Oscars 2026: Our Extremely Premature Predictions
CultureNever too early to place your bets on Timothée Chalamet's revenge, Julia Roberts' return to the podium, and a Paul Thomas Anderson sweep. Well, maybe it's a little too early.By Jack KingMarch 7, 2025Save this storySaveSave this storySaveTrying to guess what's going to happen at the Oscars in 2026—before the vast majority of the destined-to-be-nominated films have even been finished, let alone screened in public—is a fool's errand. There's precious little to go on, besides online whispers, set photos, nuggets from interviews and cast lists. Some of the most likely prospects will end up snubbed, and there will be plenty of movies that make it to the Best Picture shortlist that no one could have seen coming.Just look at 2025. At this time last year, who would've had Gladiator II and Furiosa out of contention entirely, with plucky underdogs The Substance and I'm Still Here making it in? Hell, for as much as indie auteur Sean Baker is widely admired online and IRL, almost no one would've bet on Anora before it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and its eventual Best Picture win looked like a long shot until the final weeks of the race.But that's not stopping us, baby, nor the hundreds of online awards prognosticators who make it their business to keep their finger on the Oscars pulse year-round. So days after the conclusion of the 2025 Oscars race, here are our way-too-early predictions for the ceremony in 2026. We've looked into our crystal ball, and it's spitting facts: Timothée Chalamet is going to go again (and he'll finally win), Paul Thomas Anderson is in for an Oppenheimer-grade sweep, and Julia Roberts is a lock for her second Oscar. You heard it here first! Unless we're wrong.Best Picture: One Battle After AnotherOther candidates: After the Hunt, Hamnet, Deliver Me from Nowhere, The Ballad of a Small Player, Marty Supreme, Kathryn Bigelow's untitled White House thrillerDark horse: FrankensteinPaul Thomas Anderson. With new movies on the docket from a broad church of Academy-favorite auteurs, expect the 2026 Best Picture race to be a bloodbath. There will be no room for superhero movies this time around, although the Brad Pitt racing thriller F1 might slide in the way Top Gun: Maverick (from the same director, Joseph Kosinski) did in 2023.The leading contender from the summer is the still-officially-untitled tenth feature film from Paul Thomas Anderson, which at one point was reportedly entitled The Battle of Baktan Cross but may end up being released as One Battle After Another. It's said to be the beloved filmmaker's biggest-budget movie to date, with an all-star cast featuring the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Regina Hall. PTA has been nominated for eleven Oscars so far, with arguably his biggest chance coming for bonafide classic There Will Be Blood—which would've likely swept in 2008, had it not endured the misfortune of coming out in the same year as No Country For Old Men. Should Battle meet its lofty expectations, we could see it steamrolling the opposition straight to the director's first statuette.Which brings us to the other candidates. A favorite among the Letterboxd generation, Luca Guadagnino has been consistently overlooked by the Oscars since he rocketed to international acclaim with 2017's Call Me by Your Name, despite follow-ups like Bones and All and Challengers routinely finding their way to cinephiles' year-end lists. But expectations are huge for After the Hunt, a timely cancel-culture thriller that shot over the summer last year. Julia Roberts plays a college professor whose colleague is faced with a “serious accusation,” which sounds like meaty material primed for an awards run.Elsewhere, Nomadland director Chloé Zhao returns with Hamnet, which stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley as William and Agnes Shakespeare in a fictionalization of their life following the death of their son. A prestige period piece? That's just the sort of material that the Academy laps up. An outside bet might be popstar drama Mother Mary, from A24—the studio that swept in 2023 with Everything, Everywhere All at Once and took three gongs this year for The Brutalist—starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, with original music by Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff. Suffice to say, it sounds very of the moment, appealing to the Academy's younger voters, who just saw Anora take home five awards. But director David Lowery, routinely acclaimed for films like A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, has been historically snubbed at the Oscars so far.On the subject of A24, The Rock's first foray into the arthouse, The Smashing Machine, is set to release this year. Right now, we expect it to be more of a vehicle for a Dwayne Johnson awards campaign—the narrative around the film will inevitably coalesce around his performance, should it turn up the goods, and those who follow the Oscars love nothing more than a good redemption arc. We expect ping-pong drama Marty Supreme to be another major con
Trying to guess what's going to happen at the Oscars in 2026—before the vast majority of the destined-to-be-nominated films have even been finished, let alone screened in public—is a fool's errand. There's precious little to go on, besides online whispers, set photos, nuggets from interviews and cast lists. Some of the most likely prospects will end up snubbed, and there will be plenty of movies that make it to the Best Picture shortlist that no one could have seen coming.
