1 week ago
18
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.
We have reached a moment in awards season in which attendance is a little more optional.
Even the Academy has now announced that it doesn’t plan on hosting more screenings of nominated films, only for an average of five people to show up at a time. The Oscar Nominees Luncheon is just about the only thing that will gather all the remaining contenders together, and even that had some people who skipped (like two-time Academy Award winner Sean Penn, who was still present for his shared tribute at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival with “One Battle After Another” co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro the night before).
This is not to say that awards hopefuls still don’t put in the effort.
For instance, “The Secret Agent” star and current Best Actor contender Wagner Moura thoroughly enjoyed himself at the recent NAACP Image Awards Nominees’ Luncheon, to the point where he hopes his native Brazil will form a similar awards body one day. And current Best Supporting Actor nominee Delroy Lindo delivered one of the most memorable speeches at the AAFCA Awards on Super Bowl Sunday, accepting the Beacon Award, where he formed a metaphor about his life as one complex lemonade recipe authored by his mother, and made sweeter with the addition of his family, friends, and “Sinners” collaborators (the Ryan Coogler film won seven competitive awards during the ceremony).
But the event that most indicated where Oscar voters’ heads are at was the DGA Awards on Saturday, February 7.
Coming off of the “Sinners” receiving a record 16 Oscar nominations, all eyes were on the guild’s ceremony to indicate if the film had started to overtake its fellow Warner Bros. Pictures release, “One Battle After Another,” widely seen as the Best Picture favorite. In the last 20 years, the DGA Awards have predicted the Best Director Oscar winner 18 times and, for the most part, those awarded films go on to win Best Picture as well.
All data points to the most likely outcome being Paul Thomas Anderson winning his first Best Director Oscar, and “One Battle After Another” winning Best Picture.
Sev Ohanian, Ryan Coogler, Zinzi Coogler, Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo, and Miles Caton at the 98th Oscars Nominees Luncheon held at The Beverly Hilton on February 10, 2026 in Los Angeles, CaliforniaMichael BucknerWhat “Sinners” still has going for it is that it will likely receive more awards below the line, like Best Casting and Best Original Score, so there’s the possibility that such enthusiasm across branches will carry it to victory, even if Anderson still wins Best Director.
However, this gets into the ultimate conflict my peers and I face as people predicting Oscar winners. What we would like to see is the Academy spread the wealth, and award as many films that merit recognition as they can.
But if I am to give you all advice for your Oscar pools? I have to say that the reality is, that doesn’t happen. For instance, last year the big Oscar record that was broken was “Anora” filmmaker Sean Baker winning four Academy Awards for his Palme d’Or-winning film, tying the record for most Oscars won by one person in a single year, held by Walt Disney since 1954.
Even if it’s not currently the favorite to win Best Picture, “Sinners” receiving 16 nominations is a good microcosm for how the modern Academy tends to zero in on its favorites. The number of films nominated each year has noticeably shrunk (the last time only 50 films were recognized was 2008).
As people who are entertained by awards shows, we are all craving the excitement of months of campaigning coming to fruition, with industry veterans finally getting their due, new stars being sent into the stratosphere based on a breakout performance, and an underdog clenching the win at the end of the road. But someone who made their Oscar winner predictions in July would probably be just as accurate as someone who updated their predictions after the nominees luncheon.
The last four Best Picture winners premiered before fall film festivals, the primary launching pad for awards campaigns in a previous era. Even back then, I could have told you that “Sinners” loses its Best Picture frontrunner status if “One Battle After Another” is even just a critical darling that tanks at the box office. It went on to not only become the highest-rated film of 2025 on Metacritic, but earned the most of any Anderson film at the box office by far.
Even before it was released, the general notion was that, as long as critics liked it, Anderson would finally end his double digit string of Oscar losses come March.
‘Marty Supreme’A24For Best Actor, we have been talking about Timothée Chalamet as the Oscar frontrunner since last year, when he was teasing “Marty Supreme” during his “A Complete Unknown” awards campaign. Again, most of the information was already there this summer to suspect that the Josh Safdie film would be the one that the now-three-time Best Actor Oscar nominee finally wins for.
Sure, we all needed to see the film to confirm, but Safdie was already known for writing films that became a turning point for his lead actors, like Adam Sandler and Robert Pattinson.
Similarly, all the buzz around “Hamnet” had been that it would earn lead Jessie Buckley an Oscar for Best Actress. Here she is working with one of the only women to win the Oscar for Best Director, adapting a novel read by book clubs worldwide. Unlike Chalamet, the actress only received one prior Oscar nomination for her supporting role in “The Lost Daughter,” but had been building a resume with everything from “Wild Rose” to “Women Talking” to indicate that she too would inevitably be an Oscar winner, and soon.
And much of the buzz around “Sentimental Value” was based on Stellan Skarsgård’s performance, with prognosticators predicting it would be a big winner at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival before that had come true. Sure, performances like those of his fellow nominees from “Frankenstein” and “One Battle After Another” came afterwards as a serious challenge to the idea that the veteran Swedish actor will win an Oscar off his first nomination, but his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes was enough for him to walk comfortably on the path toward a Best Supporting Actor win.
Ultimately, the only acting category that is reliably unpredictable is Best Supporting Actress.
There have been multiple instances in which the winner had not received any of the precursor awards, like when Regina King won for “If Beale Street Could Talk” or when Marcia Gay Harden won for “Pollock.” Not to mistake correlation for causation, but the category also happens to be the one that has seen the most women of color win.
I mention that because it is incredibly rare for us to be able to point to roles for nonwhite actors that felt like the writing was on the wall before their film premiered. The most recent example I can think of is Will Smith for “King Richard,” but regardless of his race, he was one of the highest-grossing film leads in the world who had already been nominated for Best Actor twice.
Teyana Taylor at the Golden GlobesBrianna Bryson/Getty ImagesThough “One Battle After Another” was primed for an awards campaign just based on who was directing it and its fall release date, audiences had to see Teyana Taylor’s performance in it before deeming her the Best Supporting Actress frontrunner.
One could argue that there was buzz prior to the film coming out that it would finally be the right moment for co-star Regina Hall to receive an Oscar nomination. But that’s part of the reason why it’s often such an uphill battle for an actor of color to be seen as an Oscar frontrunner: their performances so rarely have that hype machine around them that makes their wins feel inevitable. They are more often the “discoveries” of the season.
So for all the improvements the Academy continues to make in terms of getting the voter base to attend more screenings and consider more contenders, more often than not, the voters are already set in their ways on what people and films they will vote to win — sometimes, even before they watch the films.
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.
English (US) ·