2026 Oscar Predictions: Can Hollywood Ever Recover From Life Inside the Doomsday Bunker?

Hollywood is teetering on the edge of collapse, or so industry insiders warn, despite a summer box office buoyed by recent hits—the strongest since COVID emptied theaters. Yet, the “Great Awokening” that followed the pandemic reshaped Tinseltown, leaving it fractured and floundering. Here we are, five years later, still waiting for the storm to pass.

The irony—or tragedy—is that Hollywood’s malaise mirrors the polarization tearing through American politics. We haven’t been this divided since the Civil War. Today’s conflict isn’t fought with muskets but with votes, clicks, and cancellations. One side, clinging to power for a decade, refuses to relinquish control, waging what feels like a perpetual insurrection-or a tantrum—against the half of America that just voted them out.

This rebellion isn’t confined to ballot boxes. It’s at the box office, in plummeting TV ratings, and in award shows no one watches. Outside the “Doomsday Bunker” of the cultural elite, real life thrives—a life that rejects the utopian vision born from the collision of Barack Obama’s presidency, the iPhone, and social media. That vision, once a shared dream, has curdled into something divisive.

The “resistance” digs in, doubling down on a worldview that’s not democratic but totalitarian—their way or nothing. Hollywood, caught in this vise, can’t thrive by alienating the majority. But it’s trapped—not just in a bubble disconnected from most Americans but under the panopticon of social media, where one misstep triggers public crucifixion.

I keep hoping for a return to authentic, universal storytelling, but it’s a pipe dream. Inside the bunker, there’s only one path: total victory. The industry’s gatekeepers believe they must slay their imagined Voldemort before “normal” can resume. But “normal” isn’t what the majority craves.

This cultural schism echoes the Civil War, with one side gripped by a new dogma—call it “wokeness,” though they’d recoil at the term. It’s a religion, complete with sacred symbols and untouchable tenets. In their reversed hierarchy, America is a white supremacist empire steeped in toxic masculinity. The “marginalized”—people of color, Queer, or non-binary—are elevated as icons, while the majority, especially white “normies,” are sidelined. Even normie gays are tolerated only if they toe the ideological line. Step out of bounds, and you’re unpersoned—banished to a virtual gulag. Trump supporters, aka the majority who voted for him, are the ultimate heretics.

That doesn’t mean it has to be pro-Trump or Republican, but ideally, art can exist outside both sides and tell the crackling truth. A whole counter-culture is rising up outside the Doomsday Bunker, but Hollywood has yet to catch up to it. This has been ongoing for ten years now, and very few people have the nerve to write about any of it. I don’t blame them. They need to make a living and want to be part of the thing everyone they know is part of. Being an outsider, or a shunned pariah, is not for the faint of heart. It’s hard. It’s painful.

I suspect that quite a few people in Hollywood understand reality as I lay it out, but they are also too afraid to go against the fanatical mob that controls everything. We raised a generation of intolerant, puritanical, overly fragile monsters, and it’s destroyed American culture as we once knew it. The biggest problem with them is that they are too “good.”

If you look at your average influencer now, they must virtue signal — always — because that shapes and defines not just who they are but what this “resistance” stands for. They see themselves as “good” and everyone else as “bad.” That is death to art. Just smushes it dead like a squashed bug. Artists who also need to be seen as “good” are useless to everyone except those true believers in the church.

So when the Oscar race unfolds, it will reflect DOOMSDAY. That translates as: “Democracy voted out the Puritans, and they aren’t handling it well.” Be that as it may, that is what the film industry is and what will define the Oscars this year, until all of this collapses, which I hope it does soon. Maybe it never will. Maybe AI will come along and be able to adhere to these rules better than humans, who, in theory, think for themselves.

Publicity is All

I wish we had more coverage that wasn’t pure publicity. I see so many writers lamenting the state of Hollywood, but all of them are like the baseball players in Field of Dreams. They can’t cross the line because they will disappear and never get to go back, like Doc Graham.

