What Makes Us So Sure Sean Baker Can Sneak Anora Into the Oscars?

While Oscar hopefuls spend October jetting off to regional film festivals in the Hamptons, Mill Valley, and Middleburg, for the rest of us the month functions as a brief pause for breath. Almost all of the major contenders have screened, but they remain cosseted away in industry bubbles, unseen by the public at large. That ends this weekend, when Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner Anora opens in New York and Los Angeles. To commemorate the occasion, here are ten questions — one for each of GoldDerby’s top ten Best Picture contenders — that remain unanswered in this “phony war” period of the 2025 Oscar season.

1. What makes us so sure this is the year the Academy embraces Sean Baker?

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson has been throwing cold water on Anora enthusiasts by noting that — while the movie’s undoubtedly great — Sean Baker’s previous films The Florida Project and Red Rocket were pretty great, too, and garnered only a single Oscar nomination between them. The assumption that this time will be different rests on two data points: Anora’s Palme d’Or win, which was awarded by a jury of nine people, and its third-place finish at TIFF, which is another way of saying the Canadians liked it almost as much as they liked The Life of Chuck.

2. How many minutes will it take for out-of-context screenshots from Emilia Pérez to start going viral on social media?

And which angle of outrage will have the most valence: that the movie is a trans-empowerment narrative written and directed by a cis man, or that it’s a tale of Mexican-cartel violence made by a Frenchman?

3. Similarly, who will be most offended by Conclave …

Right-wing Catholics or members of a certain underrepresented community, who will find the movie gives them a different kind of representation than they bargained for?

4. Can The Brutalist survive on a preferential ballot?

One of the best pieces of awards-season wisdom I’ve ever heard came from a veteran campaign strategist, who told me that in the era of the preferential ballot, “most likable” beats “grandest achievement” nine times out of ten. That’s gonna be tough for a dour colossus like The Brutalist, which might as well be wearing a T-shirt that says “ASK ME ABOUT MY GRAND ACHIEVEMENT.” Can Brady Corbet’s film follow the same path as Oppenheimer without the benefit of a $900 million gross?

5. Can A24 bring back Sing Sing?

The heartfelt indie had a reportedly well-attended Academy screening in New York this week, and, in a move I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, its campaign also scheduled a fresh round of fall press screenings, almost as if the film had not already been released. The plan here appears to be to reprise the CODA playbook, and like that film, Sing Sing should benefit greatly from getting its entire cast together on the trail.

6. Will the Brits power Blitz?

Steve McQueen’s war epic is the movie equivalent of jellied eels: While American critics are damning Blitz with faint praise, their British counterparts are breaking out their OEDs to find synonyms for “masterpiece.” (“Among the greatest war films ever made,” says the Telegraph.) Will the Academy’s considerable Brit contingent put their stiff upper lips behind Saoirse Ronan and make the four-time nominee a real threat in the Supporting Actress race?

7. Can Dune: Part Two equal its predecessor’s trophy count?

As the only big blockbuster in the 2022 Oscar race, Dune ran away with almost every single craft trophy. This year will bring more competition from Gladiator II, Wicked, Blitz, and others. In these circumstances, repeating the original’s six-trophy haul will be a tougher assignment, even if Part Two outdoes its predecessor’s ten noms by getting Denis Villeneuve into Best Director.

8. Does Scott Feinberg know something about September 5 that we don’t?

Ask most pundits about September 5, a docudrama about an American news crew grappling with the Munich hostage crisis, and they’ll peg it as a borderline Best Picture nominee that could sneak into Original Screenplay and maybe an acting race. Then there’s Scott Feinberg, who has used his perch at The Hollywood Reporter to herald the film as the second coming of Argo, and the current Best Picture front-runner. Feinberg’s coverage of September 5 has been hyperbolic enough — declaring that it “blew the roof off of” Venice and Telluride, when the actual response was more low-key positive — to raise eyebrows all across the internet. Is he just being a contrarian, or are the rest of us mired in groupthink and unable to see the potential here?

9. Can Nickel Boys keep the art-house streak going?

The Academy’s taste can be thermostatic. After the auteur-heavy lineup at the 2018 Oscars, voters fell hard for Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody the following season, then gave Parasite Best Picture the very next year. Last March’s Oscars ended with challenging titles like The Zone of Interest and The Boy and the Heron winning gold. A bold, unsparing experiment like Nickel Boys will be hoping the art-house love is an enduring shift within the Academy and not a one-year trend.

10. Will history repeat with Gladiator II?

As my colleague Joe Reid explored on his podcast This Had Oscar Buzz, one reason a summer blockbuster like Gladiator was such a potent Oscar player was that many of the stately awards vehicles of fall 2000 — Pay It Forward, The Legend of Bagger Vance, All the Pretty Horses — utterly face-planted. This season hasn’t seen quite so many misfires, but a consensus is forming that the quality of the overall crop is lower than last year. Can Sir Ridley take advantage of a weakened field a II’nd time?

Oscar Futures: When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Cabbage Pie, That’s Anora

Every week between now and January 17, when the nominations for the Academy Awards are announced, Vulture will consult its crystal ball to determine the changing fortunes in this year’s Oscars race. In our “Oscar Futures” column, we’ll let you in on insider gossip, parse brand-new developments, and track industry buzz to figure out who’s up, who’s down, and who’s currently leading the race for a coveted Oscar nomination.