We are back! It’s time to begin predicting for the 98th Academy Awards! Last awards season was a tricky and windy road, where one moment Emilia Perez garnered 13 Oscar nominations and was considered the frontrunner (before it imploded), to Conclave having a late surgence, winning Bafta and SAG, ultimately to the Palme d’Or winning indie drama, Anora, clinching Sean Baker four Oscars, inducting Mikey Madison to Hollywood glory, and winning indie distributor, Neon, their second Best Picture Oscar. 

Predicting the Oscars this early can seem presumptuous. Here we have Best Picture predictions (this early in the year before the fall festivals have happened) meant as a temperature check of the season, and expectations for the rest of the contenders bubbling on the surface. 

Ever since the podcast review, I’ve held on to the belief that Sinners will be a top-five contender and garner double-digit nominations. The film has been a box office success, with high positive critical and audience reception. It reinforced Ryan Coogler as one of the most popular auteurs in Hollywood. Except for 2020 and 2013, there has been a film that premiered before the fall festivals that received a Best Picture nomination. Think of nominees like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Get Out (2017), Coogler’s Black Panther (2018), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Barbie (2023), and Dune: Part Two as notable examples. 

Warner Bros. has Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Based loosely on Thomas Pynchon’s novel, this film needs to garner high critical reception and box office success to match Anderson’s previous films and high budget. Anderson has a total of eleven nominations, including three for Best Picture. With the nature of adapting a voice like Pynchon, and Anderson’s previous Pynchon adaptation of Inherent Vice (2014), Battle could prove to be a difficult pill for the Academy. 

It will be an interesting year, as many studios have multiple contenders in play. Neon bolsters a ton of the Cannes Film Festival competition slate, with Sentimental Value and It Was Just an Accident, which both won the Grand Prix and Palme d’Or, respectively. They also have The Secret Agent, which won the Director and Actor awards. Neon has yet to have two films nominated for Best Picture in one season, but this could change with the breadth of their slate. Joachim Trier is a previous nominee for The Worst Person in the World (2021), and the positive buzz out of Cannes cements Sentimental Value as Neon’s main contender. Last year, Perez, Anora, and The Substance were Cannes holdovers that received Best Picture nominations, benefiting from the expanded international voting bloc. It’s safe to assume two or three of these contenders could be nominated.

Another major distributor in the indie space is Mubi. They achieved tremendous success with The Substance, and they now seem emboldened to continue their momentum, as they acquired several Cannes titles: Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love and The Sound of Falling, the latter of which won the Jury Prize. 

It wouldn’t be an awards season without the presence of Netflix. Since 2018, they have received ten Best Picture nominations. This year feels similar to their early slate, where for three years (2019-202), two of their films were nominated for Picture each year. Noah Baumbach returns with Jay Kelly, featuring a starry ensemble cast, and feels reminiscent of the Oscar prestige he achieved with Marriage Story (2019). 

The other film is Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Described as a passion project, del Toro is an Oscar darling, having won Best Picture and Director for The Shape of Water (2017) and his adaptation of Pinocchio (2022). The trailer promises to be a well-crafted mixture of gothic horror and period drama. This is the type of contender that can nab many technical nominations, alongside Director and Picture, and seems viable for a Picture nomination; even in a prior instance, del Toro’s Nightmare Alley (2021) surprised with a Best Picture nomination with only three craft nominations. 

Other plays include Wicked: For Good. 2024’s Wicked was a global sensation that was nominated for ten Oscars and won two. For Good promises to be a satisfying conclusion to the famous Broadway musical. Regardless of it being a Part Two sequel, The Two Towers (another film was released a year after the predecessor), Dune, and Avatar sequels have proven they can lose several of their original nominations and still receive a Best Picture nomination. 

Speaking of Avatar, James Cameron’s third entry, Fire and Ash, hopes to replicate Way of Water’s nominations haul. It and For Good will represent the populist blockbuster nominees that are the perfect intersection of art and commerce, to which the Academy will embrace. 

After the Oscar success of Poor Things (2023), Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone return with Bugonia, another black comedy in the Lanthimos vein with a sci-fi bent. Unlike Things and The Favorite (2018), Bugonia is a contemporary film, so it may lack the technical crafts that his previous films benefited from. The one downside is that the usual Lanthimos collaborator, Tony McNamara, isn’t returning for writing duties. (Will Tracy is the sole credited writer.) Searchlight will premiere one of their big contenders, Rental Family, at TIFF. Brandon Fraser stars in what is described as a dramedy. The film seems like the perfect candidate to win the TIFF Audience Award with its mix of out-of-water comedy and heartfelt drama. 

A24 is betting hard on the Safdie brothers, as they’re positioning Josh’s Marty Supreme and Benny’s The Smashing Machine as their big contenders, unless they acquire something from the fall festival circuit, similar to them acquiring The Brutalist from Venice last season. Both films are led by heavy Best Actor contenders in Timothée Chalamet and Dayne Johnson, respectively. I’m leaning toward Supreme, as its Christmas Day release indicates A24 is aiming for awards awareness (similar to Chalamet’s A Complete Unknown last year) and box office potential. 

With all of that in mind, here are my July predictions for the 2026 Best Picture nominations:

  1. Sinners
  2. Sentimental Value
  3. Jay Kelly
  4. Bugonia
  5. Rental Family
  6. Frankenstein
  7. Wicked: For Good
  8. It Was Just an Accident
  9. Marty Supreme
  10. Avatar: Fire and Ash

Alternates:

  1. One Battle After Another
  2. After the Hunt 
  3. Springstein: Deliver Me From Nowhere
  4. Hamnet 
  5. The Lost Bus

Analysis Courtesy of Amritpal Rai

Feature Image Credit to Warner Bros. Discovery via No Film School