The Oscars 2026 Race Is All Over the Place
There have long been rumblings among the mainstream viewing public that the Oscars, nowadays, makes for a tediously boring affair. But even to those of us who have stubbornly continued to follow awards season like it’s the NBA finals, making a game of trying to work out who’s going to win what, Hollywood’s favorite night has become tiresomely predictable. Although last year’s run to Best Picture felt fairly open up to the end, with Anora eventually coming out on top, it has tended not to result in surprises in recent memory (save for Coda‘s last ditch win in 2022). The same can be broadly said about most of the major categories. In that sense, this year couldn’t be more different. On the road to the Oscars 2026, there have been twists and upsets aplenty; results that might’ve seemed like dead certainties a month ago are now very much up in the air.
Ask anyone in the middle of January, and they would’ve had Timothée Chalamet as their out-and-out favorite for Best Actor. However, now that a series of results have gone against him—including the BAFTAs last weekend, and Michael B. Jordan’s win at the Actor Awards (formerly known as the Screen Actors Guild Awards) last night—it seems like an increasingly unlikely outcome. And indeed, before last night, the prevailing notion was that Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another was the Best Picture winner elect, with the ceremony looking to be more of a coronation than the end of a competitive race that was going down to the wire. But then Sinners took home the biggest gong at the Actor Awards, the award for Best Ensemble, which is viewed by many prognosticators as one of the most significant bellwethers for the primo prize at the Oscars. In its wake, the thought has emerged online that we might be seeing a late-stage Sinners surge.
Survey the rest of the categories, and based on the results at the major precursors, it’s tough to pick out favorites, save for Jessie Buckley in Supporting Actress, the only contender cruising towards an inevitable win for her part in Hamnet. The other acting categories have all been wildly unpredictable en route to the Oscars, though recent trends suggest that Sean Penn’s win for One Battle After Another at the Actor Awards will see him raise the statuette come March 15, given the last nine winners have all gone on to Oscar success, per Gold Derby. (He also beat Stellan Skarsgård to the BAFTA.) It has been similarly impossible to read the tea leaves in the Supporting Actress race, with each of the major players winning something on the run-up; the Actor Awards boosted the chances of Weapons‘ Amy Madigan, who hilariously mounted the stage doing the much-memed run of the movie’s brainwashed kids.
It all makes for an Oscars race that, even two weeks out, is far too close to call. Suffice to say, that is much more interesting—and, crucially, fun!—than the predictable alternative that we’ve seen in recent years. And while we all obviously have personal favorites, cinema-going being an entirely subjective hobby, it’s also the first ceremony in recent memory where a disappointing upset seems unlikely. Any of the eventual winners would be worthy, which makes for a refreshing change from another trend in recent Oscars’ past that has compounded our disillusionment with awards season: the perception that the worst thing always claims the crown, despite the surfeit of superior nominees. (Yes, Green Book still hurts.) For once, whoever loses, we win. And that’s an Oscar ceremony I want to see—even if I’m one of three people still sour that Hugh Jackman was overlooked for Song Sung Blue.
