What Can This Year’s Oscar Results Tell Us About the Upcoming Emmys?

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As the 2025 Oscars draw to a close, my tenure as your Gold Rush columnist is coming to an end. However, I am confident that my colleague Joe Reid will skillfully guide you through the upcoming Emmy Awards season. I’ll return to fill your inboxes again in the autumn, provided we are all still here! —Nate Jones

Joe Reid: Nate, congratulations on another season in the Oscar trenches. It’s always such a roller coaster, and if this season didn’t have it all — beginning with a wide-open field, disrupted by a controversy that actually seemed to have some impact, and ending with a big major-category upset at the last second — at least it had a lot. With a couple weeks of distance, how are you feeling about it? Any words of wisdom to impart to me as I prepare to take the Gold Rush handoff for Emmys season?

Nate Jones: Thanks, Joe! Despite whiffing a few big calls in my final predictions, there’s still much to be proud of. I kept faith in Anora when many were counting it out, and I wound up winning the Vulture Staff League in your Movies Fantasy League. This honor does not come with any sort of cash prize, but it does, I believe, forbid anyone in the office from making direct eye contact with me for the next 12 months.

Did we learn anything? Regarding Emilia Pérez, I can only quote J.K. Simmons from Burn After Reading: I guess we learned not to do it again. And after eating a lot of crow for my failure to predict Flow or No Other Land, I learned never to underestimate the impact of international voters ever again. Neither of those are really applicable to the upcoming Emmys season, but I can think of a few more relevant takeaways. The first is to respect the power of a great Golden Globes acceptance speech, which proved to be priceless advertising for Demi Moore and Fernanda Torres’s campaigns. As you noted a few months ago, that’s promising for the likes of The Penguin’s Colin Farrell.

The other lesson is to be aware of the difference between controversies that can impact the race and ones that are essentially just noise. You mentioned just how much happened this Oscars season. That’s true, and yet, when we were talking the other day, we also noted that — apart from the unforeseen Emilia Pérez implosion — in the broad strokes, this season ended in roughly the place we might have predicted back in September: Anora ascendant, The Brutalist and Conclave feeling like the runners-up, and Mikey Madison, Adrien Brody, Zoe Saldaña, and Kieran Culkin winning acting trophies.

As a movie and TV enthusiast, I’ve been pondering if we might witness a comparable wave of surprises during this year’s Emmy Awards. So Joe, what can you tell me about the current state of the television landscape? Does it appear as vibrant and unpredictable as the film industry six months ago?

Joe Reid: I’d say that assessment is half-right. On the comedy side, the top of the field is as locked in as any Emmys category I can remember. In the coming weeks, I’ll be digging into just where each of these shows stand, but as a bloc, Hacks, The Bear, Abbott Elementary, and Only Murders in the Building seem pretty well entrenched, and they aren’t leaving the year’s other comedies a ton of opportunities to climb to the top. But on the drama side of things, yes, we’re looking at an Oscars-esque wide-open field. We’ve just completed a year’s worth of awards shows where Shogun won pretty much everything, and now it won’t be back for at least another year. Of the eight shows that were nominated for Outstanding Drama Series last year, only Slow Horses remains eligible for this year.

So we’re left with a whole bunch of shows returning from multiple-year hiatuses, and it’s anyone’s guess how they’re going to be ranked this time around. Is Severance still smart and cool? Is The Last of Us going to be able to build on its momentum? Is The White Lotus falling prey to a slump year? Do Squid Game and The Handmaid’s Tale have any juice left? Is The Pitt the new show that will break through? I have thoughts on all of these things, but ultimately, there are more questions than answers.

Nate Jones: Of all the series you mentioned above, I think I’ve seen … three? So it might be helpful, for me and for our readers, to start off with a little match game, putting the upcoming Emmys race through the lens of the season that just finished. Let’s start with the reigning champ: Which show do you see as this year’s Anora?

