“I’m gonna win that Oscar!,” Jon M. Chu quipped while accepting Best Director for “Wicked” at the 2025 Critics Choice Awards. “I’m not nominated, I’m not nominated,” he said, waving away a laughing crowd.

The director is still headed to the Academy Awards in March, where his high-grossing Broadway musical adaptation is nominated for Best Picture and nine more categories. But Chu’s apparent snub for Best Director made his win at Critics Choice — typically, a landmark along the Yellow Brick Road to the Oscars — the big surprise of the night. Stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo cheered for Chu from their table, and backstage, he emphasized the passion he feels for the universe created by their entire artistic team.

“You don’t get a lot of times to celebrate when you’re making a movie. Ninety-five percent of the time, you’re torturing yourself and you have your cast and your crew every day sort of pulling you forward and building another bridge to get over the next thing,” Chu said. “So when a movie comes out and you see the world embrace it, that is everything to us as storytellers.”

He continued, “It means the world to me personally and, for this movie, I think it deserves to be seen. I think it deserves to be loved and praised in all the ways — because it’s the work of thousands of people, of human hands building every set piece, and all the work of the girls. It’s been the journey of my life to witness that personally.”

Continuing his post-acceptance Q&A, Chu described the benefits and challenges of editing the forthcoming “Wicked” sequel (expected in November of this year) while campaigning for awards with the first film. He said, “I’m living two timelines right now because I’ve been in the edit all week. So this morning I’m literally screening the movie for our internal crew to just get a sense of how it plays and then I’m jumping over to here to celebrate a movie that’s already made with all the same actors and a lot of the same things and you’re just like — it is a mind-boggling thing to go through that.”

Still, Chu said the parallel experiences have been mostly beneficial for “Wicked: For Good.” The director explained that engaging with his audience from last year’s film in the lead-up to the Oscars has impacted his decisions for the next installment. Knowing what “Wicked” viewers are paying attention to has allowed Chu to be more subtle with some narrative elements while expanding and emphasizing others, he said.

“It absolutely affects everything that we’re doing,” he said. “I didn’t think it would, but actually getting into the cut, I feel like I’m more in the head space of where the fans are — whereas before we had to cover our bases a little bit more for everybody.”

The director went on to emphasize the importance of “Wicked” to its fans, who have strongly connected with its emotional arc in a turbulent time. Chu teased an even more compelling and intense encore from Grande and Erivo in the second half, before advocating for the power of the musical.

“It is the quintessential American genre of movies that has lasted for all time and continues to — and I think that when you only have limited amount of musicals being made, you don’t get the full swath of everything you can do with music,” Chu said, adding he hopes “Wicked” encourages more filmmakers to naje their mark on the genre.

He continued, “It is the best type of movie to make. It is so fun and it is as fun as it looks, and yet is as complicated as it looks too. We make it look easy.”

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