Nominations voting is from January 8-12, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 17, 2025. Final voting is February 11-18, 2025. And finally, the 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2, and air live on ABC at 7 p.m. ET/ 4 p.m. PT. We update our picks throughout awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions.
The State of the Race
As we enter the fall/holiday season, “Wicked” (Universal) and “Gladiator II” (Paramount) are gathering early buzz for the Best Sound Oscar. Other standouts include “Emilia Pérez” (Netflix), “Blitz” (Apple TV+), “Maria” (Netflix), and “Nickel Boys” (Amazon MGM Studios). Still to come are the highly anticipated “Nosferatu” (Focus Features) and “A Complete Unknown” (Searchlight Pictures). Another major contender, course, is “Dune: Part Two” (Warner Bros.).
In “Wicked,” Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the Broadway musical by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, we get the unlikely friendship between Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Galinda (Ariana Grande), who eventually become the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda. The sound team was led by supervising sound editor/sound designer/re-recording sound mixer John Marquis, supervising sound editor/sound designer Nancy Nugent-Title, and Oscar-winning re-recording mixer Andy Nelson (“Les Miserables”), and supervising music editor Jack Dolman. The movie offers musical spectacle that leans into magical realism as well as the intimate drama between the two leads, which primarily takes place at Shiz University.
“Gladiator II,” Ridley Scott’s sequel to his Oscar winner, takes place two decades later as the Roman Empire continues to implode. It concerns Lucius (Paul Mescal), the former heir to the Empire, forced to enter the Colosseum as a ruthless gladiator in what becomes a political power play engineered by former slave-turned-merchant Macrinus (Denzel Washington). Handling the action-packed sound design are supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Matthew Collinge, supervising sound editor Danny Sheehan, and Oscar-winning re-recording mixer Paul Massey (“Bohemian Rhapsody”).
In “Dune: Part Two,” Oscar-winning supervising sound editor/sound designer Richard King (“Dunkirk,” “Inception”) reunited with re-recording mixers Ron Bartlett and Doug Hemphill and worked with director Denis Villeneuve for the first time. “Dune” won the sound Oscar, but the sequel was more action-driven with lots of battles on Arrakis, as well as the noise of Harkonnen crowds during the gladiator fights on Giedi Prime. Crucially, there were many sand recordings in the field and on the foley stage, the most interesting of which were low-end groans. Plus, the sandworms were much more prominent and required more movement sounds in the sequel.
“Emilia Pérez,” the musical crime thriller from Jacques Audiard, stars Zoe Saldaña as a lawyer who assists the titular Mexican cartel leader (Karla Sofía Gascón) in undergoing gender confirmation surgery. The director audaciously offers an operatic fever dream about the hope of a new life through song and dance — but it’s also about the difficulty in leading double lives. Supervising sound editor Aymeric Devoldère handled the crucial musical numbers with re-recording sound mixer Cyril Holtzm, who created a new vocal tool to stylize and modulate Gascón’s singing performances.
Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” explores the harrowing German aerial assault on London during World War II as a social realist fable. Editor Peter Sciberras deftly balances the communal and personal stories, in which the use of song permeates the film as a show of strength and a coping device. It focuses on biracial youngster George (Elliott Heffernan), who’s hurled on an incredible “Oliver Twist”-like adventure while heading back home to his munitions worker mom (Saoirse Ronan) and musical grandfather (Paul Weller). Handling the myriad sounds of London during wartime, including the loud, destructive bombings and flooding of the train station, and the musical performances, is the sound team led by supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Paul Cotterell.
“Maria,” Pablo Larraín’s drama about opera singer Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie), occurs during her final years in Paris in the ’70s. It continues the director’s cycle of psychological portraits (“Jackie,” “Spencer”) and contains a visual concept that fuses the ’40s through the ’70s period with surreal musical sequences. The sound team was led by Oscar-winning supervising sound editor John Warhurst (“Bohemian Rhapsody”), sound designer Gwennolé Le Borgne, and re-recording mixers Lars Ginzel and Luise Hofmann.
“Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, explores two Black teenagers, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who become friends as wards of a barbaric juvenile reform school in Jim Crow–era Florida. The film is a sensory experience about their different POVs — hope and despair— with lots of abstract imagery and sounds. The intent is to pull us into a world that contrasts brutality with the beauty of the everyday mundane. Tony Volante and Daniel Timmons serve as the co-supervising sound editors and re-recording mixers.
Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” reworks the legendary silent vampire film with Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok, Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, and Nicholas Hoult as her husband. Damian Volpe, sound designer/supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer, handled the unnerving soundscape of roving from 19th-century London to a Gothic castle.
Michael Sarnoski’s “A Quiet Place: Day One” (Paramount) prequel required a new soundscape to accompany the alien invasion of Manhattan, which finds Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) determined to grab the last slice of pizza in the city. Supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Lee Salevan reveled in recording everyday sounds, such as dripping water and creaking chainlink fences that are suddenly amplified. Additionally, the alien creatures roam Manhattan in a pack and make more complex sounds.
Lee Isaac Chung’s “Twisters” (Universal), which boasts six different tornadoes created by ILM, required distinctive soundscapes from Oscar-winning supervising sound editors Al Nelson and Bjørn Ole Schroeder (“Top Gun: Maverick”). They were variations of a kind of freight train sound with howls, pulses, and whipping winds, run through a filter and treated as specifically orchestrated layers.
Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers” (Amazon MGM Studios) treats love and tennis as a competition between rivals Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor, and the woman in their life, Zendaya. The sound design by supervising sound editor Craig Berkey and sound designer Paul Carter focused on the tennis combatants, emphasizing the racquets hitting balls and shoe squeaks, recorded by sound mixer Lisa Piñero with authentic slap echo. They picked up what they could naturally (building an effective library of reverb) and added the rest in post.
“Longlegs” (Neon), Osgood Perkins’ horror thriller, centered around Nicolas Cage’s serial killer, boasts a terrifying soundscape from sound designer and editor Eugenio Battaglia, who leaned on the glam rock aesthetic for creating creepy sounds as well. Every creaky noise, heartbeat, and footstep was recorded at different auditory levels to put us in the confusing mindscape of FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe).
“Inside Out 2” (Pixar/Disney), the animated sequel from director Kelsey Mann, introduced the hyperactive Anxiety (Maya Hawke) as the newest and most resonant emotion for 13-year-old Riley (Kensington Tallman). Returning sound designer Ren Klyce had a much larger soundscape to deal with inside Riley’s mind, as well as the addition of hockey action.
“The Wild Robot” (DreamWorks/Universal), directed by Chris Sanders, is an animated sci-fi adventure that finds robot Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) washed ashore on an uninhabited island, who must adapt and live among the animals. The sound team was led by legendary sound designer Randy Thom (director of sound design at Skywalker Sound), supervising sound editor Brian Chumney, and supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Leff Lefferts.
As for the rest: “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Todd Phillips’ musical thriller, picks up with Arthur/Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) facing the death penalty for multiple murders and striking up a delusional romance with Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn while incarcerated in Arkham Asylum. The sound team had the weirdness of the musical sequences to soundscape along with the Joker mayhem. It was led by Oscar-winning sound designer/supervising sound editor Ethan Van der Ryn (“King Kong,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”), sound designer/supervising sound editor Erik Aadahl, and re-recording mixers Tom Ozanich and Dean Zupancic.
“A Complete Unknown,” James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, chronicles the folk star’s rise in New York’s West Village in 1961 to the controversial 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he turned electric. The sound team handling the musical performances is led by Oscar-winning supervising sound editor Donald Sylvester (“Ford v Ferrari”) and re-recording sound mixer Paul Massey.
Potential nominees are listed in alphabetical order; no film will be deemed a frontrunner until we have seen it.
Frontrunners
“Blitz”
“Dune: Part Two”
“Emilia Pérez”
“Gladiator II”
“Wicked”
Contenders
“Challengers”
“A Complete Unknown”
“Inside Out 2”
“Joker: Folie à Deux”
“Longlegs”
“Maria”
“Nickel Boys”
“Nosferatu”
“A Quiet Place: Day One”
“Twisters”
“The Wild Robot”
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