The Oscars aren’t a game. Or at least they didn’t used to be, until 1999, when an unmarried single mother with a one-year-old baby living in a guest house in Van Nuys decided to make them into one. It would be called OscarWatch because “I thought it would be fun to run a newspaper.”
Back then, there were predicting sites like Gold Derby with “experts” that ranked the contenders. There were Oscar predictions in magazines like Premiere, Entertainment Weekly, and the LA Times. Siskel and Ebert would get into the game. The Oscars were mostly covered by the trades, Variety and Hollywood Reporter, who would get the bulk of their income from FYC ads (for your consideration). The studio paid lavishly for these ads every year. I used to keep a gallery way back when but now, as with everything else, another site does what I used to do, in this case, Next Best Picture.
You’d be hard-pressed to look at any of the Oscar blogs and not find traces of my influence as the one who started it all. I didn’t start the Oscar-predicting game. But I started the game of covering the Oscar race like I was covering football. From soup to nuts, from the beginning of the year until the end. I thought it might make me some money one day if I stuck to it. But even going back to the beginning, what kept this site alive were the readers who became addicted to the game of Oscar-watching.
No prominent person who covers the Oscars now would ever give me credit for that, and they didn’t even way back when. I was the dirty little secret they all stole from but would never admit out loud. Those who dominated the game felt threatened by this odd new mushroom cropping up from seemingly out of nowhere. The Pete Hammonds and the Anne Thompsons did not take kindly to their profession being infiltrated by amateurs. Fair enough.
The money is what made it a much bigger industry than it ever would have been. After all, not many people were as passionately devoted to the Oscar race as I was. I watched many sites come and go, and before long, they’d run out of steam. No, this had to be done by people who loved the game, and I did for a very long time. But those days are long gone. I don’t love the game anymore, that’s for sure. To have been chewed up and spit out by these people for having different opinions than them on political issues meant I was no longer welcome in the industry I built. Fine, fair enough. But, to quote Al Pacino in The Insider, “I won’t shut for you.”
This Oscar race this year has been rigged from the beginning, from the moment Kyle Buchanan declared One Battle After Another the frontrunner in his New York Times profile, and from then on, the story was told. Sinners had been the frontrunner, but no, this would be the movie that would bring all of them together to be anointed as the Best Picture of 2025.
Today, our Next Gen Oscarwatcher Scott Kernen changed his prediction for the Producers Guild winner from Sinners to One Battle After Another. I think that’s right. It would be shocking for any group to step outside of the Mass Formation. No film in the entire history that I’ve been covering the Oscars has ever won the National Board of Review, the Gothams, New York and LA, and the Golden Globes. It’s never happened. This is One Ring to Rule Them All.
Watching this last part, with One Award Win After Another, is going to be agonizing, even for those who love the movie and want to see it win. It’s especially crushing to see Sinners lose despite its enormous success. It is getting hit by the Right as a “woke” movie, and on the Left, well, it isn’t the Precious. Does it make that much of a difference in the end? Not really. Whether a movie wins the Oscar or not has never decided its ultimate fate, as I learned over these past 26 years. If I started to find out why Citizen Kane could lose Best Picture and still be regarded as the Greatest Film of All Time, as it was for decades until Sight and Sound decided a female director should take that top spot, I come out the other end seeing that the Oscars take a snapshot in time but that greatness emerges only after many years have passed.
The changing Oscar game means that many who cover this race would put Parasite, a film made in South Korea, as the greatest Best Picture winner. That should tell you everything about what has happened to the American film industry. So, at least One Battle is an American son and an example that his career has come to this point, where he collects lots of gold statues to show for it.
The Oscars are back where they were when I started, with Penske Media dominating the advertising space — Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Indiewire, Rolling Stone, and the Golden Globes. It’s a monopoly, with stakes so low that no one cares enough to bother with it. Warner Bros. will be sold to Netflix, and now, Netflix can finally say it has a Best Picture winner. They’re a monopoly, too, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
I am on the outside looking in as I was when I first started, so naive about the business, the industry, and the Oscars. What did I know? I certainly didn’t know 26 years later, the Left would be the side with blacklists and cancel culture, or that people in the industry would be so afraid to speak honestly, or that their new religion of wokeism would mean that they would sideline a Black director to award a white director who made a film that calls half the country Nazis and racists. Will wonders never cease?
Yes, One Battle takes its shots at the Left and at revolutionaries and activism. But it lands exactly where the Left needs it to: we’re the good guys, right? And they’re the bad guys. Mark Andreeson had it exactly right in his explanation. It is almost too perfect a portrait of life on the American Left in 2026. But I just wish Hollywood didn’t feel the need to turn half the country into their enemies.
Can Hollywood tell stories for everyone? How can they, when they treat people with different ideas about life, different ideas about language and humor and politics, like they were dipped in shit? Doesn’t matter, right? We’re just here to play the game. This game is already fixed, and we all know how it ends. Maybe this will be the year many people get a perfect score.
Ryan Coogler will be in good company, taking his place alongside the best directors who never won, like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and David Fincher.
Meanwhile, Ari Aster’s Eddington and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia will, in my opinion, go down as the films most about our time. The awards race ignored Eddington (because, of course, they did), but at least Bugonia got in.
Sorry for the downer piece. I’m still trying to be upbeat. No shade to Paul Thomas Anderson who is a good egg and deserves to be awarded for his career…I just wish it were for a different movie.
