The 2025 Oscars Finally Embraced Horror – And Gave Paul Thomas Anderson His Long‑Overdue Best Director Win 

This was a big year for movies. The 2025 Oscar contenders were stacked with magnificent and moving films. But the ceremony always has a few surprises up its sleeve, and the biggest one this year was Michael B. Jordan’s victory in the Best Actor category for Sinners. While Jordan’s dual performance as twin brothers ‘Smoke’ and ‘Stack’ is fascinating, traditionally, it isn’t the kind of role that won awards. Now it is not a generic horror movie, but Sinners is still a horror movie. And the Academy never looked kindly towards performances in the horror genre.

There have been a few great performances in horror movies that have been neglected over the years by the Academy. Toni Collette in Hereditary (2018), Mia Goth in Pearl (2022) and Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse(2019) are some recent ones that come to mind. In fact, Jeremy Irons in Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988) practically wrote the book on how to play twins convincingly onscreen. But forget winning, he wasn’t even nominated. Is this the Academy correcting its past errors?

Another win for the horror genre was Amy Madigan’s creepy performance in the unsettling Weapons, for Best Supporting Actress. This category was chock-full of incredible performances from Teyana Taylor, Wunmi Mosaku, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning, so Madigan’s victory was surprising to say the least. Horror as a genre continues to pull audiences into theaters and it serves the industry well to celebrate them. Sean Penn became another male actor with the most acting Oscars this year with his Best Supporting Actor award for One Battle After Another. He is now tied with Jack Nicholson, as both actors have 1 Supporting Actor Award and 2 Best Actor Awards. Jessie Buckley won the Best Actress award for her utterly devastating role in Hamnet, as a grieving mother and the wife of William Shakespeare, in a category that gets stronger every year.

Image Source : https://www.nme.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Jack-Nicholson-and-Sean-Penn-Eric-Robert_Sygma_Sygma-via-Getty-Imagesjpg.jpg 

Best Cinematography went to Sinners, which had a strong palette of orange and black, signifying good and evil. The simplicity of that representation is impactful, especially in today’s clutter-filled world, where we are subjected to billions of images every day. It is noteworthy that it marks the first time the trophy was awarded to a woman, and at that, a woman of colour, Autumn Durald Arkapaw. Frankenstein took the awards for its exquisite production value for Best Production Design, Best Costume Design and Best Makeup and Hairstyling. For its evocative editing, which hits you when you least expect it, One Battle After Another got the Best Editing Award.

The Best Picture nominations filled their unofficial quota to include one independent film with Train Dreams, a movie with a small scale but a magnificent scope. Similarly, the quota for a blockbuster film was filled by Apple Studios’ crowd-pleaser F1. F1 has a connection with Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, which received 9 nominations, as they both comment on the stakes of victory.

Image Source : https://www.scenestill.com/storage/film-stills/webp/Sinners_screencap_017_webp.webp

Two International films were nominated for Best Picture this year, The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value, with the latter winning the award for Best International Film of the year. Always a controversial award because the category is so fiercely competitive, it also included the wonderful and poignant It Was Just An Accident, directed by Iranian director Jafar Panahi. The biggest omission in the category was the timely No Other Choice, directed by the South Korean legend Park Chan-wook. All 4 of these films deserve a wider audience, given how strong and satisfying they are.

Sinners earned the most nominations this year, but One Battle After Another was deservedly the biggest winner of the night, with 6 wins, including Best Picture and Best Director. One Battle After Another works on various levels. A father-daughter tale, a political-comedy, an action-thriller, a coming-of-age drama, it covers so much ground and with such honesty that it will undoubtedly stand the test of time. The biggest surprise here was that this was Paul Thomas Anderson’s first Best Director Oscar. Widely considered as one of the best directors of our generation, he is the director of modern classics such as There Will Be Blood, Magnolia, The Master and many others.

Image Source : https://www.oscars.org/sites/oscars/files/2026-03/Best%20Picture%20Group%20Photo%2098O.JPG

In his victory speech for Best Picture, he graciously and like a true film fan stated, ‘‘In 1975 the nominees for Best Picture were – Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jaws, Nashville and Barry Lyndon. There is no best among them. There is just what mood you’re in that day.’’

And so, a victory for Anderson is a victory for film fans everywhere, including the mighty Steven Spielberg, who cheered from a front-row seat for his friend.