The 97th Academy Awards ceremony took place on March 2, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, marking another chapter in the long history of cinema's most prestigious awards. The evening drew approximately 18.6 million viewers on ABC in the United States — continuing a gradual recovery in ceremony ratings after years of declining audiences. The 2025 edition was notable for its competitive field, the absence of a dominant frontrunner sweeping multiple categories, and a continued expansion in the international and demographic diversity of both nominees and winners.
Best Picture and top winners
Sean Baker's Anora claimed Best Picture and Best Director, making it the first film to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Picture in the same year since Jane Campion's The Piano in 1993. The film also picked up additional awards in screenplay categories. Adrien Brody won Best Actor for his performance in The Brutalist, a three-and-a-half-hour epic about a Hungarian Jewish architect rebuilding his life in postwar America — a film that also won Best Cinematography. The Spanish-language film Emilia Pérez, a French production directed by Jacques Audiard, led all films with 13 nominations but converted only 2 into wins, including Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Song.
International diversity: a broadening field
One of the most notable statistical features of the 2025 ceremony was the international composition of acting nominees. Of the 23 nominees across the four acting categories (Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress), 8 were born outside the United States — a figure that reflects both the Academy's expanding international membership and the growing prominence of non-American productions in the prestige film market. Emilia Pérez, despite being a French film sung entirely in Spanish with a cast of Latin American and Spanish actors, dominated discussion about representation in non-English-language cinema. Our dashboard on Oscar awards tracks the historical evolution of nominations, wins and ceremony statistics across decades.
Craft categories and representational milestones
The Academy's expanded and diversified membership — now exceeding 9,500 members following years of conscious outreach under the Academy Aperture 2025 initiative — continued to shape voting patterns in 2025. In craft categories (cinematography, editing, costume design, production design, sound, and visual effects), women represented 52% of all nominees for the first time in the ceremony's 97-year history, a milestone in an area of the industry traditionally dominated by male professionals.
Context: Spanish-language cinema and Argentine film
The prominence of Emilia Pérez in the 2025 Oscar conversation sparked extensive discussion about the status of Spanish-language cinema in the international prestige market. The film's unprecedented 13 nominations for a non-English-language production — across both craft and performance categories — represented a new threshold. For Argentine cinema specifically, no Argentine film received nominations in 2025. Argentina has a distinguished Oscar history, having won Best International Feature Film four times (for La historia oficial, El secreto de sus ojos, El hijo de la novia — shortlisted — and Relatos salvajes as a nominee), and continues to be one of Latin America's most prolific film producers. The continued growth of international membership in the Academy suggests that Spanish-language and Latin American films will remain a significant competitive force in future nomination cycles.
