2025 Mid-Year Award Winners

Sinners dominates the 2025 Mid-Year Awards!

I had originally planned to release these results on Monday with a quick live, but wasn’t able to collate everything in time so I’m just releasing them in a standard post this afternoon.

As I kind of expected, Sinners dominated the awards this year, but not in the same fashion as last year’s domination by Dune: Part Two. Last year, Dune: Part Two was the outright winner or tied for first in every technical category except Best Makeup & Hairstyling while this year Sinners shared the technical glory with The Phoenician Scheme, Warfare, and F1: The Movie. Here is the full rundown of all the technical categories:

• Best Visual Effects-Sinners

• Best Sound-F1: The Movie, Sinners, and Warfare (yes, it was a three-way tie!)

• Best Production Design-The Phoenician Scheme

• Best Original Score-Sinners

• Best Makeup & Hairstyling-Sinners

• Best Film Editing-Warfare

• Best Costume Design-The Phoenician Scheme

• Best Cinematography-Sinners

Last year we only had three nominees in the Best Animated Feature category and added one more this year. Elio just snuck into the nomination period, and somewhat upset the early front runner in the Predator: Killer of Killers. Interestingly, our current Best Animated Feature winner at the Oscars, Flow, wasn’t even on the radar at this time last year so we will see if the next Oscar winner in this category is unexpected or comes from upcoming wide releases like The Bad Guys 2 or Zootopia 2.

• Best Animated Feature-Elio

That brings us on to our acting categories. Sinners took a bit of a back seat here, only winning one category, and seeing The Phoenician Scheme nab another win while Black Bag took home two awards. Interestingly, none of the winners we picked last year were even nominated for the Academy Awards (at least not for the films we nominated them for here). Here is the full list of acting wins:

• Best Supporting Actress-Marisa Abela (Black Bag)

• Best Actress-Cate Blanchett (Black Bag)

• Best Supporting Actor-Michael Cera (The Phoenician Scheme)

• Best Actor-Michael B. Jordan (Sinners)

And with our last two categories, the momentum swings back in favor of Sinners with Ryan Coogler taking home Best Director and the film taking the Best Picture win, both in solid landslides.

• Best Director-Ryan Coogler (Sinners)

• Best Picture-Sinners

In terms of a quick summer, out of the 15 categories, Sinners won or tied for first in 8 (down from Dune: Part Two’s 11 last year). Coming in second place with three wins was The Phoenician Scheme followed by Warfare and Black Bag with two wins each.

Analyzing Last Year

Last year, the only film that won any of these awards and also went on to win Oscars was Dune: Part Two. We had that film correct as the ultimate winner for Best Sound and Best Visual Effects. Among our nominees that also received nominations, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was nominated for Best Visual Effects, Dune: Part Two received a nomination for Best Production Design, Best Cinematography, and Best Picture, and Inside Out 2 was nominated for Best Animated Feature. Other than that, none of our mid-year nominees OR winners made the list at the 97th Academy Awards.

Looking Ahead

What does that mean for the next Academy Awards? Well, if form holds (and who knows if it will since we currently have a sample size of 1) Sinners can look to at least get a few nominations at the 98th Academy Awards and potentially one or two wins. Films released earlier in the year typically struggle when it comes to the Academy Awards, but there have been a few recent exceptions, most notably Everything Everywhere All at Once which was an April release in 2022 just like Sinners was this year.

And of course, I will do a vote like this at the end of the calendar year too so we can compare and see how things have changed over the course of the next six months. So make sure you’re subscribed below to make sure you get all the news about that when the time comes and all the great interviews, challenges, movie discussions, and more in the meantime.

Leave a comment with any films you feel were snubbed and look out for more challenges in the future.