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The following article is an excerpt from the new edition of “IndieWire’s The Lead Up,” a weekly newsletter in which our Awards Editor Marcus Jones takes readers on the awards trail, interviewing key figures responsible for some of the most compelling stories of the season, and offering predictions on who will win. Subscribe here to receive the newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday.
If you clicked on this column, rest assured, I will not be offering any takes on Timothée Chalamet’s recent comment about ballet and opera. I seriously would sooner learn to walk en pointe or become a castrato before I enter into another argument that I would say has mostly been constructed in bad faith.
Also? My job is to make predictions about Oscar voting, and that whole debacle took the internet by storm when the majority of Academy Awards ballots had already been filed.
With that said, I want us all to take a deep breath…
For final Oscar predictions, let’s just try and go with what we know, and not be swept up in any conversations we don’t need to be having. Yes, I think the Oscars being as late as mid-March has sent us into mass psychosis, but we really should be having more fun with a year that has not been hinged on one dominant contender.
Steamrolls are not pleasant, particuarly when they take this long to watch happen.
As we’ve seen many of the groups that have overlap with Oscar voters already making their picks, it is clear that a “Sinners” surge post-breaking the Oscar nominations record was a bit overhyped, at least on the craft side of things. In addition to winning Best Picture and Best Director at the BAFTAs and the guild awards, “One Battle After Another” has swept just about every major bellwether for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing.
Where “Sinners” has been doing better than expected is in the acting categories.
The fellow Warner Bros. Pictures release won both Best Ensemble and Best Actor for star Michael B. Jordan at the Actor Awards , and Wunmi Mosaku won Best Supporting Actress at the BAFTA Awards. The Actors Branch is by far the biggest branch in the Academy, with almost double the numbers of some of the next biggest branches, like Executives and Marketing and Publicity.
As I said in the last edition of “IndieWire’s The Lead Up,” we have empirical evidence that actors are very keen on voting for at least one of the “Sinners” stars to win an Oscar, with Jordan being the strongest candidate.
The cast of ‘Sinners’Michael Buckner/VarietyBefore we get into some What-Ifs, I will add that “Sinners” has continually won awards for Best Original Screenplay, Best Casting, and Best Original Score. Those three categories seem unimpeachable, and would result in filmmaker Ryan Coogler receiving his first Academy Award after directing three other Oscar-nominated films, casting maven Francine Maisler earning the first ever competitive Oscar given to someone in her field, and composer Ludwig Göransson becoming a three-time Best Original Score winner (placing him ahead of other all-star composers like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Hans Zimmer, Marvin Hamlisch, and fellow 2026 nominee Alexandre Desplat).
If you take away the five categories that “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” are shoo-ins for (and for the sake of this experiment, I am not waxing poetic about the latter film still having a shot at Best Picture; you fellow hopefuls are seen and heard), that leaves two-thirds more of Oscar categories to consider.
Go with God for the shorts categories. I will point out that Netflix has had a strong track record in those categories, so “The Singers” and “All the Empty Rooms” feel like safe picks for Best Live Action Short and Best Documentary Short, respectively. Netflix had also previously been so strong in the Best Documentary Feature category that the Documentary Branch refused to nominate any films from the distributor for a few years, but “The Perfect Neighbor” finally being the one to break through makes it the category frontrunner, even if this season of documentary awards were all over the place. At the end of the day, a lot of people have watched the film.
That too is the reason why the streaming phenomenon “KPop Demon Hunters” is considered a lock to win the Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song categories. But quiet as it’s kept, Netflix is also generally great at securing a lot of below the line support.
My colleague Sarah Shachat has more on this in her analysis of the craft categories, but despite a tepid critical response, Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” has been breezing its way through guild awards, making it the surest bet for Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and maybe even Best Sound, considering the results of the MPSE Golden Reel Awards.
Audrey Nuna, Ejae, and Rei Ami at Universal Media Group’s The 68th Grammy Awards After Party on February 01, 2026 in Los Angeles, CaliforniaChristopher PolkThat is, if Academy members are not looking to throw a bone to Apple’s “F1,” which miraculously earned a Best Picture nomination, despite receiving no recognition for the filmmakers above the line. Though “Avatar: Fire and Ash” did not similarly receive a Best Picture nomination this third time around, it sets too high a bar to be beaten in Best Visual Effects.
Both “Sentimental Value” and “The Secret Agent” were big winners at Cannes that were distributed in the United States by Neon, and are now both nominated for Best International Feature as well as Best Picture. “Sentimental Value” is favored to win, as voters often mirror how BAFTA voted, plus the Joachim Trier film received nine nominations.
But because the films also made it into the acting categories, after having their stars win at the Golden Globes, doubt has been cast on what categories, if any, either Neon film is sure to win.
BAFTA really threw a wrench into that because it has a lot more overlap with how the Academy votes than the Golden Globes does. It was there that “One Battle After Another” star Sean Penn won Best Supporting Actor over “Sentimental Value” star Stellan Skarsgård. It was also there that “Sentimental Value” won the equivalent of Best International Feature, while “The Secret Agent” won Best International Feature at the Golden Globes. If the only categories that “Sentimental Value” is competitive in are Best Supporting Actor and Best International Feature, the least likely scenario seems to be the film winning both.
Regardless of the fact that he was not nominated against fellow contenders Skarsgård and “Sinners” star Delroy Lindo, the safest bet would be to predict Penn wins Best Supporting Actor based on the two-time Oscar winner triumphing in that category at the Actor Awards. Following that same logic, the BAFTA win for “Sentimental Value” suggests the Norwegian film will win Best International Feature.
That leaves “The Secret Agent” with nothing, despite also being nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Casting. Again, “Sinners” has the edge in the latter two categories.
Jessie Buckley at the 2026 EE BAFTA Film Awards held at The Royal Festival Hall on February 22, 2026 in London, EnglandJames McCauley/VarietyFinally, there is Best Actress, arguably the easiest category to predict, with “Hamnet” star Jessie Buckley liking becoming the sole Oscar winner for the Focus Features film.
Best Supporting Actress, one of the hardest to predict, is led by another triumvirate similar to the Best Supporting Actor race. Though “One Battle After Another” star Teyana Taylor won the Golden Globe, her momentum seems to have petered out since then. Critical darling Amy Madigan has both a Critics Choice Award and an Actor Award for her supporting performance in “Weapons,” but unlike recent comp Jamie Lee Curtis, her horror film was not nominated anywhere else. Like Penn, she seemingly has the support of the Actors branch, but based on how many nominations it got, scores more voters watched “Sinners,” hence why BAFTA winner Wunmi Mosaku feels like a safer choice to be the predicted winner.
But again, the fun for me this year has been that anything can happen. Sure, “One Battle After Another” is about as dominant a contender as a film can be, and yet these margins all feel razor-thin.
How crazy do we sound having heated debates about who could’ve been in second place for Best Actor at the BAFTAs? If you are betting money on this, I apologize and wish you luck. We’ve even made an Oscars ballot to help you all follow along with the show.
Personally, I will be chasing the thrill of the unknown from my upper mezzanine seat in the Dolby Theater on Sunday, March 15.
P.S. For Best Animated Short predictions, please seek the counsel of my colleague Wilson Chapman.
Want more on our 2026 Oscar Predictions and the reasoning behind them? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, IndieWire’s The Lead Up, in which our Awards Editor offers some exclusive musings straight from the awards trail — all only available to subscribers.
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