2026 Oscar Predictions: How to Read the Room

Predicting the Oscars isn’t hard. At least, it isn’t hard anymore. It’s all about the tastemakers, the publicists and the money involved. It is about being King or Queen for a day and what would motivate a consensus to celebrate you in a few months’ time. What would make them feel like their vote was going toward a higher purpose? What does their vote say about themselves? How does it make them feel?

It turns out, people aren’t all that different from each other. Once you can suss out the consensus – how old, where from, what kind of education, how wealthy, it’s more or less easy after that. Knowing the consensus is key to all of it. That’s how political polls work. Poll a sample of the like-minded, and it follows that the broader consensus will agree.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t surprises. Sometimes there are. Last year, almost no one thought Anora would win. It was just a few of us, none of those at Gold Derby or any of the other prediction sites that had Sean Baker to win the PGA and DGA. And though I nailed those, I wasn’t bullish on Mikey Madison to win until Kris Tapley reminded me of the Frances McDormand rule. If Nomadland was winning Best Picture and Director, and McDormand was the whole movie, why wouldn’t she also win Best Actress?

However, finding the nominees and standouts is generally not difficult. They’re shaped by the people who do the predicting. Funny how that works, eh? It’s not as though the race was pristine before we came along. The same game was played. It was just played in a slightly different way.

Complicating matters now are the approximately 3,000 Oscar voters invited in during the Great Awokening to diversify the membership. They are mostly international, non-white, female, young. That’s slightly harder and a new consensus to get to know, though it explains how Anora swept last year, that’s for sure.

The objectives of old-time Academy members will be slightly different. They’ve worked in the industry for decades and have seen it all. They seem to be more likely to vote for change or social justice reasons, as opposed to the newcomers, who tend to prefer experimental or daring cinema.

We are talking about large voting bodies; however, once we get to the big guilds and the Academy. Here are the updated numbers:

Screen Actors Guild (SAG): 129,092
Directors Guild (DGA): 18,000
Producers Guild (PGA): 8,400
Academy: 10,000+

Even with a large consensus, there can be some surprises unless there are winners who start winning the season and never stop. Last year was a crazy, unprecedented year with a lot of major events that impacted the race, like the presidential election and the fires in Los Angeles. For me personally, last year was incredibly difficult to get through – for those who worked for me and for me – after a hit piece landed in the Hollywood Reporter (which I have not read and never will read). I had to decide whether I wanted to keep this website, which I’d worked so hard to maintain for the past 26 years, or whether I’d call it quits. I still haven’t made up my mind.

Either way, the Oscars 2024 was a long, strange trip, with Emilia Perez crashing and burning, and the subsequent humiliation of the Academy (emphasis mine) for not inviting its star, Karla Sofia Gascon. Other than Anora, I barely remember it. Do you?

To read the room now is to understand the consensus. By the time we get to the Oscars, after the critics awards and the guild awards, we more or less know the direction the race will take. So then it becomes trying to suss out the precursors. Who will dominate the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice, New York and Los Angeles Film Critics. Then, the DGA, the PGA and the SAG.

Let’s take a look at the calendar:

December 5, 2025
Critics Choice nominations

December 8, 2025
Golden Globe nominations

January 7, 2026
Screen Actors Guild nominations
Directors Guild nominations

January 9, 2026
Producers Guild nominations

January 11, 2026
Golden Globes

January 12, 2026
Oscar voting begins

January 14, 2026
SAG final voting begins

January 16, 2026
Oscar voting ends

January 27, 2026
SAG voting ends

February 7, 2026
DGA Awards

February 26, 2026
Final Oscar voting begins

March 1, 2026
SAG Awards

March 5, 2026
Final Oscar voting ends

March 15, 2026
The Oscars

So, you can see right away that the SAG Awards have been scheduled before Oscar ballots are turned in, which means the SAGs will be influential, whereas in the past couple of years they haven’t been.

You can also see that there is a very short window for Oscar nominations, just four days. But a slightly longer window for picking winners. All of the major guilds will have announced their winners by the time final votes are tallied.

That’s the easy part. The harder part will be working through the broader themes of this year. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners doing well in this race is a no-brainer for so many different reasons. The first, is that he comes into this thing overdue for accolades. Fruitvale Station – despite my own advocacy – was shut out of the Oscars, but then Coogler made Black Panther (Best Picture nominee), Creed, and Wakanda Forever. That means he’s racked up major hits. Sinners was a cultural phenomenon when it premiered in theaters, effortlessly cool.

The Old Academy might have thought, since it’s about vampires, that it’s not a serious contender, but with the new kids, it will be among the exciting, daring cinema they value. Chasing right behind it, in my view, is “Sentimental Value” by Joaquim Trier, a smaller character drama about showbiz people that might resonate with both older and newer voters.

