Online Reporter
Sunday News Correspondent
The final countdown to the Oscars is under way, as all eyes in the world of film turn to Hollywood on Sunday night.
The 98th Academy Awards, celebrating the best of filmmaking in 2025, will be held at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood at 1am Zimbabwean time in the early hours of Monday March 16, with live coverage for Zimbabwean viewers on DStv’s M-Net channel 102.
The Oscars, as they have been known affectionately since first being presented in the late 1920s, are considered the most senior awards in film and the ceremony itself is one of the most popular awards events, watched by over a billion people across the world each year.
Ten films are nominated for best picture, one of which will be the 98th winner of this prestigious award. The nominees are Bugonia, F1, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Sinners and Train Dreams .
The favourite to win is One Battle After Another, an American action film written, co-produced and direct by Paul Thomas Anderson that has swept the boards with wins at many awards events over the past few months, most recently those of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. The film stars Leonardo di Caprio and is a fast-paced comedy drama about an ageing revolutionary caught up in a murder plot.
The highest number of nominations has gone to Sinners, a fantasy horror film set in the American Deep South in the 1930s, with nominations in 16 categories.
Among the nominees are two films not in the English language: Sentimental Value, a Norwegian film, and Brazilian film The Secret Agent.
Best actor nominees are Timothee Chalamet (Marty Supreme), Leonardo di Caprio (One Battle After Another), Ethan Hawke (Blue Moon), Michael B Jordan (Sinners) and Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent). Chalamet is favoured to win, but an upset could be a win by Jordan, who recently won the best actor award in the Actor Awards handed out by the Screen Actors Guild.
Best actress nominees are Jessie Buckley (Hamnet), Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), Kate Hudson (Song Sung Blue), Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value) and Emma Stone (Bugonia). Buckley is the favourite, having swept this title at most awards ceremonies in the past few months.
A new category has been introduced for 2025, that of best casting, which will go to a film considered to have assembled the bast overall cast, with Sinners favoured to take this Oscar.
The Oscars are hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which handed out their first awards for the years of 1927 and 1928, when World War 1 drama Wings won the first best picture Oscar. In the awards process, films are shortlisted into categories, followed by voting by Academy members and a final list of five or more nominees in each category. This is followed by final voting leading to a winner in each category, with secrecy surrounding the identity of winners, known only by an accounting firm in charge of the voting until on-stage announcement live at the ceremony.
On a few occasions in the past there have been ties, most famously for 1968, when Katherin Hepburn (The Lion In Winter) and Barbra Streisand (Funny Girl) shared the best actress Oscar.
Zimbabwean viewers have three chances to watch this year’s Oscars ceremony, starting with the live broadcast at 1am Zimbabwean time on Monday March 16, on M-Net channel 102. Later that day a repeat broadcast is featured on MM1, DStv channel 104, at 7pm, while a third screening will be on M-Net channel 102 at 8pm on Saturday March 21.
A full list of nominees in all categories can be accessed at www.oscar.com, the official site of AMPAS.
