So Hollywood's biggest night: The Oscars aka the culmination of a year of campaigning for the stars and film-makers has been and gone. And honestly, there were no major surprises when it came to the winners - the front-runners cleaned up while their fellow nominees were left to smile and clap.
As one of TV Choice's resident film critics, I'm using a bit of intel and a lot of guessing to predict what might happen on the night — did Sinners' record-breaking 16 nominations leave it in the top spot, or did One Battle After Another snatch the victory? So let's see how well I did compared to my predictions.
For more information about the ceremony, including how to watch it, see our explainer.
Best Picture
Nominees: Bugonia, F1, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Sinners, Train Dreams.
Most nominated overall: Sinners (a record-breaking 16)
Did win: One Battle After Another
Will win: Sinners
Should win: The Secret Agent
Should've been nominated: Blue Moon
The most thrilling part of this year's Oscars race for Best Picture is that vying for the top spot we have two pieces of big, muscular, original film-making from two of our finest working auteurs — one long-established and one at the peak (so far) of a meteoric rise. This is an ideal year to split the awards for Picture and Director, and since Paul Thomas Anderson is a lock for Director (see below), it seems possible that Ryan Coogler's Sinners, the most nominated film of all time, might take home Best Picture. An achievement both critically and at the box office, Sinners is a stunning piece of work, an indefinable combination of musical, horror and romance filled with hypnotising performances.
Best Director
Nominees: Chloé Zhao, Hamnet; Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme; Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another; Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value; Ryan Coogler, Sinners.
Most lifetime nominations: Paul Thomas Anderson (14 overall, 4 for directing, no wins)
Did win: Paul Thomas Anderson
Will win: Paul Thomas Anderson
Should win: Paul Thomas Anderson
Should've been nominated: Ari Aster, Eddington
One Battle After Another is far from my favourite film of the year, but Paul Thomas Anderson is inarguably the best director of the bunch overall — at 55, he's already made more masterpieces than most directors manage in a lifetime. Placed in a similar two-horse race way back in 2007, his There Will Be Blood lost out to the juggernaut of the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men in both Picture and Director. He's such a giant of the industry it seems ridiculous that he's never won an Oscar, even if I think he should have won for Phantom Thread instead.
Best Actor
Nominees: Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme; Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another; Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon; Michael B. Jordan, Sinners; Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent.
Most lifetime nominations: Leonardo DiCaprio (8 overall, 7 for acting across lead and supporting, 1 win)
Did win: Michael B Jordan
Will win: Michael B Jordan
Should win: Ethan Hawke
Should've been nominated: Jesse Plemons, Bugonia
In most years, Best Actor seems locked-in months in advance, but not so for the films of 2025: we have a two- or even three-way tie, between Michael B Jordan, Timothée Chalamet and slight outsider Wagner Moura.
Previous front-runner Chalamet has landed himself in hot water in the last few days, when comments from a 26 February interview with Matthew McConnaughey resurfaced online. 'I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera,' Chalamet said. 'Things where it’s like, "Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this any more."' Capping off an awards campaign that frequently veered into arrogance and bad taste, this might have completely scuppered his chances, had it come to the fore any earlier than it did — on 5 March, the day Oscar voting closed. It's possible that a win on Sunday would be damaging to his artistry, and that losing would make him hungrier — we need only look to his category mate Leonardo DiCaprio to find an actor whose losses as a young man led to decades spent chasing the top prize with more and more impressive work. Chalamet's theatrics have certainly distracted from his remarkable performance in Marty Supreme, the best he's given in his already extraordinary career.
Michael B. Jordan, meanwhile, has run an exemplary campaign filled with class and understatement. Despite playing twins in Sinners, he gives a much less showy performance than Chalamet, separating Smoke and Stack with a shift in attitude and facial posture. Amongst all the chaos in the film, you never forget who's who, although you might forget that one actor is playing both of them. Jordan has worked in the industry since he was a child in the late 1990s, putting him in a good position to gather votes from his multitude of former colleagues and others who have watched him on screen almost all his life.
