Oscars 2026 - Thoughts & Predictions
If Sinners sweeps I'm gonna crash out
The 98th Academy Awards are less than a day away. Having seen all ten films nominated for Best Picture and having closely followed this year’s seemingly endless awards season - not to mention having had my brain rotted by the terrible movie takes, narratives, and “controversies” on film Twitter over the last few weeks - below are my general thoughts and predictions for a few major categories at tomorrow’s Oscars.
By this time tomorrow, you’ll know how well I did on my predictions and how happy I am about who won and who didn’t.
Best Picture
Nominees:
Bugonia
F1
Frankenstein
Hamnet
Marty Supreme (should win)
One Battle After Another (will win)
The Secret Agent
Sentimental Value
Sinners (could win)
Train Dreams
At this point, Best Picture is basically a two-way race between Sinners and One Battle After Another. No other film has a chance. I’m predicting OBAA to narrowly cross the finish line because it has won literally every precursor award it was up for. It was also hugely acclaimed when it came out and the industry seems to genuinely love it.
That said, after Sinners won big at the Actor awards recently - keeping in mind that the Actors Guild is a subset of the Academy - there’s been a new Sinners narrative on social media with many predicting that film to sweep tomorrow. It already made history with sixteen nominations, the most ever, but I think this narrative is a bit forced and that OBAA will hold the line.
Personally I think Marty Supreme was by far the best film of 2025 and a cut above the rest. I would rate the ten nominees somewhat like this: Marty Supreme >> Hamnet, Train Dreams >> One Battle After Another > Sentimental Value, Bugonia, The Secret Agent > F1, Sinners, Frankenstein. I wouldn’t mind OBAA winning, as it has some great parts, but Sinners is one of the weakest out of all ten, which is what makes its dominance so annoying. You can read my thoughts on each nominated film on my Letterboxd.
I like this year’s crop of nominees, though. They’re generally good films from diverse genres and languages and they all deal with interesting ideas. If you’ve been following the Oscars for a while you know things could be a lot worse.
Best Director
Nominees:
Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another (will win)
Ryan Coogler, Sinners
Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme (should win)
Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value
Chloé Zhao, Hamnet
PTA is a lock for Best Director. He’s won every precursor award this season, OBAA is genuinely inventive in its filmmaking, and though I haven’t seen most of his work, he’s been an acclaimed filmmaker for two decades and has the “long overdue” narrative going for him. The latter might be the most important factor here.
Personally I would pick Josh Safdie because I found Marty Supreme to be a uniquely chaotic and intense experience in way only a Safdie film can be, and when an auteur filmmaker is able to execute their vision that well they should be awarded. (That someone like Wes Anderson still hasn’t won grinds my gears so much.) But I’m fine with PTA taking the prize too. The underground railroad and the car chase sequences in that film alone make him a deserving winner.
Best Actor
Nominees:
Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme (should win) (will win)
Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another
Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon
Michael B. Jordan, Sinners
Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent
This is the main category of the night. It’s genuinely unstable in the sense that you could make a strong argument for four out of the five nominees etching out a win (Hawke seems the weakest), and it would sound believable.
Timothée Chalamet was the guy to beat all along and won a couple of precursor awards early on in the season, but after Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor at SAG and Chalamet said some mean (but true) things about ballet and opera in a recent interview, the tide seems to have turned, with all publications and prediction markets now predicting MBJ to take this home.
I still think Chalamet has enough star power and international appeal to see this through. MBJ is the weakest performance for me here - and not even the best double-role performance of 2025, something Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17 did way better - and his SAG win doesn’t mean as much when you factor in that Chalamet probably lost SAG because that body doesn’t seem to like repeat winners, and that he won in 2025 as well, when he made his “I’m in the pursuit of greatness” speech.
I’ve seen four out of the five nominees here, and I need Timothée Chalamet to win this for the simple reason that he gave the best performance out of all four. (I’m never going to watch Blue Moon, sorry Richard Linklater!) Also, the Oscars keep making this mistake of not awarding actors for their best performances in their prime, and thus giving them a long overdue trophy years later for something far more forgettable, robbing someone else in the process. (See DiCaprio winning for The Revenant, Gary Oldman winning for Darkest Hour, and so on.) Best Actor has in the last decade become this weird proxy for a Lifetime Achievement Award and that needs to stop. The funny thing here is that even by that logic Chalamet would still be the most deserving nominee just based on his filmography.
There is a theory that MBJ and Chalamet could split enough votes between themselves that DiCaprio sneaks in to win, which I wouldn’t really mind because he’s hilarious in his movie and funny performances don’t win Oscars very often. (“What’s up, guys? You guys cool? You guys hangin’?”)
Best Actress
Nominees:
Jessie Buckley, Hamnet (should win) (will win)
Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue
Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value
Emma Stone, Bugonia
This is the single easiest category to predict for the entire night. Buckley has won every award in existence leading up to the Oscars. Each year, of the four acting categories, there’s always at one actor that sweeps the every award in their category is 100% guaranteed to win by Oscar night, and that seems to be the case for Best Actress this year. (Ironically, though, that's what everyone thought about Best Actress last year as well, where Demi Moore won every precursor only to lose out at the end.)
I haven’t seen two of the nominees here, but having watched Hamnet I’m not in the least surprised that Buckley is set to win. The entire film, especially the ending scene, rests on her shoulders, and she’s able to give a very moving portrayal of parental grief and coming to terms with it solely through her expressions and body language, without speaking a single word. It’s mesmerizing.
