What to know:
- Despite not even being nominated for the Academy Awards, John M. Chu’s Critics Choice win throws the Best Director category into further uncertainty.
- Following its Critics Choice win, Anora surged from a 16% chance to 61% in Kalshi’s Best Picture market.
- Despite the controversy surrounding her Emilia Pérez co-star, Zoe Saldaña’s win solidifies her position at the top of betting markets, where she currently holds an 82% chance of winning.
The 30th annual Critics Choice Awards were finally held on Feb. 7. 2025 after two postponements because of the Los Angeles wildfires. Comedian Chelsea Handler returned to host the ceremony for the third consecutive year.
Conclave and Wicked had the highest number of nominations with 11, and Emilia Pérez and Dune: Part Two followed with 10 nominations. The Critics Choice Awards are included in a small selection of award shows seen as the Oscar precursor awards.
Essentially, the winners of this awards show hint at what would happen at the Oscars along with other precursor awards like the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild Awards, DGA Awards, and so on.
The precursor awards are important because most of them happen before the final voting ends for the Oscars on Feb. 18, 2025. If you want to participate in Oscars betting, awards like these are the ones to follow.
On top prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket, millions of dollars are being bet on which movies will win their respective Academy Award category. The Golden Globes and DGA Awards have shifted the forecasts in the Oscar markets, and the Critics Choice Awards similarly did so.
Here are the three surprises from the Critics Choice Awards and how they affected the Oscars.
John M. Chu wins Best Director for ‘Wicked’
After not receiving nominations at the Golden Globes for Best Director, John M. Chu was one of the big surprises of the night. Not only did he get nominated, but he won the category and beat out favorites like Brady Corbet for The Brutalist and Sean Baker for Anora.
This was a huge surprise to Kalshi bettors – predicting Corbet to be the frontrunner at 83%. Chu was at a low of 2% and Anora’s Sean Baker was at 12%.
How does this affect the Oscars? In this case, this win doesn’t bolster the chances of Chu but confuses who the frontrunner is for the award. Chu was not nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards and his win makes it more unclear who would win this category.
Corbet won at the Golden Globes and Baker won at the DGA Awards. But this wasn’t the only win to dramatically shift the frontrunner.
‘Anora’ wins Best Picture at the Critics Choice Awards
Another major surprise for the night was Anora taking the top prize. It took the Best Picture award from other favorites like Conclave and Emilia Pérez.
While most mainstream media were surprised by the win, Kalshi users weren’t. For months, the Best Picture Kalshi market has had Anora and The Brutalist neck and neck for the award.
More interestingly, this win has dramatically shifted the Kalshi Oscar markets for Best Picture and Best Director. At the beginning of February, Baker sat at an 11% chance of winning the Oscar for Best Director. Now, he sits at 50%.
Similarly, for Best Picture, Anora was at around 16% at the beginning of February and now has a 61% forecasted chance. Emilia Pérez won Best Comedy or Musical and The Brutalist won Best Drama at the Golden Globes. Now, The Brutalist has a 27% chance and Emilia Pérez has a 3% chance.
The Brutalist chances dropped after the Critics Choice Awards, but Emilia Pérez has been decreasing for the last several weeks for a completely different reason.
Zoe Saldaña wins Best Supporting Actress despite ‘Emilia Pérez’ controversy
The last surprise of the night was Zoe Saldaña’s win for Best Supporting Actress. Netflix has been scrambling after the film’s lead actress Karla Sofía Gascón landed herself in hot water.
Gascón’s old tweets have resurfaced featuring offensive language against a variety of communities. One of her tweets criticized the Oscars in a 2021 tweet (translated):
More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films, I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M. Apart from that, an ugly, ugly gala.
She’s really playing the victim. She’s talking about herself as a victim, which is surprising. It’s as if she thought that words don’t hurt.
As a result of these controversies, Gascón went from an 18% chance of winning at the end of last year to 1%.
Many thought the controversies may affect co-star Saldaña’s chance but so far they seem unchanged. On Kalshi, Saldaña is still the frontrunner at 82%.
"Some of the magic has disappeared but I chose to continue being proud of what I've done, I'm just grateful, I would do this movie again if I could "
— Selena Gomez Updates (@SGchartupdate) February 10, 2025
— Selena Gomez
pic.twitter.com/Z8NgZZpIih
The Critics Choice Awards have once again influenced the Oscar race, shaking up predictions in key categories. These results directly impacted betting markets, narrowing the field for some categories while making others even more uncertain.
