Nominations voting is from January 8-12, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 17, 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 . Wes Ball’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” (20th Century Studios), which kicks off the post-Caesar saga 300 years later, is the early Oscar favorite.
While the franchise has yet to win, Wētā FX greatly improved its photoreal performance capture animation and VFX, leveraging its tech from the previous “Apes” trilogy and water simulation from the Oscar-winning “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Wēta used dual-camera facial rigs to capture the detail and emotion of the ape performances (led by Owen Teague’s Noa and Kevin Durand’s Proximus Caesar) with greater fidelity. They also refined tools for muscle simulation, facial animation, grooming, water simulations, painting textures, shaders, and rendering to create more realistic and chattier apes.
In addition, Wētā embraced more expansive environments, with the simians developing their own civilization in villages spread throughout the overgrown Pacific Northwest (shot in New South Wales, Australia). The highlights are the early siege of Noa’s village, the homage to “The Hunt” from the 1968 original, and the thrilling rushing wat.
