2026 Oscar Predictions: There Are No Frontrunners

The pundits and critics now believe they make the race. But they don’t. Any name in the frontrunner’s spot is there because pundits put it there. Granted, that can sometimes be hard to displace.  Zoe Saldana and Kieran Culkin were already locked in. But do we have any contenders now that feel locked in? We do not. Maybe Jessie Buckley for Best Actress in Hamnet, as no one has emerged who can top her performance. But that’s pretty much it.

Best Picture is wide open, though it does seem to be down to One Battle After Another vs. Hamnet vs. Sinners. But even that could change.

Best Actor is wide open, with many predicting performances that haven’t been seen yet, such as Timothée Chalamet.

Both supporting categories are open, although it feels like Amy Madigan’s year for Supporting Actress. For Supporting Actor, it appears to be a three-way battle between Sean Penn, Paul Mescal, and Stellan Skarsgård. A screenplay in either category could be divided among the three frontrunners, or not. We’re just fumbling around in the dark here, pretending like we know what’s really going on. We don’t.

Last year was proof enough that the Oscar race right now is the blind leading the blind. Predicting the Oscars has always relied on the unchanging nature of the voters. But in the past five years, everything has changed. The industry was completely upended, and now, we do not know how to predict a consensus of new voters.

Last year, all of the pundits trusted the Golden Globes in their predictions for The Brutalist to win Best Director. Granted, the movie ultimately did better than I thought it would, winning Best Actor, for instance. However, what was peculiar was how everyone fell in line to follow a group that was almost brand new to the Oscar race and thus unpredictable and unreliable.

Last year I knew, and wrote about, that ultimately it would have to come down to the movies themselves because the stats were unreliable, thanks to how things have dramatically changed. The movies themselves meant which of the bunch on offer last year — Emilia Perez, The Brutalist, and Anora was the best movie? And not the best by the standards of critics, but the best in the sense that you could sit anyone down in front of it and they would get it, if not love it.

I sat my 27-year-old daughter in front of each of them, and the one she loved was Anora. She loved it so much, in fact, that as we headed toward the end of the movie, she looked at me and said, “Oh no, it’s almost over!” Meaning, she wanted it to go on. This was a similar vibe to CODA in 2022. If voters knew they were being pressured into choosing The Power of the Dog, but they didn’t like that film, they would likely pick the one they preferred, as these were the options presented to them.

That’s why the current Oscar race is detrimental to the Oscars and the entertainment industry. It should never be decided “by the people in this room from a bag of stuff.” It should be decided by the audience for whom the movies are made. If the public is taken out of the equation, what is the point?

Does that mean I’ll get it right this year? No. It doesn’t. But, like last year, I have the benefit of being an outsider, so I’m not too worried about my pundit credibility. When I tell the story of the Oscar race, I do not tell it from inside the Doomsday Bunker much of the Left has become. If you are like Oh, I don’t know, Jane Fonda, Stephen King, Richard Gere, or Bruce Springsteen, then you believe what MSNBC and the headlines at the New York Times tell you about this moment in our history. Coming out of that perception bubble is not easy. But it is necessary if you want to assess this moment accurately.

First, let’s examine how things have changed and why they have changed. 

The Obama era

— Sheltered in collectivism in 2009 with the expanded ballot from 5 to 10 — saw the first woman win Best Picture/Best Director.

–Hollywood is divided into two lanes – the big-budget IP lane, where studios made ungodly sums of money, while also having a niche market for the “Oscar movies” that didn’t have to make money.

–Ushered in the idea of “firsts” that were decided by identity or marginalized status.

–The Oscars became more global, less local, particularly with Best Director.

–Sensitive male protagonist rising, girl boss rising, aspirational movies — good people doing good things — prevailed:

The Hurt Locker (first woman)
The King’s Speech (a disabled monarch)
The Artist (French film, about a fading silent film star and a dog)
Argo (doesn’t really fit the pattern)
12 Years a Slave (first Black directed film to win, first film about slavery from the Black perspective)
Birdman (the actor’s lament, but also directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu)
Spotlight (“important” film about sex abuse)

The Trump era

–Mass hysteria hits the Left, but especially Hollywood, where accusations and purges consume the industry.