Joe Reid: Obviously, there is an apples-to-oranges aspect to comparing TV to movies, but I love an intellectual exercise — okay! So with Anora, we’re looking for something that is suffused with sex but not exactly sexy; where the transactional nature of sex and material desire leads people down paths that will only hurt them. Anora really benefitted, I think, from being a movie about the moral rot of excessive wealth and extravagance. Voters love to support a commentary on something. On a meta level, I’m looking for a show that similarly elevates an indie creator like Sean Baker to mainstream appreciation. And also, as you’ve been saying, a show that after it wins, you can be like, “Well, yeah, we kind of knew it all along.” In other words, I think this year’s Anora is The White Lotus.

Nate Jones: I like it. But that of course raises the question: If The White Lotus is Anora, then who could be The Brutalist?

Joe Reid: I’m going to say The Brutalist is Severance. I’m not saying Ben Stiller is TV’s version of Brady Corbet (although both are actors-slash-directors who starred in Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young). But Severance basically falling off of the TV map for years while they tried to get season two finished is a little like dipping out to Hungary to make your big, novelistic epic. Both Severance and The Brutalist are hugely ambitious works of formalist rigor that directly explore themes of exploitation and creativity. Much like Adrien Brody was an Oscar winner in 2003, Patricia Arquette was also an Emmy winner in the early aughts (for Medium) and is now back playing a woman who’s been fucked with by capitalist villains. And yet while both are great, they might also be a bit too impenetrable for voters to form an emotional connection with them.

As a passionate cinephile, I can’t help but marvel at the intriguing blend of architecture and design that “Conclave” presented this past season. It truly took on a life of its own as a symbolic masterpiece in the realm of film.

Joe Reid: To me, Conclave was the “now let’s do a fun one” of the Oscar season. A well-scripted, well-acted, well-directed movie that wraps you up in its intrigue but is mostly there to be a hoot and a holler. This is what I get from Slow Horses, a show that the Emmys finally latched onto last year and will hopefully continue to support this year. Like Conclave’s Ralph Fiennes, Slow Horses’s Gary Oldman is a veteran English actor around whom they’ve built a super-solid ensemble. And just as Conclave did with the Oscar-nominated Isabella Rossellini, Slow Horses loves nothing more than a woman with the goods on everyone (Kristin Scott Thomas’s Diana Taverner, you will always be famous).

Nate Jones: In Slow Horses’s favor, Conclave proved there is an awards lane for elevated genre fare that’s still slightly pulpy. Now let’s talk about an old-fashioned project that had a much better awards-season run than anyone expected. Who’s our Complete Unknown?

Joe Reid: Yes! What was great about A Complete Unknown is that it took the familiar trappings of the musician biopic and then steadfastly refused to put us through the usual paces of a rock-star biography. And in being so resistant to trope and cliché, James Mangold’s film ended up giving that old stager of a genre a jolt. It’s not a perfect comparison to the new medical drama The Pitt, but the doctor show is one of TV’s most tried-and-true, and just like Timothée Chalamet was revisiting the biopic genre after Wonka, so too is Noah Wyle once again doing the emergency-medicine thing after ER.

Nate Jones asks if we should anticipate Wyle to make his March Madness predictions on ESPN, and he’s convinced by the suggestion. So far, our Oscar ballot has mainly focused on arthouse films, but what would be the equivalent blockbusters to “Dune: Part Two” and “Wicked”?

Joe Reid: Dune: Part Two is absolutely The Last of Us: a big-budget adaptation of source material that manages to be both widely popular but also esoteric at the same time. The show is a big-time ratings hit for HBO, and its first season was an Emmys favorite that had the misfortune of walking into the final-season Succession buzz saw. Replace “HBO” with “Warner Bros.” (hey! Zazlav cousins!) and “Succession” with, uh, CODA, I guess, and you’ve got the Oscar story of the two Dune movies.

As for Wicked … okay, hear me out. Two women who were at one point quite wary of each other nevertheless recognize the power that would exist in a joint slay between them. On a show that is kind of dumber than it should be, but which carries with it an unmistakable feminist message? Wicked is The Diplomat! No, I will not be taking any follow-up questions about this!