I remember I was friends with a woman who was dating the screenwriter for Dances With Wolves. This was long before I ever started caring about or writing about the Oscars. I remember when that movie won Best Picture, Best Director, and Screenplay, and how so many film critics thought it was lame that it would win, and the Academy had no taste. But they were choosing the movie that everyone saw and loved that year. Just because it’s now film critics doing the deciding, the song, more or less, remains the same. It reflects a moment in time and tells us about the people voting more than it does anything else.
The question now is how many Oscars it will win. The record right now in the preferential ballot era is 7, won by Oppenheimer and Anora. Can One Battle beat that? Will these voters throw Oscars at the movie? Maybe.
As of now, I have it winning 6. But if it takes Casting and Sound it could win 7. If it takes Supporting Actor, it could win 8.
Best Picture
1. One Battle after Another (Warner Bros.)
2. Sinners (Warner Bros.)
3. Hamnet (Focus Features)
4. Marty Supreme (A24)
5. Frankenstein (Netflix)
6. Bugonia (Focus Features)
7. F1 (Apple)
8. The Secret Agent (Neon)
9. Sentimental Value (Neon)
10. Train Dreams (Netflix)
Best Director
1. One Battle after Another, Paul Thomas Anderson
2. Sinners, Ryan Coogler
3. Hamnet, Chloé Zhao
4. Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie
5. Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier
Best Actor
1. Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme
2. Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle after Another
3. Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent
4. Michael B. Jordan in Sinners
5. Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon
Best Actress
1. Jessie Buckley in Hamnet
2. Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
3. Kate Hudson in Song Sung Blue
4. Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value
5. Emma Stone in Bugonia
Best Supporting Actor
1. Stellan Skarsgård in Sentimental Value
2. Benicio Del Toro in One Battle after Another
3. Jacob Elordi in Frankenstein
4. Delroy Lindo in Sinners
5. Sean Penn in One Battle after Another
Best Supporting Actress
1. Teyana Taylor in One Battle after Another
2. Amy Madigan in Weapons
3. Wunmi Mosaku in Sinners
4. Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in Sentimental Value
5. Elle Fanning in Sentimental Value
Best Adapted Screenplay
1. One Battle after Another
2. Hamnet
3. Train Dreams
4. Bugonia
5. Frankenstein
Best Original Screenplay
1. Sinners
2. Marty Supreme
3. Sentimental Value
4. It Was Just an Accident
5. Blue Moon
Best Editing
1. One Battle after Another
2. F1
3. Sinners
4. Marty Supreme
5. Sentimental Value
Best International Feature
1. Sentimental Value
2. The Secret Agent
3. It Was Just an Accident
4. Sirāt
5. The Voice of Hind Rajab
Animated Feature
1. KPop Demon Hunters
2. Arco
3. Elio
4. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
5. Zootopia 2
Best Animated Short Film
1. Butterfly
2. Retirement Plan
3. Forevergreen
4. The Girl Who Cried Pearls
5. The Three Sisters
Best Casting
1. Sinners
2. One Battle after Another
3. Hamnet
4. Marty Supreme
5. The Secret Agent
Best Cinematography
1. One Battle after Another
2. Sinners
2. Frankenstein
3. Marty Supreme
5. Train Dreams
Best Costume Design
1. Frankenstein
2. Sinners
3. Hamnet
4. Marty Supreme
5. Avatar: Fire and Ash
Best Documentary Feature
1. The Perfect Neighbor
2. The Alabama Solution
3. Come See Me in the Good Light
4. Cutting through Rocks
5. Mr. Nobody against Putin
Best Documentary Short
1. All the Empty Rooms
2. Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud
3. Children No More: Were and Are Gone
4. The Devil Is Busy
5. Perfectly a Strangeness
Best Live Action Short
1. Two People Exchanging Saliva
2. Butcher’s Stain
3. The Singers
4. A Friend of Dorothy
5. Jane Austen’s Period Drama
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
1. Frankenstein
2. Sinners
3. Kokuho
4. The Smashing Machine
5. The Ugly Stepsister
Original Score
Sinners Ludwig Goransso
One Battle after Another Jonny Greenwood
Bugonia Jerskin Fendrix
Frankenstein Alexandre Desplat
Hamnet Max Richter
Best Original Song
1. I Lied To You from Sinners
2. Golden from KPop Demon Hunters
3. Train Dreams from Train Dreams
4. Dear Me from Diane Warren: Relentless
5. Sweet Dreams Of Joy from Viva Verdi!
Best Production Design
1. Frankenstein
2. Sinners
3. Hamnet
4. Marty Supreme
5. One Battle after Another
Original Sound
1. F1
2. Sirāt
3. One Battle after Another
4. Sinners
5. Frankenstein
Best Visual Effects
1. Avatar: Fire and Ash
2. Sinners
3. F1
4. Jurassic World Rebirth
5. The Lost Bus
Total count:
One Battle After Another – 6
Sinners – 5
Frankenstein – 3
Sentimental Value 2
Hamnet – 1
Marty Supreme – 1
F1 – 1
Bugonia – 0
The Secret Agent – 0
Train Dreams – 0
-----------------------
By: Sasha Stone
Title: 2026 Oscar Predictions: The Final Lap in Most Predictable Oscar Race in History
Sourced From: www.awardsdaily.com/2026/02/13/2026-oscar-predictions-the-final-lap-in-most-predictable-oscar-race-in-history/
Published Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:53:49 +0000
