The unusual state of this year’s Oscar race.
Felix Hughes, Contributor
The 2024 Academy Awards was a great success for the biggest awards in film. Viewership for the ceremony itself saw a steady increase from the previous year, and the cultural juggernauts Oppenheimer and Barbie helped maintain public interest throughout the awards campaigns. But while high-profile movies soared, there wasn’t much room for independent American cinema, which seemed to fall by the wayside. However, the 2025 Academy Awards are shaping up to be quite different. While Dune: Part II and Wicked were two of the biggest cinematic success stories of the year—capturing the public imagination and dominating the box office—every other Best Picture nominee this year is a much smaller-budget film, falling into the category of an indie movie. An indie movie is made outside the major studio system, typically with a mid-to-small-level budget, and every Best Picture nominee aside from Dune, Wicked, and A Complete Unknown fits this category. The average budget for a Best Picture nominee has historically been $50 million, with 60% of nominees in the past 50 years exceeding that amount. Yet this year, only the aforementioned three movies surpass this budget, with the smallest budget belonging to I’m Still Here, which cost just $1.48 million to make. This marks a significant shift for the Academy, which has historically recognized smaller films more than the general public does, yet often still prioritizes larger studio films with the financial backing to campaign aggressively. Typically, nominees like The Nickel Boys or Anora would be the kind of movies loved by cinephiles yet ignored completely by the Academy—yet this time, they are right in the mix.
To gauge this phenomenon accurately, it’s best to focus on two frontrunners: The Brutalist and Anora.
Starting with The Brutalist—the tale of a Jewish Holocaust survivor attempting to live out the American Dream as an architect for a wealthy client—this film was made for just $10 million. The project was announced in 2018 but was beset with funding issues and pandemic-related delays, and it did not begin filming until 2022. Many of the cast and crew had to spend years working for free to get the film finished, and editing alone took almost a year. Yet, when it was finally completed, it was met with near-universal acclaim. Typically, this would be as far as such a small movie would go—maybe it would win awards at a few smaller ceremonies, but little more. Yet this year, it has been the most successful movie on the awards circuit and is a frontrunner in multiple categories at the Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Adrien Brody, Best Director for Brady Corbet, and most importantly, Best Picture. While the recent controversy over the use of AI in the film’s editing may hurt its chances—and no film of such length has won Best Picture in over 50 years—the fact that it is among the favourites in the first place is a cause for celebration.
Looking at Anora—the tale of an American-Russian woman and her brief marriage to the son of a Russian oligarch—the success of this movie is no less surprising. The director, Sean Baker, has been one of the leading figures in the American indie scene over the last ten years, and while his films have been critically acclaimed, they have lacked an awards-season presence and failed to garner a wide audience. Yet with Anora, Baker was able to find both. Initially winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, it had the highest per-screen-average box office return for any movie since 2020 and, like The Brutalist, has emerged as an unlikely frontrunner for Best Picture, as well as Best Screenplay and Best Actress for lead Mikey Madison.
While these two movies are the best examples of this year’s indie boom, many of the other nominees are also part of this phenomenon. The Substance began as a spec script from writer-director Coralie Fargeat, who rejected the financial security of directing a Marvel movie (Black Widow) so that she could make a film entirely within her own vision. The film took five years to produce, including 18 months of post-production (a process traditionally closer to half a year at most). Studio executives grew “worried about the prospect of releasing the film,” with one even demanding that the entire movie be recut. In an age where executives fear that releasing anything outside the status quo might not be well received, the fact that The Substance was released unaltered—despite its controversial, “disgusting” ending—and still became such a success is great news for any cinema fan.
A common cliché in modern film discourse is the lament that no one makes good movies anymore and that “cinema is dead”—a casualty of streaming services and major studios that overshadow indie films. Yet movies like The Brutalist and Anora show that cinema is still alive and kicking, and indie cinema might just be making a grand comeback. The 1970s and 1990s both saw new waves of indie filmmaking, as the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Quentin Tarantino rose to prominence—their smaller movies making a dent in award ceremonies and capturing the public imagination, eventually allowing them creative freedom for future projects. Maybe this year’s Academy Awards will be the catalyst for a new wave of American independent filmmaking—one that embraces ambition and pushes boundaries, much like many of this year’s nominees have done. If audiences engage with these films, they could help reinvigorate cinema itself.
Photo Credit: ABC News
