Oscars predictions: What will win at the 95th Academy Awards

What should win: Everything Everywhere All At Once 

If the point of the Academy’s biggest award is to enshrine the film that most defines the year in cinema, then the obvious choice is Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s head-spinning genre explosion. Sure, Top Gun: Maverick saved cinema, but it’s still a movie inextricably tied to 1986 – plus, the only other sequels to win Best Picture are The Godfather Part II and Return of the King. Everything Everywhere, meanwhile, feels both bracingly of-the-moment and from another timeline entirely – a movie that uses the au courant comic-book trope of the ‘multiverse’ as a framework for exploring the meaning of love, family and fate. When future generations think of the movies of 2022, the first image that will pop into their heads is of Michelle Yeoh fucking shit up in a tax office with a googly eye stuck to her forehead. 

What will win: Everything Everywhere All At Once

It’s certainly an out-there choice – how many past Best Picture winners include dildo fights, hot dog fingers and a butt-plug battle, not to mention a predominantly Asian cast? – but historical precedent is very much on its side. After losing to The Fabelmans at the Golden Globes, it’s been Everything everywhere else, taking the top honour at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the Producers Guild Awards and the Directors Guild Awards. The only other films to pull off that trifecta in the modern era are Birdman, Argo and The King’s Speech – all three of which went on to win Best Picture. Academy voters may not be able to explain it, but it’s looking increasingly like they won’t be able to deny it.

Who should win: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for Everything Everywhere All At Once

T​here’s no one ​you’d shake a fist at if their name gets called​, b​ut Everything Everywhere All At Once is a true auteurist spectacle, an example of two wildly imaginative guys spilling every crazy idea they could muster onto the screen and somehow not just having hold together​,​ but resonate emotionally as well. ​And given their Directors Guild win​, the stats are with them too.​ Only eight times in its 75-year history have the DGAs failed to predict the Best Director category. 

Who will win: Steven Spielberg for The Fabelmans

​C​an voters really ​d​eny the most beloved filmmaker in history a statuette for ​his most personal film, especially since he was overlooked just last year for West Side Story? It’s ​also ​going to hurt not to vote for a ‘movie about movies’ for Best Picture. Given their age – at 35, they’d be among the youngest winners ever in the category – and the fact that their only other movie to date is the rightfully forgotten Swiss Army Man, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the Daniels get bumped in favo​u​r of Big Papa Popcorn.

Who should win: Colin Farrell for The Banshees of Inisherin

Martin McDonagh brings out the best in Colin Farrell, and in this case, he brought out his career best, as a contented layabout suddenly abandoned by his best friend in 1920s Ireland. The odds are against him, but we’re clutching our shamrocks in hope of a marginal upset, if only so he can complete his running award show gag of ribbing co-star Barry Keoghan for callously stealing his cornflakes by berating him on the biggest stage possible.  

Who will win: Brendan Fraser for The Whale

After losing the Golden Globe to Austin Butler’s ongoing Elvis impression (for reasons), with his SAG win, Fraser has regained his lead as the Best Actor frontrunner. If the film itself has proved polarising – other than a Best Supporting Actress nod for Hong Chau, its only other nomination is for Makeup and Hairstyling – Fraser’s performance is not. He brings a wellspring of pathos to his role as a grieving, morbidly obese English professor, transcending awards-bait clichés about an ‘actor in a fat suit.’ An Oscar would cap an improbable comeback for Fraser, and by all accounts it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. 

Who should win: Michelle Yeoh for Everything Everywhere All At Once

Andrea Riseborough’s controversial nomination campaign aside, this is a two-woman race, and each is equally deserving for entirely different reasons. But Michelle Yeoh is the beating heart (and ass-beating limbs) of a daring film that succeeds in large part because of her – without her steadying emotional presence amid the narrative whirlwind, the chaos would become overwhelming. 

Who will win: Cate Blanchett for Tár

Todd Fields’ study of an artist in the process of being cancelled is effectively designed as a showcase for Cate Blanchett, who turns in a virtuosic – if icy – performance as problematic classical conductor Lydia Tár. A win would tie her with Frances McDormand for the second-most in the category. Yeoh would be the first Asian actor to win the award, but it’s hard to imagine the Academy passing up a chance to cement Blanchett’s standing as one of the all-time greats. 

Who should win: Angela Bassett for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Prior to SAG, this felt like Bassett’s award to lose. She brings a rare grace and gravitas to the MCU as Ramonda, the Queen Mother of Wakanda and grieving mother of T’Challa, and deservedly became only the third actor from a superhero film to earn an Oscar nod (and the first not to portray the Joker). Plus, she’s among this year’s comeback crop, having gone 30 years since her nod for playing Tina Turner in What's Love Got to Do with It. The race has since tightened, but we’re still holding out hope she can pull it off.

Who will win: Jamie Lee Curtis for Everything Everywhere All At Once

Hollywood’s ultimate nepo baby has never even been nominated for an Oscar before – not even for True Lies – but her victory at SAG seems to lock her in: in the last 14 years, the only time the Screen Actors Guild’s Best Supporting Actress failed to win the Oscar was Emily Blunt for A Quiet Place, and that’s because she wasn’t nominated. She could end up the victim of a vote-split between herself and co-star Stephanie Hsu, paving the way for Angela Bassett, but the Academy probably won’t skip the opportunity to finally give Curtis her flowers.

