The Industry’s Oscar Predictions

The Industry’s Oscar Predictions

The Oscars aren’t until March 2026, but the race has already fired up.

Industry screenings are happening, and a slew of indies with award hopes are prepping their releases.

While most other publications give percentages or some variation for who they think will be Oscar-nominated. This approach, while a definite Oscar sugar rush, offers false nuance. Unless you poll all the Oscar voters, no one is going to know.

By contrast, what we’ve done is gone through each probable nomination and made the case for why it might be included when the Oscar nominations are released.

Read our inside take on possible Oscar nominations in four key categories:

• Best Picture

• Best Director

• Best Actor

• Best Actress

Without further ado…

Best Picture

In 2010, the Best Picture category increased the number of nominees from five to a potential ten. And so with ten spaces to play for, Best Picture can have the widest variety of films: box office sensations and festival darlings alike.

Possible Best Picture nominees:

• One Battle After Another

• Hamnet

• Sinners

• Sentimental Value

• Wicked: For Good

• It Was Just An Accident

• Jay Kelly

• Marty Supreme

• A House of Dynamite

• Frankenstein

• The Secret Agent

• Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

• Hedda

• Bugonia

• Weapons

• Avatar: Fire and Ash

• Train Dreams

Warner Bros. seems to have a lock on two slots with PTA’s One Battle After Another and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Neon will likely also command two spots with Sentimental Value, and their Cannes Palme d’Or winner, It Was Just an Accident.

If the latter film gets in, it would represent a major moment for Neon. Last year, Neon’s Palme d’Or winner Anora clinched Best Picture at the Oscars. For them to pull this off twice in a row with It Was Just an Accident would be quite a feat.

Focus Features’ Hamnet is also a surefire nomination. The film had an explosive debut at Telluride and TIFF, where it won the top prize, The People’s Choice Award. The last time the director Chloe Zhao won the TIFF People’s Choice Award (Nomadland in 2020), the film went on to win Best Picture.

Netflix has told us they have an “embarrassment of riches” this year, and it’s easy to see why. Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein are all contenders.

Although horror is not favored at the Oscars, Del Toro is a master of the Academy-appreciated genre film. His 2017 amphibious romance, The Shape of Water, is the only fantasy film to ever win Best Picture. I’d bet on Frankenstein over Weapons being picked next year - potentially becoming Del Toro’s third Best Picture nomination.

Bigelow too has also won Best Picture with The Hurt Locker (2008).

The duo behind Netflix’s Train Dreams, Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley, wrote and directed last year’s Best Adapted screenplay nominee, Sing Sing - this was an incredibly powerful piece of cinema, yet was not nominated for Best Picture, meaning Train Dreams may have an outside chance of breaking into the category this year.

Coming in a close fifth is Wicked: For Good, an unsurprising pick, as its cinematic first half was nominated in 2025.

Although it has not yet been released, Marty Supreme, directed by Josh Safdie, is gaining traction after a secret screening at NYFF set the industry buzzing. What’s interesting is the exclusion of the other Safdie brother, Benny Safdie’s A24 film The Smashing Machine starring Dwayne Johnson. Also a biopic about a fringe-sports personality, the film made a big splash at Venice, winning best director, but it fizzled at TIFF and then bombed at the box office despite being Johnson’s best performance to date.

Vying for the 10th spot are Frankenstein, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Weapons and Train Dreams, among others.

Seeing as the previous two installments of Avatar, masterclasses in world-building and VFX, were nominated for Best Picture, we would usually assume Fire and Ash would be an automatic nomination. But the last film came out in 2022, and the DNA of the academy has changed significantly since then—shifting towards international and festival darlings.

Best Director

Recently, the Academy has seen an influx of international members, which could explain the popularity of overseas directors in the running to take home Directing’s most renowned award.

