2025 Oscar nominations: 'Emilia Pérez' leads with 13 nods, followed by 'The Brutalist' and 'Wicked' with 10. See the full list.

Despite the debate over whether the big show should go on amid the devastation in Los Angeles from the wildfires, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences pressed ahead and the Academy Award nominees for 2025 were announced on Jan. 23.

Rachel Sennott (Saturday Night, Shiva Baby) and Bowen Yang (Wicked, Saturday Night Live) helmed the early morning nominations ceremony at the academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater and announced the 23 categories. The presentation was livestreamed on Oscar.com, Oscars.org and the academy’s social media accounts, and aired on ABC’s Good Morning America.

Emilia Pérez led with the most nominations, 13, including Best Picture, Best Director (Jacques Audiard) Best Actress (Karla Sofía Gascón) and Best Supporting Actress (Zoe Saldaña). That was followed by The Brutalist and Wicked, which both had 10 nominations.

At the top of the show, Bill Kramer and Janet Yang, the academy’s CEO and president, respectively, acknowledged that it had been a difficult time amid the wildfires.

“During this year’s ceremony, we will honor the talented filmmakers nominated today, pay tribute to our brave first responders and celebrate the enduring spirit of Los Angeles and the film industry,” Kramer said.

The show is set to take place on March 2 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. Conan O'Brien will host.

Most of what used to be Hollywood has been bought up by the streamers, mainly to get control of the legacy studios’ enormous film and show catalogues. The streamers are in the subscription business, and making good movies is well down on their priority list. Mainly, they are content mills that play flood the zone with chaff in order to have something new each month for each of the myriad market segments their marketing gurus have devised; these are mostly lazy films and shows for lazy, couch potato viewers. Good movies emerge here and there because there are still people somewhere in the chain who want to do more than hack work when they get the chance, but the top execs are not movie people.

What the streamers seem mostly to have been competing for in recent years is the rights to major sports events and leagues. At least since the advent of television, sports has always been a bigger market than theatrical movies, but that didn’t matter as long as the movie business was still owned and run by movie companies and movie people. That is no longer the case. Amazon, Apple and Comcast have the deepest pockets in the industry. Aside from sports, the streamers’ strategies right now seem to be preoccupied with growth through acquisitions, and most of them are talking consolidation. They are also reinventing what looks like old-fashioned cable packages, with bundled streaming packages becoming the current fad. Having swallowed most of the legacy movie studios, they now want to consolidate the sector into three or four global conglomerates that will control all content. Which will allow them to raise prices more easily.

Disney does have the parks to subsidize its blunders on movies and streaming shows, but I am skeptical of how long Disney can hang in with Apple, Amazon and Comcast. I also suspect that Netflix has feet of clay. It is by far the streaming leader and somehow still remains the default option for a lot of people due to its sheer size, but as Netflix joins the trend of raising prices and as other companies increase market share, Netflix may lose its edge and it has no sugar daddy. AT&T got tired of losing money on WarnerHBO and dumped it into a shotgun wedding with Discovery, the king of trash tv. WarnerDiscovery is deeply indebted, is slashing whatever it can (which is likely to erode quality, not that the Discovery people would care), and is ripe for merger/acquisition, or perhaps even to be broken up and sold piecemeal.

The streamers have destroyed Hollywood and the traditional movie business. The question at this point is whether the remaining independent studios can find a footing to rebuild a movie industry run by movie people. And to do that, they probably need the theaters to stay viable, because if the streamers gain a complete stranglehold on distribution, it’s hard to see how the indies can remain truly independent in the long run.

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