pianist. HisZlatan is physically demanding: the actor undergoes a transformation, speaks with a heavily altered accent and sustains emotional intensity across a film that can feel almost punishing in its long, unbroken compositions. The performance contains humour, loneliness and volatility without offering an easy release.
Mikey Madison was the other major acting winner. Her Best Actress turn in Anora plays against her younger, more delicate appearance, allowing Ani to swing between warmth, impatience and sheer frustration. She accepts the victory with a mixture of excitement and disbelief, which suits a first-time nominee whose career has been building steadily outside the biggest awards spotlight.
Kieran Culkin won Best Supporting Actor for A Real Pain, securing consecutive Oscars in the same role. His reserved, awkwardly observant performance gives the film its emotional centre. Zoe Saldaña also delivered the kind of technically demanding work that can be easy to overlook when the film around it is loud. Her accents and physical transformations in Emilia Pérez might have invited parody, yet her Maria is vulnerable, determined and occasionally heartbreaking.
The acting results were mostly sensible, even if they did not create an obvious sweep. The strongest individual work came from Brody, Madison and Culkin, while Saldaña deserved her win despite the mixed response to Emilia Pérez as a whole. This was a season in which the performances were generally easier to admire than the films containing them.
The acting headlines attracted the most immediate attention, but the technical awards may provide the clearer picture of the Academy’s current taste. This year’s winners favour films with strongly defined visual identities, precise construction and memorable practical effects.
| Craft area | Winner | Comparison with the field | My take |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cinematography | Lol Crawley for Conclave | Competed with The Brutalist, Maria and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga | Conclave’s severe compositions made secrecy feel physical |
| Film editing | Tom Cross for Wicked | Rivaled Anora, Conclave and The Substance | An encouraging win for a musical with two enormous centrepieces |
| Production design | Wicked | Rivaled The Brutalist, Conclave, Dune: Part Two and Emilia Pérez | Colour, scale and practical detail carried the fantasy |
| Costume design | Wicked | Competed with Conclave, Dune: Part Two, Furiosa and The Substance | The winner had personality, movement and sheer visual confidence |
| Makeup and hairstyling | The Substance | Rivaled Emilia Pérez, A Complete Unknown, Furiosa and Wicked | Practical transformation suited the film’s body-horror concerns |
| Sound | I’m Still Here | Competed with A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune: Part Two and Wicked | Silence and domestic noise became part of the storytelling |
| Visual effects | Dune: Part Two | Rivaled A Complete Unknown, Furiosa, The Substance and Wicked | Invisible craft gave the world-building its weight |
The biggest technical surprise was Wicked winning Best Editing. Its two famous songs required transitions that could hold their own without turning the film into a collection of musical numbers. Tom Cross kept the momentum moving between songs, dialogue and the enormous emotional machinery of the story. It was an unusual choice, yet a welcome one.
The other awards showed a preference for films that use craft to reinforce ideas. Conclave’s cinematography makes every enclosed room feel like a trap, while The Substance uses makeup to make identity, ageing and repulsion impossible to separate. Dune: Part Two received the visual-effects award even though its greatest strength lies in the combined work of artists, designers and world-builders. The win for I’m Still Here in sound was similarly fitting: quiet rooms, muffled conversations and family tension carry more weight than a loud effects package would have allowed.
Flow delivered the night’s most significant geographic breakthrough by becoming the first Latvian film to win Best Animated Feature. Its wordless story of a mouse navigating a flooded wilderness is formally inventive without becoming insufferably self-conscious. The little wooden house drifting across an empty landscape may be the year’s most immediately recognisable image.
I’m Still Here became Brazil’s first International Feature winner, arriving with political force as well as artistic achievement. Its story of a family searching for a missing man during Brazil’s military dictatorship refuses the easy comforts of an awards-season tragedy. No Other Land, the Palestinian-Israeli documentary collaboration, won Best Documentary and brought another urgent political perspective to a ceremony that was not entirely detached from the state of the world.
The ceremony’s scale came from Wicked, Dune: Part Two and Emilia Pérez. The first delivered a vast rainbow-coloured production, the second turned a vast science-fiction landscape into a character-driven morality play, and the third supplied colour, music and controversy in equal measure. There was plenty for viewers who had seen none of the nominated films to enjoy.
Technology supplied another argument. The Brutalist’s use of AI-assisted vocal adjustment to align Adrien Brody’s Hungarian accent with his character drew criticism before the awards and remains unresolved. The creative results may have been defensible, but the discussion exposed how little agreement exists about where convenience ends and authorship begins. Personal reaction posts are part of the post-Oscar ritual, and Sandy's POV is one place to compare notes on the speeches and surprises.
Australian viewers experience the Oscars differently from most of the world. The live ceremony arrives at roughly lunchtime on Monday in Sydney and Melbourne, with ABC and ABC iview carrying the broadcast. That timing turns the event into a fixture for arvo viewing parties rather than a late-night television ritual.
At those gatherings, the Australian style tends toward cheerful interruption. Mates order takeaway, grab a brew and offer confident opinions about films they saw once, three months ago. The familiar local phrase for this kind of loose, affectionate interrogation is a good deal more direct than polite television analysis. Rewarding the boldest speech or most theatrical outfit can feel like the sensible democratic outcome.
The local cinema market adds another layer. Special screenings at places such as Palace Cinemas in Sydney or Kino Cinemas in Melbourne can extend the conversation beyond the lounge room, while streaming access is distributed across services such as Disney+, Netflix, Stan, Binge and Max. “Where can I watch it?” can be as competitive in Australia as the awards themselves, particularly when American distribution rights arrive at different times.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga gave local viewers a more direct connection. George Miller’s Australian production earned nominations for Simon Duggan’s cinematography and its visual effects, losing the former to Conclave and the latter to Dune: Part Two. The result reflected the strange position of Australian cinema: culturally influential at home, internationally recognised and still operating within a market shaped heavily by imported blockbusters.
The strongest local arguments were straightforward:
My follow-up queue after the ceremony is short and specific:
My Best Picture vote went to Anora, with The Brutalist and Conclave close behind. Brody deserved Best Actor, Madison deserved Best Actress, and Conclave deserved Adapted Screenplay, although Sean Baker’s original work in Anora was harder to overlook. The technical awards made the strongest case for a year in which filmmaking craft was treated as a collaborative achievement rather than a collection of isolated signatures.
Some losses sting. The Brutalist lost Best Picture to the film its central character watches on television, while Dune: Part Two received only one award despite its extraordinary production design, music and effects. The Substance managed just one Oscar, and Conclave’s adapted-screenplay victory did not repair the Academy’s persistent habit of undervaluing formally adventurous political fiction.
I will still be thinking about Wicked’s editing, Flow’s flooded landscapes and the peculiar mix of warmth and abrasion in Anora long after the conventional winners’ tour has ended. The ceremony handed out trophies, but its more valuable legacy is another set of films that give viewers plenty to argue about.
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