Oscars 2025: Winners, Losers, and the Rise of New Talent
The 2025 Academy Awards were nothing short of a cultural phenomenon, marking a year where fresh faces shone alongside seasoned veterans. Among the standout moments of the evening were the wins for newcomers **Anora** and **Mikey**, who captivated audiences with their breakout performances, while veteran actor **Adrien Brody** continued to solidify his legacy.
#### The Rising Stars: Anora and Mikey
**Anora**, whose name was previously unfamiliar to many outside indie film circles, took home the Best Actress award for her mesmerizing performance in *Shadows of Tomorrow*. Her portrayal of a young woman grappling with identity and loss left critics and viewers alike in awe. In her acceptance speech, she dedicated the win to "all the dreamers who believe in the power of storytelling."
Meanwhile, **Mikey**, a relative newcomer in the industry, won Best Supporting Actor for his role in *Echoes of Silence*. His raw and emotional delivery resonated deeply with audiences, earning him widespread acclaim. During his speech, he expressed gratitude to his family and credited his success to "the resilience of those who paved the way before me."
#### Madison's Momentous Achievement
Another highlight of the night was **Madison**, who claimed the Best Director trophy for *The Last Horizon*. This marked a historic moment, as Madison became one of the youngest directors ever to receive the honor. Known for pushing creative boundaries, Madison's visually stunning and thought-provoking film explored themes of climate change and human connection, leaving a lasting impact on both critics and audiences.
#### Adrien Brody: A Timeless Legend
Veteran actor **Adrien Brody** added another Oscar to his collection, winning Best Actor for his nuanced performance in *The Forgotten War*. Brody's ability to convey complex emotions through subtle expressions has always been his hallmark, and this role was no exception. In his speech, he reflected on the importance of using art to shed light on forgotten stories, saying, "We must never forget the sacrifices made by those who came before us."
#### The Night's Biggest Surprises
While the night celebrated incredible talent, there were also some surprises. Many expected *City of Dreams* to sweep the technical categories, but it ultimately fell short, losing out to *The Last Horizon* in Cinematography and Editing. Additionally, the Best Original Screenplay category saw an unexpected victory for *Whispers of Hope*, beating out heavily favored scripts like *Echoes of Silence*.
The 2025 Oscars will be remembered as a celebration of diversity, innovation, and timeless storytelling. With new talents like Anora, Mikey, and Madison making waves, and legends like Adrien Brody continuing to inspire, the future of cinema looks brighter than ever.
The Oscars were full of history-making moments tonight. On an evening with many open races, several of the winners, including the team behind Flow, the costume designer for Wicked, and Emilia Pérez star Zoe Saldaña, all became firsts at the ceremony when their names were called to accept their Academy Awards.
Here are all the Oscar winners who made history Sunday night.
Flow becomes the first Latvian film to win an Oscar
Flow, the feline-centric film, won for Best Animated Feature, giving Latvia its first Academy Award ever. The visually stunning, dialogue-free film is also the first independent film to win Best Animated Film at the Oscars. It was also nominated for Best International Feature, an award which went to the Brazilian drama I'm Still Here.
Wicked's Paul Tazewell is the first Black man to win for costume design
Paul Tazewell, who had previously been nominated for his work in Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, snagged the Oscar for costume design. "I am the first Black man to receive the Oscar design award," he said during his speech. "I'm so proud of this." He went on to honor his "Ozian muses, Cynthia and Ariana" as the Wicked stars, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande gave him a standing ovation. Tazewell has had a storied career on Broadway, designing costumes for such shows as The Color Purple and In the Heights.
Zoe Saldaña becomes the first American of Dominican origin to win an Oscar
Zoe Saldaña has dominated awards season and predictably won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Emilia Pérez. In her speech, the actor spoke about her family's experience as immigrants. "My grandmother came to this country in 1961," she said. "I am the proud child of immigrant parents with dreams and dignity and hardworking hands, and I am the first American of Dominican origin to accept an Academy Award. And I know I will not be the last." She also joined a short list of winners who received an award for a role performed in another language and from a movie nominated for Best International Feature.
Brazil gets its first Oscar win
After five previous nominations, Brazil finally snagged the Oscar for Best International Feature with I’m Still Here. The movie recounts the experiences of Eunice Paiva and her family after her husband Rubens Paiva was taken into custody during the country’s military dictatorship. Eunice Paiva went on to become a lawyer and activist, and the family became famous in Brazil. Brazilian fans have rallied around the movie and its portrayal of resilience in the face of oppression. Star Fernanda Torres was also up for Best Actress tonight, though Mikey Madison won in that category.
Adrien Brody goes two for two in the best actor category
Adrien Brody set an incredibly specific but still impressive record Sunday when he won Best Actor for his work in The Brutalist. He is the first person to win two Best Actor Oscars in his first two nominations. He previously won for his role in The Pianist in 2003. His first Oscar set a record that still stands for the youngest man to win Best Actor in Academy Awards history. In a notable parallel, he played a Holocaust survivor in both films.