Ethan Hawke's nomination for the excellent but under-seen Blue Moon was somewhat unexpected, especially after he was snubbed for his superb turn in First Reformed in 2018. What a pleasant surprise, though, to have this performance rewarded by the Academy — Hawke is wonderful as Lorenz Hart, the washed-up, alcoholic former lyric writer for Richard Rodgers. It's the best performance in the category, funny and tragic and erudite.
Best Actress
Nominees: Jessie Buckley, Hamnet; Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You; Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue; Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value; Emma Stone, Bugonia.
Most lifetime nominations: Emma Stone (7 overall, 5 for acting across lead and supporting, 2 wins)
Did win: Jessie Buckley
Will win: Jessie Buckley
Should win: Jessie Buckley
Should've been nominated: Chase Infiniti, One Battle After Another
Emma Stone gives the best performance of these nominees, carrying the ambiguity at the heart of Bugonia in her micro-expressions, keeping you guessing right up to the end. She already has two Oscars, however, and while I suspect that eventually she may challenge Katharine Hepburn's record (4 Oscars), at 37 she still has a long and storied career ahead of her — there's no need to give her another just yet.
Jessie Buckley gives her whole body over to her turn in Hamnet, showing us Agnes' grief in overwhelming detail. She is also a very charming personality, exceedingly talented without being too self-serious. Hers is one of a few awards with outcomes that already seem certain.
Chase Infiniti missed out on a nomination for One Battle After Another, which is only her second on-screen role ever. Vanishingly few actors could say that at this early stage they were able to hold their own in scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, and she does so with aplomb.
Best Supporting Actor
Nominees: Benicio Del Toro, One Battle After Another; Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein; Delroy Lindo, Sinners; Sean Penn, One Battle After Another; Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value.
Most lifetime nominations: Sean Penn (6 across lead and supporting, 2 wins)
Did win: Sean Penn
Will win: Sean Penn
Should win: Benicio Del Toro
Should've been nominated: Ralph Fiennes, 28 Years Later
Sean Penn gives, I must confess, one of my least favourite performances of the year — purposefully repulsive, to be sure, but also so oversized he manages to ruin One Battle After Another's otherwise tightly controlled tone every time he waddles onto the screen. Nevertheless, the season's previous awards trend towards him taking the stage on Sunday, with his only obvious competition being the great Stellan Skarsgård for Norwegian family drama Sentimental Value. If Penn does win, he will join a rarified group of actors who've taken home three or more Oscars — Katharine Hepburn, Daniel Day-Lewis, Frances McDormand, Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, Ingrid Bergman and Walter Brennan.
Benicio Del Toro gives the opposite of his co-star's performance: charming and strange while remaining understated, a character with such complete three-dimensionality it's possible to imagine his entire life both before and after the events of the film. He's also fantastic in his other project this year, Wes Anderson's underrated The Phoenician Scheme.
Delroy Lindo is probably in third place behind Penn and Skarsgård, because of his excellent turn in Sinners, but possibly also because some members of the Academy have realised that they made an egregious mistake by snubbing him in 2021 for his astonishing performance in Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods.
Best Supporting Actress
Nominees: Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value; Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value; Amy Madigan, Weapons; Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners; Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another.
Most lifetime nominations: Amy Madigan (2 for supporting, no wins)
Did win: Amy Madigan
Will win: Amy Madigan
Should win: Wunmi Mosaku
Should've been nominated: Rebecca Hall, Peter Hujar's Day
Amy Madigan represents the sole nomination for horror hit Weapons, in which she plays Aunt Gladys, the witch behind all the creepy goings-on. It's a fun, frightening performance, playing on the ways in which society treats older women. Her only other Oscar nomination was for Twice In A Lifetime, which was released four decades ago, giving her the record for the longest gap between two nominations for any actress. It seems likely that, having been in the industry for substantially longer than her fellow nominees have been alive, she's well-known to Academy members and therefore has some good will behind her.
Wunmi Mosaku brings strength and grace to Sinners with her turn as Annie, the female counterpart to Smoke (Michael B Jordan), the more grounded of the twins. Her chemistry with Jordan is something to behold, and their pairing gives the film a deep emotional centre. She picked up the BAFTA in February, but this is likely because she's British, rather than because there's a recent wave of support within Hollywood that might carry her to an Oscar.
