In one of the most exciting and dramatic awards seasons ever, the field is wide open in several fields. BBC film critics give their expert predictions for the major Academy Awards categories.

Caryn James: It has been a fun awards season, watching the nominees for best picture pinball around. Anora became the early favourite as the brash young voice of the future, until the bonkers Emilia Pérez became the Oscar darling for a minute, then Conclave had its moment as the smart mainstream choice, until The Brutalist announced itself as the epic with artistic ambitions until… full circle, Anora is the frontrunner again. It says a lot about the strength and variety of films this year that such mayhem could happen at all. Anora – funny, original and a little bit heartbreaking – is the likely winner. And among the realistic choices (six of the nominees might as well be category filler, and Karla Soíia Gascón’s unearthed offensive tweets shattered Emilia’s chances), Anora should win. But lurking in the background is Conclave, which could win by consensus, given that voters rank their choices in this category. Simplistic scenario: votes for the top film are so scattered that Conclave finally gets the most votes because it’s everybody’s second choice. Plus, it really is a satisfying political thriller that happens to be set in the Vatican, and its Bafta and SAG awards are a sign of real support. In a year that has had so many frontrunners, a Conclave win is entirely plausible.

Nicholas Barber: This time last year, Oppenheimer was firm favourite to win the Oscar for best picture – and plenty more besides. This year, things aren’t so simple. What we can say, judging by all the other awards ceremonies that have been and gone this year, is that Dune: Part Two, Emilia Pérez, I’m Still Here, Nickel Boys, The Substance and Wicked are vanishingly unlikely to take home the biggest prize of the night. None of them has whipped up the enthusiasm that’s required from both the public and the critics. That leaves us with Anora, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown and Conclave – and over the last few weeks I’ve wavered between all four of them as the most likely best picture winner. As I write, Anora seems to be the favourite, and I can understand why. It’s a film about contemporary American life made by an American auteur, and it balances uncompromising grittiness with exuberant, crowd-pleasing flair. In a year when arguments could be made for and against so many contenders, Anora has come to feel like the choice that could please everyone, so it may well complete the journey it began when it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last May.

Nicholas Barber: This is a strong category, but I doubt that the Academy’s voters will go for a French director who was largely unknown in the US before she made The Substance, so Coralie Fargeat is out. The various Emilia Pérez backlashes have hurt Jacques Audiard’s chances, and A Complete Unknown hasn’t received much praise for its directing as such, so James Mangold is a long shot, too. That means that the best director Oscar will either go to Sean Baker, for the verve and naturalism he brings to Anora, or to Brady Corbet, for the valiant artistic vision of The Brutalist. But the amiable Baker has made several excellent films that haven’t garnered many awards, including Tangerine and The Florida Project, so I suspect that he will be the Academy’s choice.

Caryn James: This race comes down to a stark contrast, between Sean Baker, whose Anora is a beautifully orchestrated contemporary romp, and Brady Corbet, whose The Brutalist wilfully announces its ambition as the kind of film they don’t make anymore, an historical epic complete with intermission. It’s a good guess that Baker is likely to triumph, because he won the Directors Guild Award and the film won the Producers Guild award, two major predictors of the Oscars. And he should win. He made Anora feel effortless, but beneath that apparent ease is some masterful work, as he navigates the changes in tone – from fairy tale to screwball comedy to drama – that make the film so rich. Coralie Fargeat deserves her place here for her confident direction of The Substance, but it’s really a two-man race.

Caryn James: Adrian Brody was on his way to making this a done deal, having won every major precursor from the Golden Globe to the Bafta, until Timothée Chalamet got in his way by winning the SAG award for A Complete Unknown. Oscar voting had ended by the time Chalamet won, but as an indicator of how the votes go, SAG has a great track record. You can never underestimate Oscar voters’ affection for a biopic, and Chalamet’s take on Bob Dylan was a true embodiment of a character as well as a spot-on impersonation. But Brody is still very likely to win, and he should, for his searing performance as a Holocaust refugee. He creates a portrait of a man who is talented and ambitious, sometimes ruthless and sometimes vulnerable, and fully human. But let’s acknowledge how strong the category is this year, the rare case where it would be perfectly appropriate for Ralph Fiennes, Colman Domingo or Sebastian Stan to win too.

