My Final 2026 Oscar Predictions, Including A Chalamet vs. Jordan Upset

If you’d asked me just two months ago how the 2026 Oscars season was shaping up, I’d have said we were looking at another very standard, predictable awards run. The past few years have seen major sweeps from long-standing front-runners (Everything Everywhere All At Once, Oppenheimer, Anora), and at one point, we were facing something very similar.

Now, with less than a week until the 98th Academy Awards, things look very different. Frontrunners have stumbled, new leaders have pulled ahead of the pack, and dismissed favorites have fought back.

With voting closed, here are our final predictions for the 2026 Oscars in the major categories. I’m going to run through the key narratives and debates going on, then present my picks. At the bottom of the article is a breakdown of the major awards you can use to hold me accountable on Oscar night.

Why should you listen to me? I’ve been following the Oscars professionally for 15 years and know what’s a genuine knock against a campaign and what’s online noise. I’ve seen all the movies in contention for the major awards, have followed all the precursor awards and talked to expert pundits throughout the season, and will be seated in the Dolby Theater on Sunday to see if I’m right.

Best Picture: A Two-Horse Race With A Surprise Winner

One Battle After Another has been the Best Picture favorite since the start of the season.

There’s a sense that this is Paul Thomas Anderson’s year. He’s created some of the greatest works of American cinema of the 21st century, yet the Academy hasn’t shown him any love: There Will Be Blood lost to No Country For Old Men after a tightly fought race, while highly-regarded The Master and Phantom Thread struggled to gain momentum in their respective years. One Battle is well-reviewed and performed strongly at the box office (even if its high budget makes profitability questionable), making it a surprise populist pick. Above all, it’s relevant, with a story tackling authoritarianism, immigration, revolution and those pulling the strings behind behind America’s institutions.

Yet another of Warner Bros’ 2025 original projects has slowly pulled into view

I’ll be honest, I didn’t give Sinners serious consideration until the season got into full swing. Even then, I was thinking it stood its best shot with Best Original Screenplay for director Ryan Coogler, an award where the high-concept, the interesting, the genre — the movies unlikely to break Best Picture — tend to succeed. Perhaps I was married to old thinking: in the past four years, only one Best Picture winner (Oppenheimer) didn’t also win the Screenplay award it was nominated for.

So, when Sinners received 16 nominations, an all-time record, that feeling began to shift. With four acting nominations, it broke out of the genre prison that even the likes of The Lord of the Rings couldn’t (despite 11 wins, The Return of the King got zero acting noms) and became the first true horror player since Silence of the Lambs.

The acting attention has pivoted things further. At the Actor Awards, Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor and the cast won Best Ensemble. One Battle succeeded at both the Producers Guild and Directors Guild Awards, and the Writers Guild gave honors to both: Coogler won Original Screenplay, PTA won Adapted.

At this stage, the indications give a 50/50 split between One Battle After Another and Sinners – but I’m getting a stronger pull towards the latter. I’d wager that Sinners will take home Best Picture, with Paul Thomas Anderson getting Best Director. Both filmmakers should also win their respective screenplay races.

Despite that creative race, I would expect a more varied set of acting races.

Acting Awards: Or, Why Timothée Chalamet Won’t Win

Obviously, Jessie Buckley will win Best Actress. There is almost no point entertaining the other, very talented nominees. Buckley has won all the precursor awards (Golden Globe, SAG, BAFTA, and Critics’ Choice), and the last time someone did that but failed on Oscar night was Russell Crowe for A Beautiful Mind, a result of behind-the-scenes drama. Glenn Close did lose out to Olivia Colman in 2019, but there were two key distinctions: Close didn’t win the BAFTA and her campaign was far more a legacy one. Buckley is widely praised, and The Bride! bombing won’t change that.

Supporting Actress I dearly hope goes to Amy Madigan. Her turn as Aunt Gladys in Weapons is one of the most menacing, film-dominating turns in years. She’s a favorite, but there is clear competition. Teyana Taylor in One Battle After Another was the original front-runner, although her campaign has softened as the weeks went on. Wunmi Mosaku won the BAFTA for her work in Sinners, and while that comes with some British favoritism, there is a high favorability for her.

Depending on who you ask, Supporting Actor is a dead cert for any of Sean Penn, Delroy Lindo and Stellan Skarsgård. For me, it has to be Penn. Yes, he isn’t campaigning. Yes, he doesn’t want it. It doesn’t matter because Colonel Lockjaw is just that captivating. He’s the personification of the film’s searing take on American power grabs and the showiest of the lot. Skarsgård or Lindo would have a strong case for a legacy honor, and both personify the word Supporting. Skarsgård, especially, is selfless in constantly pushing the spotlight to his co-stars. But that factor also pushes Penn, who is plainly more fun.

And that brings us to the really tricky category: Best Actor. Timothée Chalamet has been the front-runner since Marty Supreme debuted. Even with his crazed marketing campaign and forward presence in interviews that has rubbed many the wrong way, it was hard to imagine a world where he wouldn’t win. 4 weeks ago, I wrote that there was no clear alternative, meaning a split anti-Timmy vote. Now there is.

Michael B. Jordan won the Actor Award and gave one of the best speeches of the season. Given that came right in the middle of Oscar voting, it became a lot, lot easier for voters to give Jordan the nod. Consider that Chalamet won the Actor last year and is perceived to have tanked his Oscar chances with a self-aggrandizing speech, the reverse happening for Jordan is palpable. At this stage, it’s comfortable to call Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan.

As for Casting, a new category this year, it’s hard to predict without any sense — on the campaign or punditry side — of how voters will go. However, based on SAG’s love of Sinners and the movie’s presence across the acting categories, Francine Maisler is the safe bet. It’s a shame, as the inventive character work of The Secret Agent or scale of One Battle After Another could have been better rewarded here.

What strikes me about this year is that had I locked in my picks in January, I’d have only made half of these choices – and only a third with real certainty. For those keeping track (or holding me to account), here’s a breakdown of all the nominees.

This is just the start of our final Oscar week. On MovieWeb in the coming days are a deep dive into how those much-discussed Oscar betting odds are calculated, and on-the-ground reporting of the night itself from inside the Dolby Theater.