If Yanet Giles could pick the Oscar winners
By Yanet Giles
We are about a month out from the 98th Academy Awards ceremony, a would be exciting night filled with glitz and glam, marvelous and tailored red carpet looks, and hundreds of people eager to see which of their peers win the privilege of walking home with bright, shining golden Oscars marking the highest achievement in cinema. Well, here’s my thing: I’m so over the Academy…
Can you believe that the 2026 Academy Awards is the first year that each Academy member will be required to have watched every nominated film before placing their votes? For all 97 prior years, nearly an entire century of this most prestigious award shows’ existence, it has not been mandatory for Academy members to have actually seen all nominated films before bestowing this award, this supposed “highest honor” amongst the winners. One can only imagine what kinds of personal biases, popularity contests, work-place politics, and prejudices must have infiltrated the award show all these years.
Personally, I have found the integrity of the Academy Awards compromised for quite some time now. Do we remember the 2021 Academy Awards when Chadwick Boseman received a posthumous Best Actor nomination for his role in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and many Oscars viewers across the country (including myself) felt as though the award show had organized the order in which awards were announced, giving every indication that the wait for Best Actor as the final category meant that Boseman would win? But instead, many felt as though the prospect of a posthumous award was used as a tactic to maintain viewership until the very end of the show when Anthony Hopkins won the award instead of Boseman. That was a moment that left viewers' mouths distasteful, and woke me up to the realization that perhaps this ceremony was not about honoring this art form in the most honest way.
Of course, with a history spanning nearly 100 years, with the first ever Academy Awards taking place in 1929, the award show has a long history of injustice and exclusion, both in the kinds of stories being told in the nominated films, and the kinds of people allowed a nomination – much less an actual win. Hattie McDaniel was the first Black person and Black woman to win an Oscar in 1939, only 10 years after the award ceremony’s conception, but, for her mammy role in Gone With the Wind. The first woman to win best director was not until Kathryn Bigelow won for The Hurt Locker at the 2010 ceremony. Only 16 years ago! Mind you, a woman of color did not win Best Director until 2021 – Chloe Zhao for Nomadland – her and Bigelow the only two women who have ever won in that category! Those are only a couple of ways in which the Academy Awards has not adequately made space for the diversity of talent that exists in filmmaking. Who is nominated, though, is just as much about who is invited into the industry in the first place, as it is who the Academy chooses to elect. All this to say, if someone is so lucky to have beat the odds and work their way into a position where they are even able to be nominated for an Oscar, the least the Academy could do is have watched every film nominated from the start!
Nevertheless, 2025 was a great year for film, I mean, talk about range. The films nominated this year are emotional, vast, subdued, grand-scale, clever, bold, nuanced, explosive, and all across the board brilliant. The blockbuster is back in Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, and Sinners, but in a movie-star driven, original kind of way – not in the latest Marvel movie kind of way. Frankenstein, enters the mix making for one of the best film adaptations of the original text as it takes on a new lens, shifting the focus from the ethics of science, life, and death, and instead providing this profound examination of birth and fatherhood in which the perspective of Latino director Guillermo del Toro and and Latino actor Oscar Isaac are pertinent to this adaptation. When paired with fellow horror film, Sinners, this is the first time it seems so much love has been shown to the genre by the Academy. The most powerful stories have been told through the horror genre as of late, and I hope to see a continued love shown towards genre films in the future. Hamnet was one of the most impressive period pieces I have witnessed in terms of costume design and love is shown to our very own Pacific Northwest in Train Dreams.
Now, I have always joked that I should be a member of the Academy, and I am sure you are all dying to know who my Oscar winners would be. So, I thought I would end this off with letting you all into what my picks are. The Academy has introduced a new category this year – Achievement in Casting – which I think will make for a fun and worthy new addition. I have included my picks below, excluding categories regarding short films, animated films, documentaries, and international feature films. The 98th Academy Awards are on March 15, we will have to see if any of my choices are brought to life!
Yanet’s Oscar Picks:
Actor in a Leading Role
Michael B. Jordan
Sinners
Actor in a Supporting Role
Jacob Elordi
Frankenstein
Actress in a Leading Role
Jessie Buckley
Hamnet
Actress in a Supporting Role
Teyana Taylor
One Battle after Another
Casting
Sinners
Francine Maisler
Cinematography
Frankenstein
Dan Laustsen
Costume Design
Hamnet
Malgosia Turzanska
Directing
Sinners
Ryan Coogler
Film Editing
Sinners
Michael P. Shawver
Makeup and Hairstyling
The Ugly Stepsister
Thomas Foldberg and Anne Cathrine Sauerberg
Music (Original Score)
Sinners
Ludwig Goransson
Music (Original Song)
“I Lied To You”
from Sinners; Music and Lyric by Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Goransson
Production Design
Marty Supreme
Production Design: Jack Fisk; Set Decoration: Adam Willis
Sound
One Battle after Another
José Antonio García, Christopher Scarabosio and Tony Villaflor
Visual Effects
Sinners
Michael Ralla, Espen Nordahl, Guido Wolter and Donnie Dean
Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
Frankenstein
Written for the Screen by Guillermo del Toro
Writing (Original Screenplay)
Sinners
Written by Ryan Coogler
Best Picture
Sinners
Zinzi Coogler, Sev Ohanian and Ryan Coogler, Producers