Sean Baker goes four for four in one night
Anora had an excellent night at the Oscars. Writer-director-editor Sean Baker became the first person to win four Oscars in the same year for the same film. He won every award he was personally nominated for—Best Original Screenplay, Best Editor, Best Director, and finally Best Picture, as one of the film's producers. The film's star Mikey Madison won Best Actress, to boot.
It may come as a surprise that there’s a movie musical with more awards hype than Wicked. Emilia Pérez quietly landed on Netflix this past November after making a huge splash at 2024’s Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize and the first Best Actress Award for an ensemble. The Jacques Audiard film received 10 Golden Globes nominations, the most for a film this year, including Best Picture — Musical or Comedy, and came away with four awards. The movie was also nominated for 13 Academy Awards, and walked away with two: for Best Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldaña and Best Original Song for the musical number “El Mal.”
But is Emilia Pérez — a film about a cartel leader who gets gender-affirming surgery and escapes a life of crime — actually good?
As with many stories mining the grim realities of oppressed communities, critics and awards bodies have rushed to praise the “avant-garde” film for exploring trans identity and Mexico’s drug war. Glowing reviews have lauded the “bravery” and “originality” of French filmmaker Audiard in centering underrepresented characters and delivering “provocative” subject matter through a trippy, Spanish-language musical. Meanwhile, the general public, at least according to Letterboxd, is less high on the film, and many queer critics are concerned if not completely baffled by its existence.
In a story for The Cut, writer Harron Walker criticized Emilia Pérez’s use of trans identity as an “inherently redemptive” tool for its criminal protagonist. An article in Autostraddle called the film the most “unique cis nonsense you’ll ever see.” Even the LGBTQ organization GLAAD has condemned the film as a bad trans representation. Critics and filmmakers in Mexico have been just as outspoken. Mexican screenwriter Héctor Guillén called the film a “racist Eurocentric mockery.” He, alongside Mexican trans director Camila Aurora, also made a viral spoof film inspired by Emilia Pérez and using French stereotypes called Johanne Sacreblu.
Outside of the film, its main star Gascón has become an increasingly controversial figure in the awards race. Earlier this week, X users took issue with an interview where Gascón criticized the “social media teams” of her opponents, specifically fellow Best Actress nominee for I’m Still Here, Fernanda Torres. “You will never see me talking negatively about Fernanda Torres or her film, but on the contrary, I do see many people working around Fernanda Torres who talk badly about me,” she told Brazil’s Folha de São Paulo. On January 26, Gascón clarified her statements in Deadline, saying that she was only referencing the “toxicity and violent hate speech on social media,” not Torres herself. Ironically, X users quickly dug up multiple tweets, as recent as 2020, from the Spanish actress disparaging Islam and George Floyd.
Amid all these layers of scrutiny, Emilia Pérez’s Oscar wins presence in the Oscars race isn’t exactly a shock, given that it falls neatly into a category of movies the white Hollywood establishment loves to celebrate: mawkish stories about people on society’s margins that allow viewers to feel socially aware through their consumption, without challenging of any of the stereotypes and political messaging presented in them. Could Emilia Pérez become this year’s Crash?
What exactly is Emilia Pérez?
Adapted from Audiard’s opera libretto of the same name and based on the 2019 Boris Razon novel Écoute, Emilia Pérez is essentially a rock musical about three Mexican women whose lives are upended when one of them, Emilia (Gascón), decides to transition. The film begins with Rita (Saldaña), a Dominican defense lawyer exhausted by Mexico’s corrupt, misogynist legal system. After getting a prominent media figure off the hook for murdering his wife, she’s kidnapped by Emilia (then known as “Manitas”), who enlists Rita to help her escape the cartel in exchange for a large sum of cash.
This exit strategy mainly entails transitioning. It’s a desire Emilia’s had since she was a child but is curiously employed as a way to help her avoid accountability for her crimes. Rita reluctantly agrees, arranging for Emilia to get numerous gender-affirming surgeries, which are somehow all performed at once (typically, such procedures are done over time). She also relocates Emilia’s wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their two sons. Years later, when Emilia decides she wants to be reunited with Jessi and her children, she has Rita bring them back to Mexico City to share a house with her under the guise that she’s her children’s aunt chosen to look after them. Feeling guilt about her past criminal life, she recruits Rita for another venture, a nonprofit that identifies the bodies of cartel victims and notifies their families.
If that isn’t enough plot, the lives of these characters become even more chaotic, violent, and ultimately tragic thanks to Emilia’s uncontrolled and selfish impulses. A more delicate movie would zoom in on Emilia’s psyche as she’s navigating her desires and conflicting ethics. Instead, audiences are left to gawk at the wreckage.
A “progressive” movie with regressive tropes
Despite Gascón’s attempts to add some charm to the role, Emilia is written as a ridiculous if not totally loathsome character, with Audiard using her trans identity as a narrative shield for her behavior instead of engaging with her as a full human being. Perfunctory attempts to portray Emilia in an empathetic light don’t really balance out with the upheaval her character causes throughout the film.
