28. the oscar buzz 2025 spreadsheet
my favorite holiday tradition <3
It's my favorite time of year! No, not winter. Winter-enjoyers are psychos with fundamentally different snot production systems than me. Not Christmas either because just anybody can get something shiny at Christmas. It’s AWARDS SEASON!!!!! The six-month-long blood-soaked beauty pageant where Cillian Murphy can be a reigning queen. Every year, on the day after the Oscars, I look through the next year's releases, listen to Little Gold Men, and start my big spreadsheet of Oscar’s hopefuls. But as we made our way through the year, I felt a lot of movies I was excited about turned out to be disappointments, and the ones I really enjoyed had no chance of being nominated. It's a bummer to watch an actress receive her long-due recognition for a film that was pretty bad, or a film that actually offended me on all levels aesthetically, creatively, and politically be lauded on all sides. As a teen, the Oscars were how I found out what the good movies were, and now I feel like I have better taste than the average Academy voter (I think most of us do, to be clear).
Even when they’re bad though, I still love them. If you look at what kinds of movies that were nominated 20 years ago, the typical all-white period pieces and sob stories that constituted “Oscar bait”, recent years’ classes are far more interesting, daring, and with more diverse countries of origin and circumstances of budgets. And even if a win is predictable, a delightful speech may still surprise you. I’d actually argue the Oscars have been getting less predictable every year with the massive expansion of the Academy, which is exciting even if it messes up my pools. The race does feel rather thin this year though, likely a post-strike symptom. Below is my big spreadsheet, roughly in order of likelihood of nominations, with the major categories:
Have you ever watched a sport you know nothing about and just picked whatever athlete on the court had the most pluck to root for or the most annoying to root against? That’s an entirely valid way of navigating Oscar season. Or, if you’re like me, you will watch all the movies and then you will shout yourself hoarse saying that one unnominated supporting actor performance was actually more impressive than anyone who actually got a nod (CHARLES MELTON, YOU WILL BE AVENGED!!!). I have snubs and wins for whomst I still nurse grudges about and probably will until I reach the grave. I’m already upset to see Challengers slipping below my Line of Likelihood (even though I made that line and it's all subjective, I can still be upset by it). It simultaneously feels both early and late in the season as so much campaigning has already happened and yet most of the world still hasn’t seen the top movies!!
My personal holiday watchlist is:
Gladiator II
A Complete Unknown even though it feels so lame, I wanna see it
Nosferatu
Oh shit i can’t wait for The Nickel Boys
But everybody will be talking about Babygirl
And The Brutalist fuck how am I going to see 6 movies and do those 3 yoga classes and also probably have to work and party and sleep
Fuck, and now they’re rereleasing Sing Sing which I didn’t get to see yet!!!!!
here’s how a movie i worked on can still win an oscar
I have extra investment this year because one of my big horses is a movie I actually worked on!!! A24’s A Different Man!!!! It’s a funny, smart, wildly original beautifully shot gem of a movie. I thought it had premiered too quietly to be in voters’ minds, until then, it got BEST PICTURE AT THE GOTHAM AWARDS! Many entertainment news outlets called it “surprising”! But not to me! And now I’m hungry for the big fish. The movie has a few different roads to gold. It was short-listed for Make-Up Design which I can tell you was the chief cost of the movie, besides the film it was shot on (yes!! film!!! ooooh!!). I think the script is more than deserving of a Best Original Screenplay but unless I see some guild attention, it doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of traction there. But let’s think big. Top 5 big. Adam Pearson has rightfully gotten recognition for his scene-stealing supporting role in the film. In 2021 and 2022, we also saw relatively fringe actors propelled to victory by both delivering good performances (ones also based on their real-life personalities which makes things simpler for voters) and deploying an aggressive charm offensive on the campaign trail. If anyone is the man for this job, it's Adam. He’s charming as hell and genuinely kind. Within ten minutes of meeting him, he offered me his Disney+ password so I could watch the new Chip ‘n’ Dale movie. I admittedly have not seen a lot of this year’s other movies with rumored contenders for this role, but I cannot see a world in which Adam’s is not as perfectly worthy as any of them.
good reads
“The other day I said to the company, ‘If you have any conversation about money, it’s blood, A blood fight.’ Negotiating about a dress, negotiating salary, anytime money is mentioned in a scene, it’s not a casual reference; it’s life or death
IndieWire | ‘All That Jazz’ Is a Favorite of Fincher, Kubrick, and Scorsese — Here’s Why by Jim Hemphill
Where “All That Jazz” distinguishes itself from virtually every other musical ever made is its use of song and dance to express emotion and theme and its creator’s insecurities, cruelty, contradictions, and self-absorption with no filter and no mercy. To call it autobiographical is like calling “Psycho” a movie about a guy with a few mother issues.
The Dial | The Promise of Duolingo by Imogen West-Knights
“It’s become a bit of an identity thing,” he told me, adding that he has found himself in the corner of nightclubs at 11:58 p.m. yelling into his phone to keep his streak going.
seen/read highlights
SEEN: Queer, The Merry Gentlemen, Hot Frosty and not joking a little bit the one about the sexy snowman came to life moved me the most
READ: Only Santas in the Building, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
WATCHED: Motherfucking Audra Gypsy
spotify wrapped
I literally loved organized, statistical collections of so Spotify Wrapped is my jam. I literally think about it all year long, and as you can see, I spend an insane amount of time using that app. This year, I say gratefully, no show tunes entered my top five, though my playlist had 8 separate songs from Merrily We Roll Along, 4 from Ragtime, and 1 from Liza with a Z…..
hot frosty + merrily album representation here. really good stuff