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The 97th Academy Awards will take place on Sunday, March 2 at 7 p.m. Et / 4 p.m. Pt. The prestigious ceremony will take place at the iconic Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, continuing the Academy’s rich tradition. The event will be broadcast live on ABC and streamed on platforms like Jio Hotstar, Oscar.com, Oscars.org, and the Academy’s social media handles.

As far as nominations are concerned, Emilia Pérez leads the 2025 Oscar race with 13 nominations, followed closely by The Brutalist and Wicked, each securing 10 nominations. Stay tuned as we update the complete list of 2025 Oscar winners in real time.

Here’s the complete list of the 2025 Oscar nominees and Winners: Best Supporting Actor Yura Borisov (Anora) Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain) – Winner Edward Norton (A Complete Unknown) Guy Pearce (The Brutalist) Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice) Best Animated Feature Film Flow – Winner Inside Out 2 Memoir of a Snail Wallace and...

Nominations voting is from January 8-17, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 23, 2025. Final voting is February 11-18, 2025. And finally, the 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2 and air live on ABC at 7:00 p.m. Et/ 4:00 p.m. Pt. We update our picks through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions.

The State of the Race

Given everything going on in America, a place where most Academy members are based, it does make sense for people to vote for “The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent” to win the Oscar just by just looking at the title alone. A winner at both Cannes and the European Film Awards, the Croatian short is a snapshot of the 1990s genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Though the audience sees minimal violence, it remains a discomfiting watch.

However, content wise, “A Lien” is the nominee with...

The American Civil Liberties Union is collaborating with the creative team behind the Oscar-nominated short “A Lien” on an impact campaign working to protect the rights of immigrants.

The campaign will be led by the production and distribution company Willa, focusing on litigation and advocacy work to create empathetic conversations around border policies and the rights of asylum seekers. For over 25 years, the ACLU has protected the rights of immigrants and will focus on leveraging “A Lien”s narrative to inspire meaningful action through screenings and discussions.

“At the ACLU, we work through the courts, the legislatures, through grassroots organizing and through shifting the culture to reach people’s hearts and minds,” nationwide director of artist & entertainment engagement at the ACLU Jessica Weitz said. “We know the harrowing story in ‘A Lien’ is happening all over our country. By developing impact campaigns like this, we give people a glimpse of...

While the numerous Oscar precursors have given us an idea of what might be out front for the big prize in many categories, the same can’t be said for the short-film categories. With hardly any precursors to use, if any, these can be the most tricky categories to forecast ahead of Oscar night. Audiences will soon get to view these nominees for themselves when ShortsTV presents the nominated categories in theaters nationwide starting on Friday (see where they’re playing and how to get tickets). But which shorts might be the ones to beat in these three categories? Here’s our analysis of the short film categories for the 97th Academy Awards.

Live Action Short Frontrunner: “A Lien”

Synopsis: A young couple faces up to and deals with a dangerous immigration process.

Set during President Donald Trump‘s first term, the immigration tragedy is an emotional gut punch that...

Ahead of the Academy Awards, we’re reviewing every short film in each category: Animation, Documentary, and Live Action. Follow here this week. Below are the Best Live Action Short nominees:

A Lien | USA | 14 minutes

Would Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz’s A Lien be better if it went even darker? I think so. Because it’s tough to tell a story about America’s immigration laws being corrupt insofar as how Ice (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) hides behind their authority while also allowing those same laws to give Sophia Gomez (Victoria Ratermanis) a necessary sigh of relief. This choice doesn’t totally derail the film’s effectiveness because its softening of the blow is also a great depiction of the hypocrisy and luck our nation is built upon. Maybe a different agent doesn’t look at the passport. Maybe the bureaucratic red tape prevents Sophia from showing it to him.

A Lien, written and directed by brothers David and Sam Cutler-Kreutz, brings audiences into the fraught and complex experience that a noncitizen can go through in the U.S. legalization process. Clocking in at just under 15 minutes, the story follows a young couple (Victoria Ratermanis and William Martinez) navigating their Green Card interview at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (Uscis) office. The appointment starts off simple enough, until Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) takes a turn for the worse, putting the couple and their young daughter in unexpected danger.

In addition to being executive produced by politically conscious filmmaker Adam McKay, A Lien snagged an Oscar nomination for Best Live Action Short Film and garnered a Grand Prize Narrative Award from the Washington Film Festival.

Here, the Cutler-Kreutz brothers talk to Deadline about capturing the heart-wrenching process of becoming a U.S. Citizen.

Deadline: The film takes place during President Trump’s first term.

It’s plausible that the earthshaking disruptions to the central Oscar race “narrative” that Karla Sofía Gascón’s resurfaced tweets have unleashed may wind up trickling down to the few categories that don’t even feature Emilia Pérez. In other words, if voters who expected to be all-in on the representation that Jacques Audiard’s film afforded them are now surveying the other above-the-fold contenders and failing to find a worthy runner-up cause, where can they turn? Why, the reliably PSA-adjacent live action shorts, of course!

We’re admittedly being a tad facetious here, because anyone who’s followed our annual predictions knows that we firmly believe in the myriad ways the dynamics of the mainline contests factor into every race, but in the short film categories in particular. And if you were to ask for a live action short film nominee that distills the uncanny feeling of being...

Updated: Jan. 17, 2025

Predicting the nominees for the three short film categories at the Oscars is no easy task. Fortunately for you, we are here to help. Below are the 15 shortlisted titles for Best Live Action Short at the Academy Awards along with descriptions and embedded videos where available.

Among the subjects on this year’s list: an adolescent boy seeking to prove that he belongs in his family, the last moments that a woman spends in prison, a woman seeking to figure out whether she’s an android, and a Jewish ice cream shop owner in 1940s Amsterdam.