Nicholas Barber: Adrien Brody (The Brutalist) and Timothée Chalamet (A Complete Unknown) are neck and neck, so it’s tricky to say which attributes will tempt the Academy more. Will it be pain, anguish and a Hungarian accent, or a nifty impersonation elevated by some expert singing and guitar-picking? Will it be the long-awaited return to greatness of a Hollywood stalwart who has already won an Oscar, or the crowning of a fresh-faced youngster who has nonetheless amassed a tremendous body of work? It could go either way, but Chalamet’s Oscar campaigning has been flawless – he has shown himself to be fun-loving and self-mocking, but at recent awards ceremonies, including Sunday’s SAG Awards, he has emphasised how seriously he takes a difficult job – so I’m betting on him. My own personal favourite is the wonderfully versatile Ralph Fiennes, who is so quiet and reserved yet so racked by doubt in Conclave – but I doubt that this is his year.

Nicholas Barber: OK, so we know that Karla Sofía Gascón isn’t going to win – the publicising of her offensive X posts settled that – so that leaves us with Cynthia Erivo for Wicked, Mikey Madison for Anora, Demi Moore for The Substance and Fernanda Torres for I’m Still Here. Both Moore and Torres won Golden Globes for their roles, in a musical / comedy and in a drama respectively, and for most of the time since then, they’ve been the frontrunners. Madison shook things up when she won the Bafta, so it’s now the closest of calls. But I reckon that Moore will win. Partly, that’s because of her savagely self-parodying performance as a former A-list star being turned into a monster by the ageist entertainment industry. And partly it’s because her comeback narrative, as spelt out in her Golden Globes acceptance speech, would furnish the Academy with the kind of feelgood story it loves so much.

Caryn James: Demi Moore has been on an almost steady march toward her first Oscar, marred only by Mikey Madison’s Bafta, ever since her pitch-perfect campaign/acceptance speech on winning the Golden Globe for The Substance. Moore checks all the boxes: the story of how Hollywood finally takes her seriously, the insider status and the no-holds-barred performance in a film with a resonant message. She is still the likely winner, but there could be an upset from Madison for her star-making role in Anora, or by Fernanda Torres, who should win. Torres gives a beautifully nuanced, restrained performance in I’m Still Here as a grieving yet determined widow during Brazil’s political dictatorship. But Oscars tend to go to screaming, yelling, tearing-down-the-scenery roles, which is what The Substance and Anora call for. A brilliantly subtle performance like Torres’s has an uphill battle.

Caryn James: There’s a reason Kieran Culkin has won every major award in this category in the run-up to the Oscars: he really deserves to. His wilfully outrageous, sad and moving character of Benji in A Real Pain may have echoes of his role as Roman Roy in Succession, but it is also funny and affecting on its own, a delicate mix of comedy and tragedy. And it hasn’t hurt his chances that every acceptance speech of his is wry, self-deprecating and fun to watch. Some winners make an earnest point of saying “There is no winner” or spreading the praise around, but Culkin has turned acceptances into a stand-up art form. In another year, Edward Norton might have taken the award for his sharply drawn performance as Pete Seeger in A Complete Unknown, but that seems like a very unlikely upset.

Nicholas Barber: This year’s Oscars are harder to predict than usual, but the best supporting actor category is the exception that proves the rule. Ever since Kieran Culkin won the Golden Globe for his role in A Real Pain in January, he has kept on winning and winning – and now it feels as if there is no point in any of his competitors turning up to the ceremony at all. Even those of us who would argue that Culkin isn’t really a supporting actor in the film, but a co-lead with its writer-director, Jesse Eisenberg, have had to accept the inevitable. The only regrettable part of the whole business is that this category is stacked with Oscar-worthy performances, namely Yura Borisov’s soft-hearted Russian muscle in Anora, Edward Norton’s gentle Pete Seeger in A Complete Unknown, Guy Pearce’s bluff tycoon in The Brutalist, and Culkin’s old Succession co-star Jeremy Strong as controversial lawyer Roy Cohn in The Apprentice. If they hadn’t been up against Culkin, any one of them might have won.