Are there any lesser-known Oscar films from previous years that might be making a comeback as TV contenders this season?

Joe Reid: Coming out of Toronto, I was very high on The Wild Robot’s chances to perhaps crack the Best Picture list. Buzz was strong, the movie was a huge crowd-pleaser, and the field was — as we’ve mentioned — wide open. That didn’t pan out, and The Wild Robot ultimately lost even the Best Animated Feature to another movie about a ragtag group of animal friends. Where am I going with this? Well, maybe there’s a TV show out there that certainly deserves its high praise but might be kept out of the top ranks because the show is repping a genre that the Emmys have only selectively loved over the years. I’m talking about Andor. Populist genre fare with a message about solidarity and fighting for your brethren against a system of control almost too vast to fathom! Also, Diego Luna is adorable like a baby duck!

Nate: Thank you for validating my extremely silly questions with responses far more detailed and enjoyable than they deserved. After putting you through that whole rigmarole, I realized that there may be an even more obvious common ground between the Oscars and the Emmys: They’re recognizing the same people. As the line between movies and TV gets ever more porous — apparently, Monica Barbaro has been on a Netflix show this whole time? — awards voters frequently enjoy rewarding their faves from one medium whenever they make the jump to the other. We just saw Kieran Culkin win an Oscar for a performance that was quite similar to his Emmy-winning turn in Succession; now what about the reverse? Could any of this year’s nominated actors take advantage of their Oscars bump and ride to Emmy glory?

Joe Reid: Going through this year’s Oscar ballot, the acting nominees are more likely to have recently done TV (Mikey Madison on Better Things; Adrien Brody on Winning Time; obviously, the Succession contingent) than have TV in their immediate future. Some of the ones eligible for Emmys this year put in voicework on animated shows, like Edward Norton in Sausage Party: Foodtopia and Kieran Culkin on the upcoming #1 Happy Family USA. You mentioned Monica Barbaro on FUBAR, though that Arnold Schwarzenegger action-comedy won’t be back on Netflix with new episodes until later this year.

One Oscar winner who’s already ensconced in a TV series of her own is Zoe Saldaña, whose second season of Amazon’s special-ops series Lioness aired at the end of last year. Lioness, like most Taylor Sheridan–created shows, was completely ignored by the Emmys for its first season. But awards voters sometimes like to jump on a bandwagon, and if the Saldaña vibes still feel good (an open question, considering she dodged the Emilia Pérez heat, but just barely), there could be some spillover voting momentum.

There is the question of Cynthia Erivo, recent Best Actress nominee for Wicked, who will be guest-starring on the new season of Poker Face. Given the massive success of Wicked, it’s no surprise that Erivo is given a place of prominence among the guest stars in the season-two trailer. And with her high profile, she would make for a prime Guest Actress Emmy contender. Even though Poker Face only pulled four Emmy nominations in total for its first season, one of those nominations was for guest star Judith Light. So there is precedent. The snag for potential Poker Face guest-star nominees is that the second season will straddle the Emmys eligibility window, which is the end of May, so Cynthia will have to be in an early-season episode to be eligible this year.

Speaking of Guest Actress nominations, the most likely 2025 Oscar nominee to show up on the Emmy ballot may well be Demi Moore, who’s been a guest actress on Landman during her entire Oscar campaign. Yes, this is another Taylor Sheridan show, so all the usual “the Emmys hate Taylor Sheridan” caveats apply. And yes, the majority of the heat for the cast of Landman has been going to Billy Bob Thornton and, somehow, Jerry Jones. But if Emmy voters see Demi’s name on that long list of possible nominees and think she could use a pick-me-up after that Oscar upset … the Demi-ssance could be back on.

Nate Jones: From losing an Oscar for a buzzy Cannes premiere, to potentially winning an Emmy for a Taylor Sheridan show, would be as weird as anything that happens to Demi in The Substance.

Gold Rush will be taking a short break between seasons and will return on April 11, 2025.

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2025-03-15 19:00