Just look at 2025. At this time last year, who would've had Gladiator II and Furiosa out of contention entirely, with plucky underdogs The Substance and I'm Still Here making it in? Hell, for as much as indie auteur Sean Baker is widely admired online and IRL, almost no one would've bet on Anora before it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and its eventual Best Picture win looked like a long shot until the final weeks of the race.
But that's not stopping us, baby, nor the hundreds of online awards prognosticators who make it their business to keep their finger on the Oscars pulse year-round. So days after the conclusion of the 2025 Oscars race, here are our way-too-early predictions for the ceremony in 2026. We've looked into our crystal ball, and it's spitting facts: Timothée Chalamet is going to go again (and he'll finally win), Paul Thomas Anderson is in for an Oppenheimer-grade sweep, and Julia Roberts is a lock for her second Oscar. You heard it here first! Unless we're wrong.
Other candidates: After the Hunt, Hamnet, Deliver Me from Nowhere, The Ballad of a Small Player, Marty Supreme, Kathryn Bigelow's untitled White House thriller
Dark horse: Frankenstein
With new movies on the docket from a broad church of Academy-favorite auteurs, expect the 2026 Best Picture race to be a bloodbath. There will be no room for superhero movies this time around, although the Brad Pitt racing thriller F1 might slide in the way Top Gun: Maverick (from the same director, Joseph Kosinski) did in 2023.
The leading contender from the summer is the still-officially-untitled tenth feature film from Paul Thomas Anderson, which at one point was reportedly entitled The Battle of Baktan Cross but may end up being released as One Battle After Another. It's said to be the beloved filmmaker's biggest-budget movie to date, with an all-star cast featuring the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Regina Hall. PTA has been nominated for eleven Oscars so far, with arguably his biggest chance coming for bonafide classic There Will Be Blood—which would've likely swept in 2008, had it not endured the misfortune of coming out in the same year as No Country For Old Men. Should Battle meet its lofty expectations, we could see it steamrolling the opposition straight to the director's first statuette.
Which brings us to the other candidates. A favorite among the Letterboxd generation, Luca Guadagnino has been consistently overlooked by the Oscars since he rocketed to international acclaim with 2017's Call Me by Your Name, despite follow-ups like Bones and All and Challengers routinely finding their way to cinephiles' year-end lists. But expectations are huge for After the Hunt, a timely cancel-culture thriller that shot over the summer last year. Julia Roberts plays a college professor whose colleague is faced with a “serious accusation,” which sounds like meaty material primed for an awards run.
Elsewhere, Nomadland director Chloé Zhao returns with Hamnet, which stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley as William and Agnes Shakespeare in a fictionalization of their life following the death of their son. A prestige period piece? That's just the sort of material that the Academy laps up. An outside bet might be popstar drama Mother Mary, from A24—the studio that swept in 2023 with Everything, Everywhere All at Once and took three gongs this year for The Brutalist—starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, with original music by Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff. Suffice to say, it sounds very of the moment, appealing to the Academy's younger voters, who just saw Anora take home five awards. But director David Lowery, routinely acclaimed for films like A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, has been historically snubbed at the Oscars so far.
On the subject of A24, The Rock's first foray into the arthouse, The Smashing Machine, is set to release this year. Right now, we expect it to be more of a vehicle for a Dwayne Johnson awards campaign—the narrative around the film will inevitably coalesce around his performance, should it turn up the goods, and those who follow the Oscars love nothing more than a good redemption arc. We expect ping-pong drama Marty Supreme to be another major contender for A24, and it may just be the most viable of the lot: a sports drama directed by Josh Safdie (of Uncut Gems fame) with Timothée Chalamet in another lead that seems primed for awards contention, playing real-life table tennis star Marty Reisman.
The obligatory music biopic will be Jeremy Allen White's take on Bruce Springsteen, Deliver Me from Nowhere, which will likely see the Bear actor in the conversation for Best Actor. (More on that below.) Conclave director Edward Berger has proven himself a reliable pick for Oscar nominations, so expect his Colin Farrell-starring The Ballad of a Small Player to be among the strong Netflix contingent vying in this year's awards season. The others? Kathryn Bigelow's as-yet-untitled White House thriller, which is said to be an adrenalized look at an unfolding political crisis. And then there's Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, the sort of genre film that has been regularly snubbed by the Academy—but this was the year of The Substance, and there are few more beloved filmmakers in Hollywood than GDT.
Other candidates: Jeremy Allen White, Deliver Me from Nowhere; Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another; Colin Farrell, Ballad of a Small Player; Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, The Smashing Machine
Dark horse: Daniel Day-Lewis, Anemone
Will 2025 finally be Timmy's year? He was the undisputed master of the awards circuit this time around, even if his stoic take on primo enigma Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown came up just short of Adrien Brody's performance in The Brutalist. Movie buffs are super excited about Marty Supreme, and it's A24's biggest-budget movie yet, surpassing Alex Garland's Civil War. And by the sounds of things, it's very much Chalamet's movie—a character study of the type that magnetizes awards love.
