The best film of the year won’t win at the 2025 Oscars
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You may still feel very much in the well-fed, sofa-lolling phase of Twixmas, but it’s now 2025 and with the Golden Globes looming on Sunday, we’re being plunged into awards season already. It seems aggressively early to be thinking about the best film of the past 12 months being crowned at various showbiz bashes over the next few weeks, culminating in the Oscars on March 2.
![[Best Picture 1999]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/GettyImages-859874310.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
But the thing is, it won’t be. While we like to think in tidy terms of worthy films picking up a selection of gongs, it really most often comes down to films that capture the zeitgeist – and yes, are often (but not always) very good – which also spend a boatload on gruelling publicity campaigns.
![[Karla Sofia Gascon as Emilia Perez wearing a black embroidered top]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/SEI_232662481-0369.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
It would have been very hard to not ‘hold any space’ for the months-long Wicked press tour, for example. As always, Oscar winners are therefore not the final word in what is ‘best’ in cinema; we need only cast our minds back to Green Book triumphing over BlacKkKlansman and The Favourite in 2019, Crash nabbing the win from Brokeback Mountain in 2006 or even Shakespeare in Love being the best film of 1998 over Saving Private Ryan.
![[Undated film still from Queer. Pictured: Daniel Craig as William Lee and Drew Starkey as Eugene Allerton. See PA Feature SHOWBIZ Film Reviews. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature SHOWBIZ Film Reviews. PA Photo. Picture credit should read: The Apartment S.R.L./FremantleMedia North America, Inc./Frenesy Film Company S.R.L./Yannis Drakoulidis. Photo courtesy A24. All Rights Reserved. NOTE TO EDITORS: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature SHOWBIZ Film Reviews.]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/SEI_232563539-545e.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
This year, there’s no clear front-runner like Oppenheimer in 2024, which mostly had to contend with Barbie but ultimately proved a comfortable victor at various awards ceremonies. There will probably be be a lot of votes split between the likes of indie darling Sean Baker’s Anora, the five-star juggernaut of Wicked and epic late arrival The Brutalist.
