Movie Awards Season 2025: Who’s Coming Back For More?

With movie awards season over, and rumors that Adrian Brody’s Oscar acceptance speech is finally coming to an end, the year 2025 sees a surprising amount of faces coming straight back into the conversation. For one, Zoe Saldaña will be putting her Supporting Actress Oscar to good use on the publicity trail for one of the biggest tentpoles of the year: James Cameron’s Fire and Ash, the third in the Avatar series, in which she reprises her role as Na’vi princess Neytiri.

It doesn’t seem especially likely that lightning will strike twice for Saldaña, but the win will bring extra gravitas to the franchise, which secured four nominations (including Best Picture) last time. Fire and Ash hits cinemas in the middle of December, usually a risky strategy, awards-wise — think Wonka, Nosferatu and even A Complete Unknown — but Cameron has good form on this front, and, presumably for extra good luck is releasing it on the same date as Titanic.

Snapping on Cameron’s heels is the next entry in the Wicked saga. Titled Wicked: For Good, John M. Chu’s rapid follow-up isn’t so much a sequel as an extended version of the second act of the stage play, which pretty means that all the same players are returning. Chu’s film received a wide spread of nominations, from cast to tech, but it remains to be seen whether Part 2 will get the same kind of love, especially in a year when tech credits are likely to be dominated by Fire and Ash and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.

On Oscar night, it seemed touch and go for Timothée Chalamet, who emerged as a late favorite for his performance as Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. History may well repeat for him, as his only movie appearance this year will be in A24’s Christmas Day release Marty Strong. Directed by Josh Safdie, it is a loose biopic of Marty Reisman, who could be described as the Weird Al Yankovic of the table tennis world. Similarly, after disappointment prevailed for The Apprentice team, Jeremy Strong stands to make a return to the Supporting Actor category for his role as Jon Landau — Bruce Springsteen’s manager — in the upcoming Boss biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere.

Oscar night must have been strange for Daniel Craig, whose tenure as Bond was celebrated in a bizarre musical tribute to Eon’s spy franchise. Though his performance as a gay morphine addict in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, based on the novella by William S. Burroughs, had earned plaudits at the Venice Film Festival and bagged the actor a Golden Globes nomination, the film rapidly lost momentum in the new year. Having said that, despite strong reviews throughout his career, Craig has thus far been ignored by the Academy and has only scored a single Bafta nod — for 2007’s Casino Royale — in his homeland.

It could be third time lucky, however, with Craig’s return to the Knives Out universe; in Rian Johnson’s upcoming murder-mystery Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, ace sleuth Benoit Blanc comes to London for what Netflix is teasing as “his most dangerous case yet.” Since establishing Blanc in 2019, Johnson has become a fixture in the Best Screenplay category, and his series continues to attract stars across the spectrum, from Cailee Spaeny to Josh O’Connor, Josh Brolin and Glenn Close. As is the tradition, the new film seems likely to debut at the Princess of Wales Theater at this year’s edition of the Toronto Film Festival.

Also left out of the awards conversation was June Squibb, the 95-year-old actress whose performance in OAP action comedy Thelma caused pundits to wonder whether the Academy would recognize her work again, 11 years after her nomination for Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. Having premiered at Sundance, Thelma didn’t quite have the legs to last the year, but Squibb certainly did; she was actually one of the MVPs at the Oscar ceremony, where she partnered with Scarlett Johansson to present the award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. “I got a little makeup done too,” she joked, “and I’m actually being played by Bill Skarsgård right now. Half the time you see me in public, it’s Bill Skarsgård. The real June Squibb is at home with a book…” 

What audiences didn’t know is that the pairing was a sneaky promo for Johansson’s recently wrapped directing debut Eleanor the Great, a low-key Sony Pictures Classics release about an elderly Floridian woman who moves to New York alone after a bereavement and befriends a young student.

The setting is Coney Island, which did pretty well for Sean Baker’s Anora. Speaking of whom, the director was doubling up during Neon’s effective awards campaign while finishing his producing and editing duties on Left-Handed Girl, the solo debut of Shih-Ching Tsou, who co-directed Baker’s 2004 film Take Out. He calls their new collaboration “a family drama that takes place in the Taipei night markets,” and if it lands in Cannes, it will bring Baker full circle from 2024.

Spookily, he is not the only class-of-2024 director being tipped for that festival; while promoting their film The Brutalist, director Brady Corbet was similarly preoccupied with producing his partner Mona Fastvold’s new film Ann Lee, a musical — yes, you read that right — about the founder of the Shaker movement (aka the “female Messiah”) starring Amanda Seyfried. Fastvold’s previous films premiered at Sundance (The Sleepwalker) and Venice (The World to Come), and although Corbet was at Cannes as an actor with Martha Marcy May Marlene, his own films tend to go to Venice, a longtime supporter of his work. As you can see from his casting, he’s nothing if not loyal, so it could go either way.

Conclave helmer Edward Berger, meanwhile, isn’t licking his wounds from the Academy’s Best Director snub; his new film — a Netflix production — will likely head straight to the fall festivals, giving him a breather after Conclave‘s last-minute stall at the Oscars. Titled The Ballad of a Small Player and based on the 2014 novel by Lawrence Osborne, his follow-up guarantees BAFTA attention at least with the casting of Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton in a Macau-set gambling drama.

But the master of the quick turnaround, for now, has to be Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose Kinds of Kindness attracted early awards buzz that only paid out in a surprise Golden Globe nomination for Jesse Plemons in the Best Actor – Musical or Comedy category. This winter sees Lanthimos debut his third film in as many years — Bugonia, a sci-fi this time, based on the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet! and, again, starring Emma Stone. In any previous year, such speed would be considered superhuman, but somehow that kind of work ethic doesn’t seem to register anymore in the accelerated world of today.