Wicked Wins a Major Best-Picture Prize in a Gloriously Messy Oscar Season

Wicked has dominated the 2025 National Board of Review honors, winning both best picture and best director for Jon M. Chu. It’s the first bit of awards recognition for the box-office phenomenon, a signal of just how strong the film appears as it crashes this year’s messy Oscar race.

And what a mess it’s turning out to be. On Monday, at the first official awards ceremony of the season, A24’s dark comedy A Different Man pulled off a shocker by winning best feature over buzzier competition like Anora and Challengers. On Tuesday, The Brutalist dominated the New York Film Critics’ Circle Awards, winning prizes for best picture and best actor (Adrien Brody). And on Wednesday, the most significant Academy Award precursor nominations so far have arrived, courtesy of the Film Independent Spirit Awards—which always hand out trophies to at least a handful of eventual Oscar winners. Not among the five nominees for best feature? A Different Man and The Brutalist. They didn’t make NBR’s top-10 list, either.

To put it mildly, that’s unusual. For the last four years, the Gothams and Spirits have selected the same winner for best feature, including Oscar champs Nomadland and Everything Everywhere All at Once. When the NYFCC gives an American indie the top prize, like First Cow or Tár, that film has historically at least been nominated by the Gothams and Spirits. Yet there’s no such alignment this year. And while these are all smaller voting bodies with little to no Academy overlap, their choices still speak volumes. Or look to the NBR’s winners for best actor and actress: Queer’s Daniel Craig and Babygirl’s Nicole Kidman, both of whose A24 films were snubbed entirely by the Spirits.

Wicked was ineligible for the Spirits’ best-feature category, which includes Nickel Boys, Anora, Sing Sing, The Substance, and I Saw the TV Glow—all films that have popped up consistently in the awards conversation since their respective celebrated festival debuts. (Other blockbuster and international movies that were ineligible include Conclave, Emilia Perez, Dune: Part 2, Gladiator II, and A Complete Unknown.) Accordingly, I’d argue Nickel Boys has had the best week of any movie in the race this year, snagging this crucial Spirit nomination after winning multiple awards with both the Gothams and NYFCC.

But even that’s a qualified triumph: The NBR ignored it, and while director RaMell Ross won with both of those other aforementioned groups, he was not even nominated by the Spirits. Yet The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet was—as the movie’s sole representative, since the Spirits’ nominating committee also blanked The Brutalist’s cast entirely. Go figure.

Still considered the strongest indie Oscar contender, Anora continues to hum along. But outside of its Cannes debut, it yet to elicit the level of passion that Nickel Boys, The Brutalist, and Sing Sing—whose stars Colman Domingo and Clarence Maclin swept the Gothams’ acting races—each rode to big wins this week. (Anora writer-director Sean Baker did win NYFCC’s screenplay award.) With the Spirits giving the Neon hit a directing nod for Baker and three acting nominations (more than any other film), it’s easily checking off the necessary boxes to stay out front, with hopes of exploding in the next few weeks. Ditto Sing Sing, a Toronto 2023 premiere for which A24 is shrewdly playing the long game. It’s returning to theaters on the day Oscar nominations are announced—meaning, yes, the studio sees this title as win-competitive.

A Different Man has also kept pace, nabbing Spirit nods for screenplay and supporting performance (Adam Pearson). But its best chance at Oscar traction, lead actor Sebastian Stan, finds himself in a funky quandary. The Spirits recognized Stan for his other great 2024 turn: as Donald Trump in The Apprentice, a movie whose awards stock has decreased since the election. (Though director Ali Abbassi was also nominated at the Spirits today.) The best-actor field also contains a wide-open slot; Craig got a boost today, while A Real Pain has been racking up noms seemingly everywhere (with Kieran Culkin winning both NYFCC and NBR), except for Jesse Eisenberg’s lead performance. On paper, if it is not Craig, Stan makes sense to fill that slot. Voters just need to pick a clear lane.

Other fringe Oscar contenders to receive a Spirits boost include Nightbitch’s Amy Adams, Thelma’s June Squibb, Dìdi’s Joan Chen, and Between the Temples’ Carol Kane—who deserves to be taken seriously in the race, as she’s hot off of an NYFCC win too. His Three Daughters won the Robert Altman Award for ensemble performance, taking its actors out of individual contention but keeping them in the conversation. That movie also won a screenplay award at the Gothams, and—fun fact—remains Netflix’s only top awards player to crack the streamer’s weekly Top 10 viewer rankings, easily outpacing Emilia Perez and The Piano Lesson. Over at NBR, A Complete Unknown made its first splash of the season too, with Elle Fanning pulling off a surprise supporting-actress win and the movie cracking the organization’s Top 10 Films.

See the full list of NBR winners below. We’ll be back tomorrow with, you guessed it, more precursor awards analysis.

Best Film: Wicked

Best Director: Jon M. Chu, Wicked

Best Actor: Daniel Craig, Queer

Best Actress: Nicole Kidman, Babygirl

Best Supporting Actor: Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain

Best Supporting Actress: Elle Fanning, A Complete Unknown

Best Ensemble: Conclave

Breakthrough Performance: Mikey Madison, Anora

Best Directorial Debut: India Donaldson, Good One

Best Original Screenplay: Mike Leigh, Hard Truths

Best Adapted Screenplay: Clint Bentley & Greg Kwedar, Sing Sing

NBR Spotlight Award: Creative Collaboration of Cynthia Erivo & Ariana Grande

NBR Freedom of Expression Award: No Other Land

Best Animated Feature: Flow

Best International Film: The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Best Documentary: Sugarcane

Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography: Jarin Blaschke, Nosferatu

Outstanding Achievement in Stunt Artistry: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Top Films (in alphabetical order):

Anora
Babygirl
A Complete Unknown
Conclave
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Gladiator II
Juror #2
Queer
A Real Pain
Sing Sing

Top 5 International Films (in alphabetical order):

All We Imagine As Light
The Girl with the Needle
I’m Still Here
Santosh
Universal Language

Top 5 Documentaries (in alphabetical order):

Black Box Diaries
Dahomey
Look Into My Eyes
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
Will & Harper

Top 10 Independent Films (in alphabetical order):

Bird
A Different Man
Dìdi
Ghostlight
Good One
Hard Truths
His Three Daughters
Love Lies Bleeding
My Old Ass
Thelma

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