Spring is awards season for the entertainment industry, and there are no awards show more prestigious than the Oscars. The nominations for this year’s Academy Awards were announced earlier in January. The Academy Awards will be held at the Dolby Theater downtown on March 2, 2025. The best films of 2024 will be competing for awards in Best Picture, Best Actor and Actress, Best Director, and a host of other categories.

To qualify for the Academy Awards, a movie has to be shown in a commercial theater in either LA, New York, the Bay Area, Chicago, Atlanta or Miami for seven consecutive days with at least three showings a day. While this may sound pretty easy, a film’s biggest hurdle is getting votes from Academy members, who have the final say in whether or not a submitted movie gets in. Because of this, only high-performing or big studio films (which isn’t always a signifier of quality) generally progress to the actual awards ceremony.

Leading the competition with a whopping 13 nominations is Netflix narco-musical Emilia Pérez, which has come as something of a surprise to most. The film, which follows a Mexican drug lord’s journey through retirement and transitioning to a woman, was generally panned by reviewers and flopped at the box office; so needless to say, it’s a shock that it managed to sweep the nominations like this. For perspective, this puts it tied with last year’s front-runner at the awards, Christopher Nolan’s epic biopic Oppenheimer, and only one short from the likes of 1997’s Titanic.

Behind Emilia Pérez, sitting at ten nominations each, are Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist and John M. Chu’s Wicked; the former is the story of a Jewish architect who immigrates to the US after WWII and the latter is an adaptation of the hit musical set in the Wizard of Oz universe. Since the two are very different films in most respects, they don’t have many head-to-head matchups, however, Wicked is predicted to sweep in most of its nominated categories.

Other notable films to keep your eye on this year include James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Edward Berger’s Vatican political thriller Conclave and Sean Baker’s comedy-drama Anora. 2024 wasn’t a particularly big year for the film business, thanks in no small part to the presidential election and ripples from 2023’s writer and actor strikes still being felt in productions, but the industry is still seeing a very slow rebound from it’s pandemic slump.

Like most Oscars, this year has had its fair share of drama. At the forefront of the conversation around this Academy Awards is the use of AI in several of it’s top films, including The Brutalist, Dune Part 2 and Emilia Pérez. While its inclusion in these movies was minor, mainly for minor audio or visual tweaks that otherwise wouldn’t have been noticed, AI is still a hot-button issue in the film industry. Many are still concerned about studios automating the production process, which was one of the core reasons behind the 2023 strikes.

In addition, Emilia Pérez in particular has received increasing criticism for its depiction of  Mexican culture and gang violence. Although it centers around these two topics, the film is a French production, with only one Mexican actor and principle shooting occuring in Spain, which has led to many describing the film as inaccurate or offensive. On top of that, Pérez also beat out Mexico’s official submission to the Oscars, Sujo, which had been a contender for the Foreign Film award, which was met by extreme disapproval in Mexico. A notable product of this conflict is Johanne Sacrebleu, a parody short film of Emilia Pérez made in Mexico that heavily uses French stereotypes, which racked up over 3 million views on Youtube within its first week.

So, who’s most likely to win what? Anora has been sweeping in other awards ceremonies and in guild polls, so it’s projected that it’ll take the lion’s share of the Oscars, with Best Picture and Director being easily within its grasp. Behind it, The Brutalist is expected to win Cinematography, Editing and Actor with its highly cinematic style, and sci-fi epic Dune Part II is likely to take home awards in technical fields like Sound and Visual Effects. Wicked and Conclave are slated to duke it out over most of the remaining awards, while other films like Coralie Fargeat’s horror movie The Substance taking the rest. We’ll only know for sure, though, on awards night.