Everything else is in the “I don’t know” category because none of us knows until these films start being seen. By Monday, we’ll know what’s playing in Venice and Toronto. That should give us a good idea of what’s headed to Telluride and then perhaps New York and AFI.

Now that we’ve seen the trailer for Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, it’s easier to see the tone of this thriller. In making one of the major characters Black and not dodging what that would mean in real life, After the Hunt will, I predict, turn out to be more about race than about Me Too.

The discourse on After the Hunt will likely spread rapidly across TikTok, I predict, as it has with Sinners and, surprisingly, Superman, now that many have applied it to a colonizer/colonized scenario (i.e., the war in Gaza). After the Hunt, at least from what I can tell in the trailer (which is different from the script) will get very messy in terms of “white spaces” and what the kids call Misogynoir (abuse toward Black women).

It’s unavoidable with an Ivy League scenario and mostly white characters, with the one Black character who claims she’s been assaulted. All the white people who don’t believe her, and the inclination toward elevating Black women among the hive mind, and you can see how this will play out.

With Ayo Edebiri in After the Hunt vying for a Supporting Actress nod, and Jeremy Allen White pursuing the Springsteen doc for Best Actor, we could see a The Bear reunion at the Oscars, just as we saw a Succession reunion last year. I am predicting both Edebiri and White to win at the moment.

As far as Best Picture goes, it might just be Sinners, and that is that. If so, Ryan Coogler makes history as the first Black director ever to win, and he’d be winning not as a virtue signal but because he deserves it. That would be something to see as the Oscars head into their 98th year, virtue signal flags a-flying.

Someone, somewhere, will someday say (if he wins), it took the Academy 98 years to give a Black director an Oscar for directing. I would imagine for the Good People of the Left that might sting a little.

Sinners as the winner would be how the Oscars are supposed to go – a film that captured the zeitgeist, made a lot of money, and carried with it a deeper, more meaningful message. They’d be fools not to give it to him. But it’s early yet. There are other movies still to be seen. An enthusiasm explosion is coming to a film festival near you.

If I had to guess right here and right now what the themes would be, I’d say more cosplaying oppression by the people with all of the power. There will be self-righteous speeches followed by standing ovations. There will be many people who believe we are under the control of a “fascist” even though if we really were no one could say it out loud. That won’t stop them from their phantasmagoria. They are trapped in a Doomsday Bunker. They’ve become wild-eyed preppers by now, who can’t bear to even open the hatch to see what’s out there on the outside. It’s too dangerous.

Given that, I imagine their choices will be things that resonate in that direction. Sinners, After the Hunt, the Springsteen doc by association (he’s a Trump hater and the King of self-righteous speeches), Wicked for Good, A House of Dynamite, One Battle After Another, Jay Kelly (George Clooney is a Trump hater and another giver of self-righteous speeches). Those are, so far, the ones I see landing in the sweet spot of cosplay oppression. But who knows. Maybe there will be more.

Here are my predictions for this week (from the Awards Expert app – you can follow us there):

Picture:

1. Sinners
2. Sentimental Value
3. Wicked for Good
4. A House of Dynamite
5. After the Hunt
6. One Battle After Another
7. Hamnet
8. Jay Kelly
9. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
10. Ballad of a Small Player

Director:

1. Ryan Coogler, Sinners
2. Joaquim Trier, Sentimental Value
3. Jon Chu, Wicked for Good
4. Luca Guadagnino, After the Hunt
5. Kathryn Bigelow, A House of Dynamite

Best Actor:

1. Jeremy Allen White, Deliver Me From Nowhere
2. Michael B. Jordan, Sinners
3. Timothee Chalamet, Marty Supreme
4. George Clooney, Jay Kelly
5. Colin Farrell, Ballad of a Small Player

Best Actress:

1. Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value
2. Cynthia Erivo, Wicked for Good
3. Julia Roberts, After the Hunt
4. Emma Stone, Bugonia
5. Jennifer Lawrence, Die My Love

Best Supporting Actor

1. Miles Caton, Sinners
2. Andrew Garfield, After the Hunt
3. Jeremy Strong, Deliver Me From Nowhere
4. Adam Sandler, Jay Kelly
5. Shia LaBoeuf, Henry Johnson

Best Supporting Actress

1. Ayo Edepiri, After the Hunt
2. Hailee Steinfeld, Sinners
3. Ariana Grande, Wicked for Good
4. Jennifer Lopez, Kiss of the Spider Woman
5. Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value

And that’s all she wrong. Have a great weekend.

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By: Sasha Stone
Title: 2026 Oscar Predictions: How to Read the Room
Sourced From: www.awardsdaily.com/2025/07/18/2026-oscar-predictions-how-to-read-the-room/
Published Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2025 22:48:24 +0000