Grownups Seize the Spotlight in the 2025 Oscar Nominations

Edward Norton, 55, sang a new song

It’s been a decade since Norton got a nomination (his third, for Birdman in 2015), and his Oscar comeback is for playing another grownup comeback kid: Pete Seeger, the singer blacklisted and ruined in the ‘50s who came back bigtime in the ‘60s as Bob Dylan’s mentor, urging Bob not to go electric and desert their folkie good cause. Norton broke out in his 20s with Oscar noms for Primal Fear and American History X, but as Seeger he signifies the hopeful, hard-earned wisdom of age, and his deep research into Seeger’s life paid off in onscreen authenticity, and humor. He interviewed the singer’s kids (now in their 70s and 80s), who told him about their dad’s pride in the composting toilet he claimed never smelled — but it did! The funny resulting scene establishes his identity as a family man and stubbornly upbeat idealist. And Norton captures Seeger’s musical gift as well as Timothee Chalamet does Dylan’s.

Ralph Fiennes, 62, and Isabella Rossellini, 72, proved you’ve got to have faith

For three decades, film connoisseurs have been bemoaning that Fiennes’s Schindler’s List role as a concentration-camp commandant lost the best actor Oscar to The Fugitive’s Tommy Lee Jones, and many are annoyed he was snubbed as the hilarious hotelier in 2013’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. So it’s deeply satisfying that he’s nominated as the saintly cardinal at the center of the rather unsaintly election of a new pope in Conclave, the kind of old-fashioned movie Oscars celebrate (and keep alive). The film stars a host of grownup actors upping each others’ game: Stanley Tucci, 64, John Lithgow, 79, and most delightfully of all, Isabella Rossellini, earning her first Oscar honor ever at 72 as a nun involved in the Vatican power play. In a performance under eight minutes long, she could make history as part of the first mother-daughter Oscar-winning team (her mom Ingrid Bergman won for an 18-minute role in 1974’s Murder on the Orient Express).

Colman Domingo, 55, struck a blow for the power of art — and grownup acting

After last year’s nomination for Rustin, Domingo is a rare back-to-back Oscar nominee for Sing Sing, an inspiring movie shot on a minimal $1.5 million budget, about a real-life Shakespeare theater group that turned convicts’ lives around in Sing Sing, the notorious high-security New York prison. Domingo’s role as John “Divine G” Whitfield, in Sing Sing for a crime he did not commit and discovering a theatrical gift that liberated his soul behind bars, is deeply rooted in his own life: he spent years doing shows in impoverished Bay Area junior high schools (with Sean San José, who plays his Sing Sing cellmate). He told journalist Malina Savai that both that experience and Sing Sing made him realize how crucial the art of theater is — some of the cast are actual former inmates who said if they had discovered theater classes growing up, “perhaps they would not have wound up in prison in the first place.”

Adrien Brody, 51, turned in an epic performance with a cutting-edge tech assist

If Isabella Rossellini’s performance in Conclave was short and sweet, Brody’s role as Jewish-Hungarian architect László Tóth who flees Holocaust-shattered Europe to pursue his dream project in America in The Brutalist was a gruelingly long endurance contest in an amazingly long (3-hour, 35-minute) movie. Has there ever been a $10 million film that loomed so epically immense? Brody’s role as a driven genius colliding with a control-freak patron is the biggest of his career, even more ambitious than his role in The Pianist, which made him, at 29, the youngest best actor Oscar winner in history 22 years ago. His 2025 nomination overcame a controversy over the use of AI in the film, which perfected his dialogue in Hungarian (though his mom is a Hungarian immigrant, the AI made him sound better) and AI also rendered the architectural sketches and buildings that are Tóth ‘s masterpieces. AI is part of the moviemaking experience nowadays, and was also used to tweak voices in Oscar contenders Emilia Pérez and Maria. We’d better get used to it, and think harder about the artistic risks and opportunities it affords.

Guy Pearce, 57, finally got his due

At 57, Pearce earned his first Oscar nomination as the irritable zillionaire patron of The Brutalist's genius Tóth, as obsessed with the architect as the architect is with his American Dream of artistic success. It's about time Pearce got artistic recognition — he's been a crucial part of multiple Oscar winners (L.A. Confidential, Memento, The Hurt Locker, The King's Speech), yet the Oscar honor eluded him. With this performance, he leaps from the background to the top of his field.

Fernanda Torres, 59, followed in her mother’s footsteps

History repeats itself in Torres’ history-based I’m Still Here, about an actual woman whose husband was kidnapped by Brazil’s murderous rulers in 1971. It’s directed by Walter Salles, 68, who directed Torres’ mother Fernanda Montenegro in her Oscar-nominated role in 1998’s Central Station — and Montenegro, the oldest living Best Actress nominee at 95, plays Torres’ character in age in I’m Still Here. When Torres won a surprise Golden Globe Award for the film, she dedicated it to Fernanda. Can she top that dedication if she wins the Oscar?

Karla Sofía Gascón, 52, makes Oscar history

As if Emilia Pérez weren’t unusual enough — it’s a musical and tragicomic crime thriller about a drug lord who changes sex— Gascón, 52, makes history as the first ever trans acting Oscar nominee. Not only does she nail the tricky role of Emilia, she transformed the part: in the original script, the sex change was just for disguise, to evade authorities, "a screwball premise," as she told The Hollywood Reporter, and Emilia's sex life was played for laughs. She convinced director Jacques Audiard to take the character’s sexual identity seriously, making her more likeable (a huge advantage in winning over Oscar voters), and deepening what could’ve been a mere comedy role. Audiard called Gascón “a powerful educator...she led me to understand that, well before transitioning, we’re already who we want to become.”