Nicholas Barber: For a while it looked as if Zoe Saldaña had this Oscar in the bag. Of course, she isn’t really a supporting actress in Emilia Pérez, but one of the leads. As soon as voters put her in this category, though, it seemed to be hers for the taking. Not only does she deliver a fabulous performance that includes energetic song-and-dance numbers, but she is a mainstay of the Marvel and Star Trek cinematic universes, so she has helped Hollywood make zillions of dollars. Then a journalist uncovered Those Social Media Posts. The bigoted remarks made by the other star of Emilia Pérez, Karla Sofía Gascón, stripped the film of much of its goodwill, and Saldaña’s hopes were badly damaged in the explosion of recriminations. Oscars observers started wondering: Would Ariana Grande win for Wicked, instead? It’s still possible, but Saldana has distanced herself smartly from the scandal, and made emotional speeches at other award ceremonies, including the Baftas and the SAG Awards, so the Academy will probably reward her for her work, rather than punish her for her co-star’s opinions.

Caryn James: Zoe Saldaña may be the one person to escape unscathed from the Emilia Pérez debacle, and get the Oscar, as she should. She has won every precursor award, and is actually the dynamic centre of the story. Rita, the lawyer who helps the title character to transition and create a new identity, gives Saldaña her richest role yet and she makes the most of it. Rita starts as a fiery, beleaguered small-town lawyer, wrestles with her conscience about being involved with a criminal, and eventually becomes a philanthropist, and Saldaña sings and dances her way through it all with grace and presence. And she had the perfectly crafted answer when first asked about her co-star’s offensive tweets, saying she was “saddened”. Very well played. Isabella Rossellini makes a huge impact as Sister Agnes in a small role in Conclave, and Monica Barbaro is amazing as she channels Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown, but they can’t complete with Saldaña’s Rita.

Caryn James: Peter Straughan is sure to win for Conclave. He turns Robert Harris’s potboiler novel into a sleek, thoughtful screenplay, which is a huge part of what makes the film – pretty talky when you think about it, and not exactly an action movie – so suspenseful and entertaining. Turning that straightforward novel into a faithful screenplay may sound simple, but in fact Straughn’s adaptation has a magician’s deft touch, taking the best of the story and making it much better. It’s great to see that RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes’s screenplay for Ross’s Nickel Boys is nominated. It’s a dazzling adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s extremely literary novel, but the film hasn’t received the kind of major awards traction it would need to compete. The rest of the category is fairly weak. The screenplay is the least of Emilia Pérez, Sing Sing is less about script than performance. And the banal screenplay for the biopic A Complete Unknown shouldn’t even have a place in this conversation.

Nicholas Barber: Peter Straughan’s gripping adaptation of Robert Harris’s novel, Conclave, has picked up prizes at the Golden Globes, the Critics’ Choice awards, and the Baftas. And when Conclave won best picture at the Baftas, the film’s director, Edward Berger, made a point of singing Straughan’s praises. Is he unbeatable at this stage? The controversies swirling around Emilia Pérez may have put it out of the running – as adventurous as Jacques Audiard’s screenplay is – and there doesn’t seem to be much chatter about A Complete Unknown, Nickel Boys and Sing Sing in this category. So, yes, unless there are some Conclave-style shenanigans going on behind closed doors, Straughan should triumph here.

Nicholas Barber: This is one of this year’s toughest categories to predict. September 5 hasn’t built any momentum over awards season, but the other four best screenplay nominees – Anora, The Brutalist, A Real Pain, The Substance – are all brilliant in their own distinctive ways, and were all written or co-written by the films’ directors. Sean Baker’s Anora script won at the WGA Awards; Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s The Brutalist was given the prize by two US critics’ organisations; Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain won at the Baftas, and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance won at Cannes last year. My own preference, in a year of extremely long films, is Eisenberg’s precision-engineered screenplay for A Real Pain, because it doesn’t waste a scene, or a syllable of dialogue, in a trim 90 minutes. But I think that Anora will beat it, which would be OK by me, too.