–The Academy begins to add new voters.
2016-683
2017-774
2018-928
2019-842
2020-819

From Gold Derby:

Following an invitation to 534 new members in June, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has grown its total membership to 11,104, Gold Derby has learned.

That number includes 33 percent who identify as women, and 24 percent from underrepresented communities. In addition, 24 percent of the membership resides in countries or territories outside of the United States, including:

• 43 in Africa
• 309 in Asia
• 1,683 in Europe
• 334 in North America beyond the U.S.
• 217 in Oceania
• 113 in South America

So, 33% women, 24% international. That means roughly 2,640 voting members are international.

2016–Now, La La Land is “racist” and not the right film to win the first year with Trump in office. Moonlight must win, and by some miracle, it does.
2017–Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is “racist,” so The Shape of Water wins.
2018–Green Book is like the Nazis rolling into Paris, and its win brings the apocalypse.
2019–Parasite wins, a film from South Korea, besting some of the strongest contenders from the American film industry in a long while.

The Biden Era

2020 brought the Great Awakening, a “color revolution” on the streets that transformed every part of American culture, especially Hollywood. The COVID-19 pandemic emptied out theaters, and everything and everyone shifted online, including the Oscar race. With Biden in office, I thought things would calm down and return to normal. But they didn’t. Hollywood all but collapsed. The Academy promised a DEI mandate to take place in 2024. The BAFTA removed its members’ voting privileges and brought in a select committee (now abandoned). And the Golden Globes were canceled in 2022 after accusations of racism.

By the end of it, Hollywood became a culture of silence and a climate of fear. Everyone was afraid of everything. People could lose their jobs with one wrong word. Many were purged or exiled just because someone pointed the finger.

As they crawled themselves out of the madness, eventually Jay Penske would buy the Golden Globes, along with Rolling Stone, Deadline, Gold Derby, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, ensuring great coverage or at least not agonizing op-eds about how racist they are. The Academy’s mandate is implemented and movies will never be the same. It’s a disaster but everyone tries to make do and pretend things are more or less back to normal. But Hollywood is forever changed.

2020-Nomadland wins. No one thought any other movie would or could. It was directed by a woman of color, and that was that. It was good, well-reviewed, and seemed to be the perfect movie to win in such a bleak era.
2021-The first and only streamer, CODA, wins Best Picture after The Power of the Dog was the presumed frontrunner. It won all three of its nominations. The film featured a predominantly deaf cast and a singer who aspired to live out her dreams.
2022-Everything Everywhere All At Once takes the industry by storm. It was a hit in theaters, but more than that, it was unlike anything anyone had seen—a hybrid of a video game and a social justice opera (minus the singing).
2023–Oppenheimer lands like Gladiator – an undeniable hit that finally brings Christopher Nolan his overdue Oscar and is the first blockbuster to win since Return of the King.
2024–Anora wins all of the top awards, including Editing and Screenplay.

Trump era again

Just ahead of the 2024 election, Joe Biden delivered a tragic debate performance, despite enlisting the help of Hollywood heavyweights like Spielberg and Katzenberg. George Clooney writes an op-ed pushing him out. He refuses to go, but then finally relents. Kamala Harris has 107 days to make up the difference, but she loses. Trump wins again.

The mass hysteria isn’t quite on par with 2016. The Left has graduated from fear and panic to seething hatred, insisting America is under an evil dictatorship rather than face why they lost the election. Many of the films released this year for the Oscars reflect the time gone by, the collectivist era.

Split Vote vs. Sweeps

What’s remarkable about the new Academy era is how the wins have locked in, denying a split. Let’s look at how that went:

2016–split – La La Land Director/Moonlight Picture
2017–no split–The Shape of Water Picture/Director
2018–split-Roma wins Director/Green Book wins Picture
2019–no split–Parasite Picture/Director
2020–no split–Nomadland Picture/Director
2021–split–Power of the Dog director/CODA Picture
2022–No split–Everything Everywhere All At Once–Picture/Director
2023–No split–Oppenheimer Picture/Director
2024–No split-Anora Picture/Director

Scott Kernen was the first person to alert me to this emerging pattern. 2016 was the last time there was a split with the director also nominated. However, since then, the only time a split occurred was when the director of the Best Picture winner wasn’t nominated. That tells me there’s a good chance there won’t be a split, and it’s an all-or-nothing proposition.

