AFI Fest 2025 Was for the Awards Season Underdogs

One of the most exciting parts of L.A.’s annual AFI Fest is its unpredictable nature — especially in the awards race.

At the end of October every year, it’s basically last in line among fall film festivals in major metropolitan areas that still regularly program big-ticket red-carpet premieres. Some years, those premieres are for future Best Picture nominees like “The Fabelmans” or “Maestro.” And now and then, the festival even hosts the world premiere for last-minute dark horses like “Juror #2” or “Tick, Tick… Boom!”

But overall, as this year’s lineup conveys, AFI Fest’s red carpet premieres section positions it as a festival for the underdogs. Those films that one looks back on and says, “Right, this did have Oscar buzz.” (Remember “Here,” “Heretic,” and “Maria”? AFI gave them a moment to shine last year.)

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The 2025 festival kicked off on Wednesday, October 22, with “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,” arguably the red carpet premiere most likely to score Oscar success, given the Academy’s proclivity for music biopics. AFI Fest being one of the only times Los Angeles has a centralized time and place to catch as many awards contenders in theaters as possible, there was high chance many Oscar voters were present at the Chinese Theatre to watch Bruce Springsteen himself perform a couple songs from his “Nebraska” album, an act meant to bolster Jeremy Allen White’s own energetic performance as The Boss.

The following night had bigger stakes, as the Los Angeles premiere of “Jay Kelly” was a make-or-break moment for the Netflix release seeking to improve upon its unusually tepid reviews out of the Venice Film Festival. As predicted, the Noah Baumbach film about a Hollywood star looking back on his lack of a work-life balance played much better in the epicenter of American filmmaking, with even the director pointing out during the post-screening Q&A that there were jokes only the local crowd understood. 

At a different studio, “Jay Kelly” would more comfortably be a Best Picture contender. But its recent success with the Academy crowd (a couple hundred of which were reportedly in attendance) comes at a moment where fellow Netflix film “Frankenstein” is also very much on the rise (director Guillermo del Toro was present throughout the festival as the Guest Artistic Director), and Sundance acquisition “Train Dreams” is finally beginning to catch a second wind (partially propelled by a special screening at the festival). One silver lining, though, for “Jay Kelly”: There was a lot more chatter about a Best Actor nomination for star George Clooney at the after-party, in addition to people talking about a Best Supporting Actor nod for co-star Adam Sandler being a foregone conclusion.

The Friday premiere of “Nuremberg” did not make much noise, though star Russell Crowe continues to receive praise for his performance as Nazi general Hermann Göring, making him yet one more name to consider in the pool of dozens of viable Best Actor contenders from this year.

Saturday was much busier with the red carpet premieres of both “Dead Man’s Wire” and “Christy” not only making a case for themselves as awards contenders, but serving as the debut of their financier-turned-distributors, Row K Entertainment and Black Bear, respectively. Though a Best Picture nomination is likely too far an uphill battle for both films, “Dead Man’s Wire” does make a case for its director Gus Van Sant, lead actor Bill Skarsgård, and upstart screenwriter Austin Kolodney, while “Christy” is mostly counting on awards attention for lead Sydney Sweeney, with possible recognition for supporting actor Ben Foster, and the boxing film’s original screenplay, which director David Michôd co-wrote with his filmmaker wife Mirrah Foulkes, from a story by Katherine Fugate.

The last day of AFI Fest ended with the two world premieres that the festival managed to line up this year: “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants” and “Song Sung Blue.” For the former, the real Oscar contender in this robust year of animated films is actually the short that played before it, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 – Lost in New Jersey.” As for Craig Brewer’s “Song Sung Blue,” its long-awaited premiere, especially given the buzz around star Kate Hudson’s performance, ended up taking the wind out of its sails.

The musical tearjerker about a Wisconsin couple that forms a popular Neil Diamond tribute act, based on a true story, received mixed reviews, though some still dig their feet in about Hudson’s awards potential (not so much co-star Hugh Jackman’s, given the aforementioned, more-than-stacked Best Actor race.) 

If everyone were being entirely truthful, the Focus Features film, set to be released during the holidays, is trying to capture that “The Greatest Showman” or “A Man Called Otto” crowd that inexplicably shows up in droves, and at the very least earns the film some AARP Movies for Grownups Awards. Former Academy Award nominee Hudson is absolutely a contender to be nominated for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes, but she would need to win over other expected nominees like “Wicked: For Good” star Cynthia Erivo or “One Battle After Another” star Chase Infiniti, or “The Testament of Ann Lee” star Amanda Seyfried, etc. to pull ahead in an Oscar race everyone is already calling for Jessie Buckley, the star of another Focus Features release, “Hamnet.”