Caryn James: This is one of the richest categories, with three very different, thoroughly deserving nominees. Sean Baker’s Anora is fresh and bold. Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is audacious and zeitgeisty. And Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain is perceptive and humane to its core. Anora and The Substance were also nominated for best picture, a sign of strength that might give them an edge. But I’m guessing that A Real Pain, which should win, will come through in the end. Where Anora and especially The Substance owe a lot to those films’ initial concepts, Eisenberg’s screenplay is the work of a writer with an ear for making his dialogue both believable and affecting. Of course, Anora is coming on so strong in other categories, you can’t possibly rule it out, but if voters want to spread the awards around they may see this as a chance to give A Real Pain some well-earned recognition. 

Caryn James: Once, this race seemed down to Emilia Pérez v I’m Still Here, but Emilia’s implosion clears the way for I’m Still Here, which will win now and always should have. Walter Salles’s brilliantly moving story of a family dealing with the aftermath of their father’s disappearance during the Brazilian dictatorship in the 1970s is an eloquent, timely masterpiece that reveals the personal cost of politics. The film is nominated for best picture, which it surely won’t win, and Fernanda Torres for actress, where winning would be an upset, but those nominations are a sign of strength that will translate into winning the International prize. There isn’t a weak film in this category, with The Seed of the Sacred Fig another standout, but I’m Still Here towers above the others. There were celebrations in Brazil at the nominations alone, and although Brazilian films have been nominated before, including Salles’s 1998 Central Station, it looks like the celebrations will go on for the country’s first Oscar in this category.

Nicholas Barber: A storm of bad publicity knocked Emilia Pérez off-course this awards season, and suddenly it seemed as if one of its competitors might grab the Oscar for best international film. The most likely of these would be I’m Still Here, a powerful and popular Brazilian political drama whose star, Fernanda Torres, has been nominated for best actress. Also in with a chance are Flow, a Latvian cartoon which is nominated for best animated feature film, and The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which was made in secret in Iran by Mohammad Rasoulof, and then smuggled out of the country. But a week is a long time in awards season, and the Oscars take place a whole month after Karla Sofía Gascón’s offensive tweets were unearthed. My hunch is that the storm is passing, and that Emilia Pérez, which won the equivalent prize at the Baftas, will get its Oscar, after all.

Nicholas Barber: Nineteen years ago, Nick Park (and his co-director) won the Oscar for Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Nine years ago, the Oscar went to Pixar’s Inside Out. Follow-ups to both films are nominated this year, and as this is one category in which voters aren’t averse to handing prizes to sequels, either of them could win. Things are looking especially promising for Aardman’s claymation caper, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, a favourite of mine which nabbed not one but two Baftas – one for animated feature film and one for children’s / family film. The dialogue-free Latvian charmer, Flow, has its cheerleaders, too, whereas Memoir of a Snail, an Australian stop-motion animation, is just too gloomy to get voters behind it. That leaves the nominee which I believe will win: The Wild Robot. It’s a sci-fi epic, yet it has a big heart and loveable picture-book visuals. Besides, its writer-director, Chris Sanders, made Lilo & Stitch, The Croods, and How to Train Your Dragon, but has never won an Oscar. Surely his peers will want to rectify that this year?

Caryn James: How important is box office? That may be the deciding factor in this race, which is between two eco-themed films: The Wild Robot, the frontrunner, and Flow, its only likely competition. Flow is a true original, a dialogue-free Latvian film about a cat who tries to survive a flood. The Wild Robot is a funny, heart-tugging story about an intelligent robot, voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, who grows a human heart after being stranded on an island full of animal creatures facing an environmental crisis of its own. The Wild Robot has starry voices, including Pedro Pascal as Fink the Fox and Mark Hamill as Thorn the bear, and it has earned more than $300m. In itself that might not be enough to get the Oscar, but the combination of star power, a timely message and its popularity with audiences is likely to make it the winner. And it is charming, so fair enough. The attention to Flow so far might be its best reward.