Here is your 2025 Oscars Best Live Action Short cheat sheet, ranked according to Gold Derby’s current combined odds:

“The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent” – 39/10 odds

In war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993, a passenger train is stopped by paramilitary forces to conduct an ethnic cleansing operation and only one of the...

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Adam McKay is reentering the Oscar race in support of a new, timely project.

IndieWire can exclusively announce that “The Big Short” and “Don’t Look Up” director is boarding “A Lien,” one of the titles on the Oscar shortlist for Best Live-Action Short, as an executive producer via his production company Hyperobject Industries.

Written and directed by brothers Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz, who Vimeo just recently added to their list of Breakout Creators of 2024, “A Lien” highlights the often traumatizing experience surrounding the path toward permanent residence in the United States, and the unseemly tactics the Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses in order to round up more detainees.

“‘A Lien’ is pure cinematic tension,” said McKay via statement. “And then it hit me, this is reality for thousands of people every day.” The filmmaker is known for being outspoken on social media about the many issues Americans are facing,...

The coveted Vimeo “Best of the Year” awards have been announced.

In its 17th year, the annual awards celebrate the most outstanding shorts and video creators on the independent platform. Many “Best of the Year” alumni have later won Academy Awards, Sundance Awards, Cannes prizes, and more. The Vimeo Curation Team reviews thousands of films to select the winners based on originality, technical excellence, storytelling impact, and overall artistic merit.

“We’re proud to highlight the most iconic short films and branded content of 2024,” Ina Pira, Head of Curation at Vimeo, told IndieWire. “These films are the very best of those that received ‘Staff Picks,’ which in its 17th year is still curated by humans sifting through and handpicking the best work shared on Vimeo.”

Pira cited highlight films including Bill Morrison’s surveillance and body cam documentary “Incident” and Renee Zhan’s live action and animated film “SHÉ (Snake)” as standout originals.

Doc Short Contenders Give Voters Plenty to Ponder

The 15 films that made the shortlist in the Oscars’ documentary short category are all powerful and thought-provoking, making the competition for an Academy Award nod incredibly stiff this year.

Leading the charge are “Incident,” “The Only Girl in the Orchestra,” “The Quilters,” “Death by Numbers” and “Keepers.”

The first 89 seconds of Bill Morrison’s police brutality doc “Incident” is silent. Security footage captures a street in Chicago on a July afternoon in 2018. Minutes later, a man is dead. Through a series of recordings of CCTV and police bodycam footage captured from different vantage points, Morrison offers a raw look at the Chicago police shooting of a Black man. The 29-minute New Yorker film won the best short documentary award at the 2023 IDA Documentary Awards and garnered a spot on the influential Doc NYC shortlist earlier this year.

Netflix’s “The Only Girl...

Intensity is the name of the game for brothers/co-directors Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz. Their previous short Flounder, which we featured on Directors Notes last year, was about a toxic initiation process for a male swimming team that takes a dark turn. The plot mixed with the filmmakers’ immersive cinematic style bred a highly compelling short that captured the charged nature of hazing rituals. This formula is carried over into their latest work A Lien, about a young family going through a dangerous immigration process. Whilst the characters and circumstances are completely different from Flounder, the heart-racing intensity of a vicious system’s impact on the individual remains the same. The filmmaking duo return to Dn today for a discussion about their attraction to these extreme scenarios, the methodology and practicality of their kinetic camerawork, and the value they place in taking the time with each part of the filmmaking process.

While there are still several days of buzzy film premieres remaining at SXSW 2024, all of the films playing in competition have screened for audiences and critics. The film festival’s jury announced the winners of the festival’s major awards on Thursday, giving out prizes for narrative feature, documentary feature, and a variety of short, episodic, and Xr categories.

The narrative feature competition was won by “Bob Trevino Likes It,” Tracie Laymon’s dramedy that stars Barbie Ferreira as a young woman who seeks to heal wounds from her relationship with her abusive father by befriending an unrelated man with the exact same name (John Leguizamo).

The top documentary prize went to Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls’ groundbreaking documentary “Grand Theft Hamlet,” which followed a group of actors staging a production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” inside “Grand Theft Auto Online” during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Keep reading for a complete list...

The South by Southwest Film & TV Festival has announced the 2024 Jury and Special Award winners.

This year’s narrative feature competition winner was “Bob Trevino Likes It,” which was directed and written by Tracie Laymon and stars Barbie Ferreira and John Leguizamo. Meanwhile, “Grand Theft Hamlet” topped the documentary feature competition.

“What an extraordinary week of film and TV premieres we’ve had here at SXSW, and there is more to come through Saturday,” said Claudette Godfrey, VP, Film & TV. “Our theaters have been bursting with incredible and vocal audiences celebrating the exceptional and diverse work in our lineup, and we’re so excited to celebrate this year’s jury and special award winners!”

The Audience Award voting will conclude on Saturday, March 16, and winners will be announced that week.

See the complete list of winners below.

Feature Film Grand Jury Awards

Narrative Feature Competition

Winner: “Bob Trevino Likes It”

Director/Screenwriter: Tracie Laymon,...

The arena of sports has always been a hotbed for toxic masculinity. When an environment is built on a bedrock of competition it, unless acknowledged, is bound to foster an unhealthy relationship to winning. This sentiment is at the heart of Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz’s drama Flounder, which depicts a dangerous water polo ritual in which the friendship of two young men will be tested. The Cutler-Kreutz brothers do an excellent job of embedding you in the reality of these testosterone-fuelled young men, utilising the camera in a way which is loose and visceral, reacting to the intensity of the ritual in a fast and direct manner. It’s truly a film worth your time which is why we had to invite the fraternal directing duo to join us for a chat about the making of their short, the personal history it was birthed from and the challenging practicalities...