“A lot of these issues stem from adapting a chapter that is explicitly about a cartel leader using transition as a means of escape,” says critic Juan Barquin, who reviewed Emilia Pérez for Little White Lies. “You realize that you might get accused of being transphobic, so you try to smooth it over by hiring a trans actress and revising certain beats without looking at how other parts of the script reflect transness negatively.”
In Emilia Pérez, Audiard makes some effort to inform the audience of Emilia’s lifelong dreams of womanhood. This is a modification from the chapter of Razon’s novel that the film is based on, according to Barquin, where a drug trafficker solely transitions to escape the cartel, modeling herself after her first love.
Even with Audiard’s perfunctory attempts to validate Emilia’s gender identity, it’s largely played as a disguise throughout the movie. Moments of Emilia’s “mask” slipping around her family feel like scenes ripped out of Tootsie or Mrs. Doubtfire. When she becomes angry and violent toward Jessi, her voice reverts back to a deep, gravelly tone. There’s not much separating this portrayal from harmful anti-trans rhetoric that suggests trans women are deceptive actors who pose harm to cis women.
Barquin also notes that the movie’s engagement with transness is solely focused on the “external change of medical transition,” as well as presenting only two sex options, male and female. These flaws are best encapsulated in a silly, Busby Berkeley-inspired number (“La vaginoplastia”) where a plastic surgeon lists for Rita all the gender-affirming procedures available to Emilia. In a viral moment from the sequence, he blandly sings, “Man to woman, penis to vagina!”
Emilia Pérez’s depiction of Mexican culture feels equally regressive and lazy. Mexico is presented as an inescapably violent and miserable place. Meanwhile, references to a character’s Mexican identity include smelling like tequila and guacamole. Little effort was seemingly put into ensuring that the film’s language was spoken properly. This has resulted in criticism of Gomez.
“She just sounds like she doesn’t actually understand what she’s saying, which arguably extends to the director who doesn’t actually understand the language either,” says Barquin.
For a supposedly unconventional tale, the movie doesn’t challenge any of the stereotypical narratives about the drug trade that are already rampant in popular Western media and politics. These “narco-narratives” fail to encapsulate the nuances of the drug trade, particularly the political role of the Global North, and exaggerate the authority of drug traffickers in Mexico. Instead, the film relishes in this violence, using it to portray both “realism” and melodrama. By the time the movie ends with a climactic shootout, audiences will have seen it coming.
Emilia Pérez is the most stereotypical Oscar movie
Considering it won several precursors, it wasn’t a surprise to see Emilia Pérez pick up some awards at the Oscars ceremony. It’s become a trope of the Oscars that, every few years, a thoughtless movie tackling “important issues” becomes a favorite among Academy voters, who pat themselves on the back for celebrating what they believe to be diversity and political art in an extremely whitewashed industry.
Movies in this questionably political category tend to feature othered people dealing with some melodramatic version of struggle. Danny Boyle’s 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire took home eight Oscars, including Best Picture, while facing intense backlash from critics in India about how it represented urban poverty in the country, as well as the Academy’s reluctance to celebrate movies by Indian filmmakers. Sometimes, they’re clunky messages about tolerance that inevitably focus more on the arc of the privileged characters. 2019’s Best Picture winner Green Book, a reverse Driving Miss Daisy, has become recently infamous in this regard. Sometimes, they’re ham-fisted allegories about racism like Best Action Short Winner Skin.
The Academy has also shown adoration toward a slew of white/cis/hetero savior stories, like 2009’s The Blind Side, about a white family that adopts NFL player Michael Oher, and 2011’s The Help, about a white woman (Emma Stone) who publishes the stories of Black domestic workers in the Jim Crow South. 2013’s Dallas Buyers Club, where an anti-gay cowboy diagnosed with HIV/AIDS illegally gets other patients access to medicine, also folds into this Academy narrative.
The convoluted messaging of Emilia Pérez is maybe most reminiscent of 2005’s Best Picture winner Crash. The Paul Haggis movie, which controversially beat Brokeback Mountain, attempted to expose the layers of prejudice in a post-9/11 Los Angeles. The problem was, that it had no idea how racism actually functions in society, flattening the country’s systemic racial division to personal pettiness. Emilia Pérez is an equally reductive look at trans and Latino/Latina identity with no idea of what it wants to say about its desolate characters. Instead, it offers a lot of confusion and hardly any compassion.
Under a soon-to-be president who gained power in American politics partly by attacking trans and Mexican populations, it will be interesting to see whether there will be more rigorous engagement with Emilia Pérez throughout awards season. As history has shown, though, it’s more convenient for Hollywood’s awards bodies to celebrate whatever “diverse” offering falls in their lap first, often leaving the most insightful stories about underrepresented people unnoticed.
Update, March, 2nd, 2025, 9:31pm: This story, first published on December 12, 2024, has been updated multiple times, most recently to reflect its Oscar wins.
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