Best Supporting Actor
Nominees:
Benicio Del Toro, One Battle After Another
Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein
Delroy Lindo, Sinners
Sean Penn, One Battle After Another (should win) (will win)
Stellan Skarsgard, Sentimental Value
This is a category I wouldn’t mind anyone winning as I liked all the performances here for different reasons. Elordi was the only good part of Frankenstein, Del Toro’s line reading of “a few small bears” alone deserves its own award, and Skarsgard played a character so complex I had no idea what he was thinking, I just knew it was something deep. (Haha.)
This is a race between Skarsgard and Sean Penn, though, and it seems Penn is going to take it. It’s genuinely hilarious how two-time Oscar winner Sean Penn doesn’t seem to give a damn about awards, has skipped most ceremonies, and yet the Academy keeps awarding him. He seems to have not campaigned this season at all. But the acting speaks for itself. He deserves it just for adding so much personality to Lockjaw, making him so detestable with the facial ticks, the grotesque body language, and that Looney-Toons-esque walk. A truly great performance.
Best Supporting Actress
Nominees:
Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value (should win)
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value
Amy Madigan, Weapons (will win)
Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners
Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another
Contrary to Best Supporting Actor, this is a category I’m not much invested in because I didn’t particularly care for any of the performances here. I don’t think Teyana Taylor should’ve been nominated at all. Amy Madigan seems to be the frontrunner and I love Sinners but the fact that she’s the one aspect they liked most from that film is baffling.
If I could I’d vote Elle Fanning simply because she plays an actress in Sentimental Value, who’s acting in a movie within the movie you’re watching, which I’m sure is way more difficult than it seems.
Best Original Score
![Bugonia (2025) [REVIEW] | The Wolfman Cometh](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ncTg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90a3b4dc-4960-4621-809c-abfd5c4602eb_960x500.jpeg "Bugonia (2025) [REVIEW] | The Wolfman Cometh")
Nominees:
Bugonia
Frankenstein
Hamnet
One Battle After Another (should win)
Sinners (will win)
The real “should win” of this category is Marty Supreme. It’s score was electric and energetic in a way that perfectly suited the film’s energy. But the current music branch of the Academy seems to hate electronic music and swings way more towards the old school orchestral kind. In retrospect it’s incredible that The Social Network won in this category back in 2011 at all.
But if not for Marty I’d rather have OBAA take this because I’ve seen that film only once, last summer, and I still remember the hypnotic, minimalist piano that underlined much of the film’s movement. Hamnet also had good music but I later discovered that a huge chunk of the music in it was non-original played at the end was an old song. Sinners will take this but that would be deserved, the music was great, especially in that one scene everyone talks about. Ludwig Göransson is on a generational run and is set to score Nolan’s The Odyssey as well.
Best Cinematography
Nominees:
Frankenstein
Marty Supreme
One Battle After Another
Sinners (will win)
Train Dreams (should win)
I can’t believe that Frankenstein, a movie that looks like a video game cutscene, was nominated here. I’m predicting Sinners to carry all technical categories just by default unless I have good reason to think otherwise. I thought the nature photography in Train Dreams was gorgeous and would like to see it win here. OBAA also had some crazy camerawork though.
Best Film Editing
Nominees:
F1
Marty Supreme (should win)
One Battle After Another (will win)
Sentimental Value
Sinners
Editing is the secret sauce that makes Marty such a high-octane ride. The pacing of that film is immaculate. The problem is that I don’t see Marty winning anything other than Best Actor, if that at all, and OBAA is the next best contender that could take this for similar reasons.
Best Visual Effects
Nominees:
Avatar: Fire and Ash (will win)
F1
Jurassic World Rebirth (should win)
The Lost Bus
Sinners
In spite of me predicting Sinners’ dominance in most technical categories, I would never bet against a James Cameron film for visual effects. I haven’t and never will watch the third Avatar and so will pick Jurassic World as my preference just by default, because those dinosaurs did look quite good. In the last decade though, Best Visual Effects has been an extremely unpredictable category and I think all five of these could win.
Thoughts on Other Categories
Even though I consider the Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay categories to be one of the “major” ones, I didn’t elaborate on them above because the nominees in both almost completely overlap with Best Picture, and I didn’t have anything new to say about either. I’m predicting Sinners and OBAA to win each respectively, obviously.
I’m generally into Best Animated Feature but this time have seen only two of the five nominees and thus couldn’t elaborate on it either. Obviously KPop Demon Hunters is a lock here, and for Best Original Song as well.
Every year I think to myself, “this time I’ll watch all the Best Documentary nominees!”, and every year I never do so, not even one. Same with shorts.
I think F1 could legit snatch Best Sound cause those cars do be going vroom vroom pretty loudly.
There’s a new Best Casting category and I have no idea how you’re supposed to judge the casting for a film without knowing who all auditioned for it. But that’s most categories anyway. How do you judge Best Editing without having seen all the raw footage of the film? This is all stupid fun anyway.
My last take on this whole thing is that the nominees this year are good but the Academy has gotten quite lazy and just nominates a select bunch of films for everything. I miss the days when non-Best-Picture-nominated movies would sneak into major categories, and even win sometimes.
Otherwise generally looking forward to watch the Oscars tomorrow.
Haven't watch most of these. But whatever I have watched deserves to be in there for something or the other. I might be back here tomorrow to count how many you got right. 😂would be even better if you post your own scores.