Caryn James: There are years when documentaries with urgent political messages become the undeniable frontrunners and inevitable winners, such as Navalny in 2023 and 20 Days in Mariupol last year. This is one of those years. The extraordinary No Other Land will win and it should. Its eye-opening first-hand look at a village in the West Bank from 2019 to 2023, when Israeli forces destroyed homes and displaced the villagers, makes the cost of the conflict visceral. The film’s backstory is compelling: it was made by a team of Israelis and two Palestinians, whose personal stories shape the film. And it resonates with even more impact since the turmoil in the Middle East continues. The film has not found a US distributor despite earning awards from several festival and critics’ groups. but it has done very well in self-distribution. A vote for it might even convince the Hollywood players who have the power to release it wider.

Nicholas Barber: The past two winners of the Oscar for best documentary feature were 20 Days in Mariupol, which celebrated the resilience of the Ukrainian people during the current war, and Navalny, which condemned Vladimir Putin’s regime. That trend could well continue this year, at a time when those inter-related topics are more urgent than ever, with the prize going to Porcelain War. Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s film offers an intense, citizen’s-eye view of the conflict in Ukraine, and shows civilians being trained as combatants. What separates it from other such documentaries is that the main participants, Leontyev and his wife Anya Stasenko, are artists who sculpt and paint exquisitely patterned porcelain animals. The theme is the importance of storytelling and creativity as ways to resist oppression – and what could be more appealing to Hollywood’s film-making community than that?

Nicholas Barber: If voters feel that a film as lucrative as Wicked shouldn’t go away empty-handed, then giving it the prize for best original score is one obvious way for them to show it some love. But my money is on Daniel Blumberg’s awe-inspiring score for The Brutalist, which won the Bafta in the same category. One of the questions raised by Brady Corbet’s film is how such a low-budget indie drama can seem so epic, and the music has a lot to do with it. It’s big, bold and experimental, with strange ticking and clinking noises to establish the theme of construction, stately motifs to echo the characters’ grand ambitions, and some symphonic bombast and wild jazz to convey the thrill of arriving in the US in the middle of the 20th Century. It’s also deeply eerie at times, so you can expect it to be used on trailers for horror films and science-fiction sagas for years to come.

Caryn James: It might seem like Emilia Pérez and Wicked have the edge, but the songs that pop out of these musicals have their own category. Here, the award for the background music is between Conclave’s Volker Bertelmann, who won the Oscar for his music in All Quiet on the Western Front (like Conclave, directed by Edward Berger), or Daniel Blumberg, who won this year’s Bafta for his score for The Brutalist. Both scores serve their films well. Bertelmann’s classical style adds suspense to the Vatican thriller. But I’d give the edge to Blumberg, who should win for his evocative score that adds a touch of the contemporary to the film’s post-World War Two setting. Sometimes jazz-infused, sometimes commanding, his score enhances the mood without thwacking viewers over the head.

Caryn James: The film that should win wasn’t even nominated. It’s still a head-scratcher why Jomo Fray’s eloquent, imaginative cinematography for Nickel Boys, which gracefully meshed with director RaMell Ross’s first-person narrative, wasn’t acknowledged, while the film got a best picture nod. But there are two very strong contenders among the nominees. The Brutalist, shot in old-style, widescreen, rarely used VistaVision, has epic sweep, and is full of clarity. And Nosferatu’s cinematography is a beautiful mix of colour in its scenes of daily life, and darkness in the shadowy world of the vampire. Jarin Blaschke, who has worked on previous, stunning Robert Eggers’s films, equals that work in Nosferatu and should win. But The Brutalist and Lol Crawley probably will, if only because the film has been so much in the awards conversation, while Nosferatu definitely hasn’t.

Nicholas Barber: The fact that Nickel Boys didn’t get onto the shortlist for its immersive first-person camerawork is one of the Oscars’ most puzzling oversights this year, and it’s a shame, too, that the stylish Conclave was ignored. Of the films that were nominated, Nosferatu boasts glorious mountain vistas and shadowy Victorian chambers, while The Brutalist has the geeky appeal of large-format VistaVision film stock. But I have a feeling that the Academy will honour Greig Fraser’s stunning views of uncanny alien worlds in Dune: Part Two. After all, voters have to give at least something to bona-fide Hollywood blockbusters, and this would be a worthwhile way for them to do so.