Who should win: Brendan Gleeson for The Banshees of Inisherin 

No shade to frontrunner Ke Huy Quan, who’s great and has undoubtedly the best story of any nominee in any category, but if we’re talking solely about what we see onscreen, Gleeson’s soulful turn as an Irish musician in the midst of an existential crisis is the most deeply felt performance among the nominees. He won’t win, and we’re largely fine with that given the circumstances, but any other year he’d be a shoo-in.

Who will win: Ke Huy Quan for Everything Everywhere All At Once

There are a few comeback stories looking to culminate at this year’s ceremony, none more remarkable than Quan’s, who disappeared from acting as a teenager, only to re-emerge decades later playing, in a single film, a lovingly nerdy father, a debonair businessman and a skilled fannypack fighter. Now, he’s on the verge of becoming only the second actor of East Asian descent – and first since Haing S Ngor won for The Killing Fields in 1984 – to win the category. The Academy doesn’t always vote based on narrative, but Quan has also been basically unbeatable this award season – he’s the firmest lock in any category.

Who should win: Tár 

Character studies don’t get much more layered or compelling than Todd Field’s account of a privileged, egotistical composer as her life falls to pieces around her. Nearly three hours long but fascinating throughout, this is not just a Cate Blanchett acting masterclass; it’s also a great piece of screenwriting, unfurling Lydia Tár’s story piece by piece to create a complicated picture of someone who is only partly a monster. This film restored Martin Scorsese’s faith in cinema. Who are any of us to argue with that?

Who will win: The Banshees of Inisherin

Let's be honest: after the WGA awards this too could be part of an Everything Everywhere All At Once sweep, but Banshees looks like the most likely upset. From an almost comical premise – a man’s best friend declares he doesn’t want to speak to him anymore – Martin McDonagh creates something that looks at what is required to leave a worthwhile life, the cost of making art, and the futility of a civil war. It won prizes at the BAFTAs and, for what it’s worth, the Golden Globes, so there are obviously voters behind it.

Who should win: Living

It’s been somewhat overlooked this awards season, but the adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru by Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro is a perfect little miracle. The story of a man who has lived according to convention his whole life until he learns that that life is ending, it’s moving and profound and lingers in the mind. And can the Oscars resist the lure of being seen to co-sign the Nobel committee for only the third time (after George Bernard Shaw and Bob Dylan, fact fans)?

Who will win: All Quiet On The Western Front

This anti-war epic cleaned up at the BAFTAs, and while the British Academy doesn’t always agree with its American cousin, there’s enough overlap in membership for the script by Edward Berger, Ian Stokell and Lesley Paterson to be a serious contender. Adapting a classic novel like this is usually the sort of work that the Adapted category recognises over sequels (Glass Onion and Top Gun: Maverick) or understated character pieces (Living and Women Talking). It’s an open race but All Quiet is the one to watch.

What should win: All Quiet on the Western Front

Well, it should have been Park Chan-wook’s atmospheric murder mystery Decision to Leave, but since it got snubbed, the German-made, Netflix-distributed BAFTA-winner is the next best option. And it is pretty damn great, fully justifying remaking the 1930 Best Picture winner – an adaptation, of course, of Erich Maria Remarque’s high-school English standard – by putting its sizable budget to use painting a savagely realistic portrait of combat during the first World War.

What will win: All Quiet on the Western Front

A pretty basic rule: if an International Feature nominee is also up for Best Picture, it should win the smaller category, and that’s happened in every single instance in the history of the awards. Its massive showing at BAFTA only makes it more of a foregone conclusion. Sorry, everyone else.

What should win: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

‘Should’ is a big word in this case given that the likely winner is also fantastic, but spare a thought for this impossibly charming faux-documentary about a naively optimistic inch-tall shell who lives in a deserted house with his elderly grandmother-shell. Director Dean Fleischer Camp plays a version of himself to good effect, and the Marcel animation is both adorably low-tech and impeccably convincing. 

What will win: Pinocchio

Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson’s little wooden boy has become an unstoppable force this awards season, sweeping almost all before him despite strong competition. That’s for good reason: it’s a beautiful reimagining of  the classic story that leans into stop-motion to bring a tactile quality to its puppet hero and throws in some biblically accurate angels for good measure. Set in fascist Italy, this adaptation is politically and emotionally forceful, combining heart and creepiness as only del Toro can.

What should win: Fire of Love

Sara Dosa’s account of the lives of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft is unlike anything you’ve seen before. A story of science, romance and complicated people told through astonishing archival footage, it pays tribute to the Kraffts’ work in popularising their subject without papering over their flaws. It also has cool lava rivers and serious discussion of the possibilities of rafting thereon. Dosa’s film won the Directors Guild Award already, but goes into the Oscars as a relative underdog because of our next contender.

What will win: Navalny

The political momentum this season seems to be behind Daniel Roher’s film, which looks at the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the fallout from that event. It’s obviously topical following the recent anniversary of the war in Ukraine, but it’s also a powerful account of the fight against authoritarianism that has already won prizes at the BAFTAs and Critics Choice Awards. Other contenders like All the Beauty and the Bloodshed were much hyped, but it’s the novichok-and-awe campaign of this one that seems to have the wind in its sails.