As for the Academy, there may well be a feeling that Chalamet is the next in line, after he was overlooked for what remains his career-best work in Call Me by Your Name (that goddamn fireplace scene) and now missed out on his second go-around. Then again, Leonardo DiCaprio was made to wait until his fifth nomination until he finally bagged a statuette for The Revevant.
On the subject of DiCaprio: he is the lead of the untitled PTA movie that has everyone in a buzz, so it feels natural to have him on the list. And the narrative of a Chalamet v. DiCaprio Oscar battle—the matinee idol of the ‘90s up against his Gen Z successor—is too delicious a prospect not to go all-in.
Who else? Jeremy Allen White seems a shoo-in for Deliver Me from Nowhere, in which he plays Bruce Springsteen while he is hard at work on his sixth album, Nebraska. Further, one of the biggest holy shit moments in recent cultural memory came when it was announced that Daniel Day-Lewis was once again coming out of retirement to appear in a film written and directed by his son Ronan, Anemone. If the movie is good, expect the Oscars mainstay to be in the running. Colin Farrell was nominated for his first belated Oscar for 2023's The Banshees of Inisherin, and has cemented himself as one of the best actors of his generation — so it feels like there's a good chance that his part in The Ballad of a Small Prayer, from Conclave director Edward Berger, will turn up another nod.
And then there's arguably the greatest wild card of the lot: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, whose once unimpeachable blockbuster bonafides were dented by the failure of his D.C. debut Black Adam. But now he will appear in The Smashing Machine in a performance directed by a Safdie brother, his first major foray into serious drama. It's a tasty narrative ripe for the WWE: the down-and-out veteran who looks primed to surprise everyone with the performance of his career. Let's see how it bears out.
Other candidates: Cynthia Erivo, Wicked: For Good; Regina Hall, One Battle After Another; Jessie Buckley, Hamnet; Emma Stone, Bugonia
Dark horse: Jennifer Lawrence, Die My Love
Harder to predict still is the race for Best Actress, but there are some early frontrunners. Luca Guadagnino himself told Marc Maron that Julia Roberts puts in career-best work in his upcoming cancel-culture thriller After the Hunt: “I feel like this is the best performance she's ever given,” the director said on the WTF podcast. And if online chatter is to be believed, Guadagnino's take has been corroborated by audiences at early test screenings. “Roberts is said to be ‘incredible’ in the lead role,” Jordan Ruimy writes for the film blog World of Reel. Take it with a pinch of salt, but with so little to go by at this stage, the winds certainly seem in Roberts' favour.
Should Wicked fever carry into 2025, don't overlook Cynthia Erivo, who could be nominated again for playing lime-green witch Elphaba in Wicked: For Good. Furthermore, Irish actress Jessie Buckley—an indie cinema regular who was nominated for The Lost Daughter, and has since appeared in Men, Women Talking and more — is set to star opposite Paul Mescal in Chloé Zhao's Hamnet as Agnes Shakespeare, wife of William. Though a work of fiction, it's the sort of period piece based on a real-life figure that awards bodies love. (See also: Shakespeare in Love.) It seems like exactly the sort of role that would get an already-liked actor more deserving of consideration at the Oscars.
Emma Stone won her second Oscar for a collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos. Will their next net her a third? There's a good chance with Bugonia, an English-language remake of Jang Joon-hwan's Save the Green Planet!, about a pair of conspiracy nuts who kidnap a pharmaceutical CEO (Stone) who they're convinced is an alien. It's being released in the prime awards month of November, suggesting that it's thought of highly by distributor Focus Features. Pencil it in for a likely film festival premiere at Cannes or Venice, where we'll find out whether Stone is en route for her hat trick.
The outside bets here are twofold: Regina Hall in the Paul Thomas Anderson movie, and Jennifer Lawrence in Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love, the director's first movie since her Joaquin Phoenix headspinner You Were Never Really Here. Best known for playing Brenda in the Scary Movie franchise, the perception around Hall's calibre shifted massively after her acclaimed performance in 2018's Support the Girls, and the film world has since waited for her to fill another awards-worthy part. Four-time nominee and second-youngest-winning actress Lawrence is a known quantity in the Oscars race—questions mostly revolve around Die My Love, which has been described as a comedy-horror. The Academy doesn't usually go for genre movies. But we're heading for the first post-Substance Oscars; 2026 might be the year that horror finally reigns supreme.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