Possible Best Director nominees:

• Paul Thomas Anderson - One Battle After Another

• Ryan Coogler - Sinners

• Chloé Zhao - Hamnet

• Jafar Panahi - I Was Just an Accident

• Joachim Trier - Sentimental Value

• Noah Baumbach - Jay Kelly

• Josh Safdie - Marty Supreme

• Kathryn Bigelow - A House of Dynamite

• Guillermo del Toro - Frankenstein

• Kleber Mendonça Filho - The Secret Agent

International directors Panahi, Trier, and Filho all made a splash at Cannes with their films, with the former two winning the Palme d’Or and Grand Prix respectively. There is a definite correlation between big festival winners and Oscar nominations (more on that in a future article).

Ryan Coogler, one of cinema’s most powerful voices, is a near-certain contender; up there with the hugely celebrated PTA, who has achieved a nomination hat-trick in this category for There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread, and Licorice Pizza.

A Best Director nomination would mark a key point in Coogler’s career; although Black Panther made history by being the only superhero film to be nominated for Best Picture, he has yet to receive recognition in the directing category. Could this be the beginning of Coogler’s own string of directorial nods?

The rest of the list is chock full of big players that have been awarded Best Director before: Chloe Zhao in 2020 for Nomadland, Guillermo Del Toro in 2017 for The Shape of Water, and Kathryn Bigelow in 2009 for The Hurt Locker. It’s a list full of enormous talent.

Best Actor

• Timothee Chalamet - Marty Supreme

• Leonardo DiCaprio - One Battle After Another

• Jeremy Allen White - Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

• Wagner Moura - The Secret Agent

• George Clooney - Jay Kelly

• Dwayne Johnson - The Smashing Machine

• Ethan Hawke - Blue Moon

• Michael B. Jordan - Sinners

• Jesse Plemons - Bugonia

It’s no surprise that Leonardo DiCaprio (the previous “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” of this category until his win in 2015) would be top of the list, as well as Chalamet, who at only 29 has been nominated twice before.

Coming in close behind is Jeremy Allen-White, who would keep the trend alive of Best Actor noms for music biopic roles; Chalamet as Bob Dylan, Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury, and Austin Butler as Elvis (I can already see the torrent of nominations for the future Beatles leads.)

There are so many reasons each actor on this list could catapult into the top five. Michael B Jordan was celebrated for playing not one, but two unique and complex characters in one film. Ethan Hawke (who has been nominated for Supporting Actor twice) creates a performance like he’s never delivered before. And Dwayne Johnson/A24 are on an all-out media blitz to make sure he scores the nom for his career-defying role.

Not forgetting Jesse Plemons, a characterful performer who has steadily contributed a plethora of fantastic roles to cinema, has been nominated previously for Supporting Actor (in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog), but never for a lead performance. His talent is definitely deserving.

Best Actress

• Jessie Buckley - Hamnet

• Renate Reinsve - Sentimental Value

• Cynthia Erivo - Wicked: For Good

• Emma Stone - Bugonia

• Rose Byrne - If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

• Chase Infiniti - One Battle After Another

• Kate Hudson - Song Sung Blue

• Amanda Seyfried - The Testament of Ann Lee

• Jennifer Lawrence - Die My Love

Three major players dominate the list here. Both Jessie Buckley and Renate Reinsve capture something powerful in their performances that caused such an exciting buzz on the festival circuit. Buckley’s performance as William Shakespeare’s tortured wife taps into the dark forces of nature, while Reinsve plays a nuanced actress trying to hold herself together as a whirlwind of emotions and generational anger rage inside of her.

Erivo was considered one of the top contenders for winning Best Actress last year with Wicked’s first installment, meaning it is likely she will see another nomination for its second, though the second installment has yet to be released; her first outing defined what we mean when we say “performer.”

The fifth spot is very much up for grabs. Jennifer Lawrence and Amanda Seyfried have both been nominated for Oscars before (with Lawrence winning Best Actress in 2013 for Silver Linings Playbook and Seyfried being nominated for Supporting Actress in 2021 for Mank). On the other end of the spectrum is the fresh face of Chase Infiniti, who burst onto screens with her feature debut One Battle After Another, and before that, in her insane role in Apple TV+’s Presumed Innocent. Could one film capture the career of an acting legend (DiCaprio) while launching the stardom of another?

Epilogue…

Stay tuned for our next two articles, further analyzing the unwritten rules of the Oscars and the surprising outliers that break them.