Many of us, including The Contending’s Clarence Moye, are thinking about a potential split with Hamnet in Best Picture and Paul Thomas Anderson for Best Director. However, if both are nominated for Best Director, it seems unlikely that this new Academy would stray from its chosen director. So, probably if you think One Battle After Another is the winner, then PTA is the director, obviously. But if you think another movie wins Picture, then that director should be pulled in along with the movie.

The box office for One Battle might end up doing what Killers of the Flower Moon did, which wasn’t that bad — though China could push it over the top and hand it something better, like maybe $200 mil. But then there’s the politics. I continue to believe it is too divisive to win. I think the critics have gone overboard, and I believe the pundits will push it too hard, which will make voters less inclined to vote for it.

When The Graduate was up against In the Heat of the Night, voters opted to split those votes early on with the Golden Globes. It made sense that the split was pre-ordained. Could that happen this year? Maybe. However, it’s also likely that we’ll see the Academy do what it wants to do, and that might mean a break from the big guilds, as we saw in 2019.

But for now, I feel I can’t split them, so if it’s Hamnet, it’s Chloé Zhao coming in to make history with her second win. If it’s Sinners, it’s Ryan Coogler coming in to make history as the first Black director to win in 96 years of Oscar history. If it’s PTA, then One Battle wins both Picture and Director. It is a coin toss.

Might Jon M. Chu and Wicked for Good come in and sweep everything? Maybe. Who knows. We can’t decide this race until we’ve seen all the movies.

I don’t feel confident predicting a movie I haven’t seen — it never works out well when I do that but I have to continue to think Hamnet will prevail — though I also think Sinners could make a last-minute rally. It’s hard to know. Hamnet feels more universal, less specific.

Best Picture

1. Hamnet
2. Sinners
3. One Battle After Another
4. Sentimental Value
5. Wicked: For Good
6. Frankenstein
7. Bugonia
8. Weapons
9. Avatar: Fire and Ash
10. A House of Dynamite
11. Marty Supreme
12. It Was Just an Accident
13. Jay Kelly
14. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

Best Director

1. Chloé Zhao, Hamnet
2. Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another
3. Ryan Coogler, Sinners
4. Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value
5. Guillermo Del Toro, Frankenstein

Best Actor

1. Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another
2. Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme
3. Jeremy Allen White, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
4. Dwayne Johnson, The Smashing Machine
5. Michael B. Jordan, Sinners

Best Actress

1. Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
2. Cynthia Erivo, Wicked: For Good
3. Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value
4. Emma Stone, Bugonia
5. Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Supporting Actor

1. Paul Mescal, Hamnet
2. Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value
3. Delroy Lindo, Sinners
4. Adam Sandler, Jay Kelly
5. Sean Penn, One Battle After Another

Supporting Actress

1. Amy Madigan, Weapons
2. Elle Fanning, Sentimental Vallue
3. Ariana Grande, Wicked: For Good
4. Ayo Edebiri, After the Hunt
5. Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another

Original Screenplay

1. Sinners
2. Sentimental Value
3. Weapons
4. House of Dynamite
5. Bugonia

Adapted Screenplay

1. Hamnet
2. One Battle After Another
3. The Life of Chuck
4. Bugonia
5. Wicked: For Good

Casting

1. One Battle After Another
2. Sinners
3. Wicked: For Good
4. Hamnet
5. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

International Feature

1. No Other Choice
2. Sentimental Value
3. The Voice of Hind Rajab
4. Sirāt
5. The Secret Agent

Cinematography

1. One Battle After Another
2. Hamnet
3. Sinners
4. Avatar: Fire and Ash
5. Frankenstein

Editing

1. One Battle After Another
2. Sinners
3. F1
4. Marty Supreme
5. The Smashing Machine

Production Design

1. Sinners
2. Avatar Fire and Ash
3. Frankenstein
4. Wicked: For Good
5. Hamnet

Makeup and Hairstyling

1. The Smashing Machine
2. Christy
3. Frankenstein
4. Wicked: For Good
5. Sinners

Visual Effects

1. Avatar: Fire and Ash
2. Frankenstein
3. Superman
4. Wicked: For Good
5. F1

Sound

1. Sinners
2. Avatar: Fire and Ash
3. F1
4. Wicked: For Good
5. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

At any rate, there are no frontrunners at the moment and I can’t get any kind of accurate read on the race.