2025 Oscars: Best Documentary Short Predictions
Nominations voting is from January 8-17, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 23, 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.
The State of the Race
What makes the Best Documentary Short Oscar race special this year is the breadth of films represented. Though some of them are linked by certain themes, each short is very different, and has some really creative filmmaking.
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For instance, before “The Perfect Neighbor” became one of the buzziest films out of Sundance 2025 for the way in which it tells the story through police body cameras and CCTV footage, “Incident” earned an Oscar nomination for its similar approach, showing the circumstances around a couple unjust deaths in a very visceral way.
Questions around mortality, and whether anyone has the right to decide who lives and who dies, are the subject of two other nominees as well that are considered the frontrunners of the race. First, “I Am Ready, Warden,” centers on John Henry Ramirez, a Texas man on death row for stabbing a convenience store worker to death, though he has since done an incredible amount of work to reform himself without trying to excuse his actions. Also featuring the son of Ramirez’s victim, the film ponders whether capital punishment serves anyone involved in an already brutal case. The project is distributed by MTV Documentary Films, which came close to a win in this category last year for “The ABCs of Book Banning,” and speaks to the humanist work we saw in 2024, with films like “Sing Sing.”
“Death by Numbers” focuses on Sam Fuentes, one of the survivors of the Parkland school shooting in 2018. Like “I Am Ready, Warden,” the film depicts the reverberations of a horrific crime, but is more community focused. Fuentes is articulate about her own struggle with having to confront her assailant via an impact statement at his sentencing hearing, but does not quite have the answer on if anyone deserves the death penalty either.
With Best Documentary Feature, one normally predicts voters going the more intense route, honoring films about global issues, but the Short winner last year was a profile of workers who repair the musical instruments of public school students in LA. With that in mind, “Instruments of a Beating Heart” and “The Only Girl in the Orchestra” could win, as they carry on those heartful messages of the importance of music in bringing people together, but are ultimately not as emotionally stirring as the other nominees.
Nominees are listed in order of likelihood to win.
“I Am Ready, Warden”
“Death by Numbers”
“Incident”
“The Only Girl in the Orchestra”
“Instruments of a Beating Heart”
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