Best Original Screenplay
Nominees: Robert Kaplow, Blue Moon; Jafar Panahi, It Was Just An Accident; Ronald Bronstein & Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme; Eskil Vogt & Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value; Ryan Coogler, Sinners.
Most lifetime nominations: Joachim Trier (3 overall, 2 for writing across original and adapted, no wins)
Did win: Ryan Coogler
Will win: Ryan Coogler
Should win: Robert Kaplow
Should've been nominated: Kleber Mendonça Filho, The Secret Agent
Screenplays are often the arena in which black directors pick up make-up awards when they lose Best Picture or Best Director — this has happened to both Spike Lee and Jordan Peele — or, if we're being more generous, an arena in which awards go to "cooler" projects that won't pick up any elsewhere. Of course, Sinners has a nomination for almost every award this year, and it seems likely that Coogler will take home this statue on Sunday, helped by the fact that it's the only prize he's not in competition with Anderson for. It's also, crucially, an excellent screenplay, drawing on Coogler's own family history to tell a genre-bending story about the way black artistry is treated in America.
Best Adapted Screenplay
Nominees: Will Tracy, Bugonia; Guillermo del Toro, Frankenstein; Chloé Zhao & Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet; Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another; Clint Bentley & Greg Kwedar, Train Dreams.
Most lifetime nominations: Paul Thomas Anderson (14 overall, 6 for writing across original and adapted, no wins)
Did win: Paul Thomas Anderson
Will win: Paul Thomas Anderson
Should win: Paul Thomas Anderson
Should've been nominated: Park Chan-wook, No Other Choice
This prize is Paul Thomas Anderson's to lose. The screenplay for One Battle After Another is a loose adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, taking the book's exploration of rebellion in the middle of the 20th Century and transposing it to modern America.
Other nominees
Best Casting: Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, Sinners.
Best Cinematography: Frankenstein, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sinners, Train Dreams.
Something to keep an eye on: Best Cinematography is the last Oscars category in which a woman has never won, and Sinners, which may well take home the statue, was shot by a woman. Its cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw is also the only woman of colour ever to be nominated for the award.
Best Animated Feature: Arco, Elio, KPop Demon Hunters, Little Amélie Or The Character Of Rain, Zootopia 2.
Best Animated Short: Butterfly, Forevergreen, The Girl Who Cried Pearls, Retirement Plan, The Three Sisters.
Best Documentary Feature: The Alabama Solution, Come See Me In The Good Light, Cutting Through Rocks, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, The Perfect Neighbor.
Best Documentary Short: All The Empty Rooms, Armed Only With A Camera: The Life And Death Of Brent Renaud, Children No More: "Were And Are Gone", The Devil Is Busy, Perfectly A Strangeness.
Best Live Action Short Film: Butcher's Stain, A Friend Of Dorothy, Jane Austen's Period Drama, The Singers, Two People Exchanging Saliva.
Best Film Editing: F1, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value, Sinners.
Best International Feature Film: The Secret Agent, It Was Just An Accident, Sentimental Value, Sirāt, The Voice Of Hind Rajab.
Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Frankenstein, Kokuho, Sinners, The Smashing Machine, The Ugly Stepsister.
Best Music (Original Score): Bugonia, Frankenstein, Hamnet, One Battle After Another, Sinners.
Best Music (Original Song): Dear Me from Diane Warren: Relentless, Golden from KPop Demon Hunters, I Lied To You from Sinners, Sweet Dreams Of Joy from Viva Verdi!, Train Dreams from Train Dreams.
Best Costume Design: Avatar: Fire And Ash, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, Sinners.
Best Production Design: Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, Sinners.
Best Sound: F1, Frankenstein, One Battle After Another, Sinners, Sirāt.
Best Visual Effects: Avatar: Fire And Ash, F1, Jurassic World Rebirth, The Lost Bus, Sinners.
Madeline Pritchard has been a writer for TV Choice and its sister publication Total TV Guide for four years. Madeline got interested in the Oscars when she was 13, fuelled by her outrage that The Social Network, the best movie of the year — and, as it transpired, the decade — lost out on Best Picture. She mainly covers film for the magazines, but she also has a soft spot for American prestige TV and anarchic Channel 4 comedy shows.