Nominations voting is from January 8-17, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 23, 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 7:00 p.m. ET/ 4:00 p.m. PT. We update our picks through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions.
The State of the Race
Whoever is 100 percent certain about their Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination predictions is lying. The precursors have been way too all over the place to provide any certainty. Sometimes “Emilia Pérez” star Selena Gomez makes the cut, sometimes she doesn’t. Just when things finally look up for Monica Barbaro, earning a SAG Award nomination for her performance as Joan Baez in “A Complete Unknown,” she does not make the cut at BAFTA Awards, even though that group has six nomination slots.
Currently, it feels almost certain that the race is between two musical stars: Zoe Saldaña (“Emilia Pérez”) and Ariana Grande (“Wicked”), with Saldaña pulling ahead after winning Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture at the Golden Globes.
Gomez is by no means a critics pick, and is weighed down by not getting a solo SAG Award nomination, but “Emilia Pérez” has been on the fast track toward tying — and possibly breaking — the Oscar nominations record. When voters love a film this much, across branches, it becomes much easier to see them voting for every possible nominee from the film than worry about spreading the wealth. Even Adriana Paz has a shot, given how Netflix has excelled at securing unexpected nominations.
Interestingly enough, the last time a film had more than one Best Supporting Actress nomination was when Jamie Lee Curtis won the Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” in 2023. Now the Oscar winner is back with a vengeance, scoring SAG and BAFTA Awards for her supporting turn in Pamela Anderson comeback vehicle “The Last Showgirl.” The pro is that this role is actually more consequential than the one that earned her an Academy Award, but the con is that the film is in the running for nothing else. It would truly be another Oscar nomination based on her being an expert campaigner more than people paying close attention to the work. And this is not to say she is bad in either film she has been in consideration for. It’s more like her roles were so far down the call sheet that one could almost get away with calling them cameos.
“Conclave” star Isabella Rossellini is in a similar boat, where her reputation precedes her more than her eight minutes of screentime in the film does. Her and “The Brutalist” star Felicity Jones were the ones to make the BAFTA list, but were snubbed by SAG nominations for Female Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture. While Rossellini is still technically a SAG Award nominee via “Conclave” getting a Best Ensemble nomination, she has the edge between the two — but the guild’s love for “A Complete Unknown” was too overwhelming to not believe that Barbaro may have the best shot at that fifth slot when Oscar nominations are announced.
Contenders are listed in alphabetical order, below.
Frontrunners:
Monica Barbaro (“A Complete Unknown”)
Jamie Lee Curtis (“The Last Showgirl”)
Selena Gomez (“Emilia Pérez”)
Ariana Grande (“Wicked”)
Zoe Saldaña (“Emilia Pérez”)
Contenders:
Michele Austin (“Hard Truths”)
Joan Chen (“Dìdi”)
Danielle Deadwyler (“The Piano Lesson”)
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (“Nickel Boys”)
Felicity Jones (“The Brutalist”)
Carol Kane (“Between the Temples”)
Adriana Paz (“Emilia Pérez”)
Margaret Qualley (“The Substance”)
Saoirse Ronan (“Blitz”)
Isabella Rossellini (“Conclave”)
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