Speaking of good movies that Hollywood will never make again…

So they’re almost there but they’re not quite. The machine has become somewhat self-aware, however, as I’ve noticed both Netflix and Searchlight expanding to the world of influencers. Like this Paloma Diamond ad for the new Wes Anderson film, Phoenician Scheme:

Paloma Diamond was also seen at NetflixCon, aka Tudum. I expect we’ll start to see more of that because if you want people to see your movie or even talk about it, it has to hit TikTok. Otherwise, it will exist in the bubble within the bubble of Film Twitter, aka the desert.

What we get now is necessary enthusiasm. Because, do the math. If everyone is GOOD and must be seen as good, then no one is allowed to really dunk on them, call them out, mock them or even criticize them. So we see all of this aspirational coverage for aspirational movies and before long, you feel like you have a toothache.

Gone are the grouchy, confrontational columns by, say, Peter Bart. Everyone is too afraid. So they stay silent and wait for the storm to pass. Well, my friends, we’re not there yet. The ten-year-long temper tantrum will last many more years until the Democrats and the Left can become semi-tolerable to the rest of the country.

On to predictions.

Best Picture

The film that will resonate this year will have to hit the Woketopians right where they live. It’s too bad Emilia Perez was last year, and that it crashed and burned, because it would be the ultimate movie for the Oscars this year. It would be their righteous stand against the KING. So, barring that, we have to look at what is on offer.

What movie would appeal to people who put up signs like this:

For a movie like Sinners, this isn’t a problem. It is effortlessly diverse and inclusive. It tells the true story of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South and how music saved them from oppressive misery, and that music was then stolen and appropriated by white artists. But it’s also just a good movie. It’s a ’90s throwback. Fun and alive and brilliantly made.

What else do we have? I headed over to the Oscar Expert app to look and see what movies are doing well.

You should follow me there, too if you’d like to see how well I do — I have bragging rights as the only pundit who predicted Anora for the DGA/PGA and Oscar. But you only get that lucky every so often. I love that kind of a year, personally, when everyone is wrong and I’m right.

If you look at Best Picture and you add the ‘plus’ sign, you see what is most predicted over there among their thousands of users. That looks something like this:

The ones that are checked are mine. The ones that aren’t checked aren’t yet on my radar. The films that I would say exist outside the ideology of the Left, at least as far as I can tell right now, would be:

Sentimental Value
Marty Supreme
Bugonia
It was Just an Accident
The Rivals of Amziah King (I think)
No Other Choice

Maybe. I don’t know. Everyone in Hollywood drives the same message — that they are “good” and those who voted for Trump are “bad.” You might not think that message exists in most movies, but it does. It’s the background noise in almost every story told. It’s their nudge nudge wink wink message that says, “we all agree with the same things and we’re on the same side.” And that side happens to be against the American majority at the moment.

So, for instance, a movie like Die My Love is about post-partum depression (feminism), After the Hunt is about sexual assault and Me Too. One Battle After Another appears to be about the Left at war with MAGA (we’ll have to wait and see if that’s true) because in their fantastical imaginings, MAGA=white supremacy. Wicked For Good is actually about the modern-day Left, but they’ve shape-shifted it and turned it into a Trump-style story about fascist regimes.

Avatar Fire and Ash will be about climate change, and there will probably be a Trump reference in there somewhere. It’s kind of like how Christians need to always have Satan represented. The Life of Chuck and Deliver Me From Nowhere are defined by their resistance heroes, Stephen King and Bruce Springsteen. And I guess we can add Jay Kelly since it stars George Clooney, and there’s no way we’re getting out of that one.

Frankenstein, I’ll take a guess that there is a political message in there. How could there not be? All points lead back to Trump so I’ll be shocked if it isn’t there. We’ll see. Hamnet = feminism. Rental family is probably somehow related to cultural differences. The Secret Agent is about living under a dictator, that’s a no-brainer, as those inside the Doomsday Bunker believe they are also.

The Ballad of a Small Player—I have no idea, but since it’s Netflix, it’s highly probable that it will have to reflect politics. We’ll see.

These are the films the users of the Awards Expert app see as most promising so far in terms of the Oscars. But other movies might resonate more with the “resistance” that aren’t in the top twenty.

I don’t see it that way. The Oscars are pointless unless they are relevant to the broader country. In other words, GO BIG OR GO HOME.

To that end, here are my predictions.