Statue Season is finally coming to a close. Each week leading up to the 98th Academy Awards ceremony, we’ve checked in on the closest races, the winningest narratives, and the plain old movie magic that will decide who’s taking home the gold on March 15. This week, we’re making our final predictions in the top categories before Sunday night’s ceremony.
Happy Oscar week! The final ballots have been turned in, and it’s time to find out who’s going to win these statuettes we’ve been talking about for months. And, man, these races are coming down to the wire. Three out of four acting categories are practically toss-ups. Best Picture and Best Director don’t feel as settled as they should. Best International Feature will be a photo finish. From cat and opera disparagement to surprise precursor wins, the homestretch of Oscar season has been as exciting as they come—and that’s made this year’s ceremony particularly difficult to predict. Let’s run through all the data we have on the major categories to make our best educated guesses ahead of Sunday night’s Academy Awards.
Best Picture
What will win? One Battle After Another
What could win? Sinners
What should win? One Battle After Another
It all comes down to this. These are the two movies we’ve been pitting against each other all awards season, and after months of campaigns, precursor awards, and predictions … we still kind of don’t know what’ll happen. Or maybe we do? Look, if there’s any Oscar ceremony primed for a Best Picture upset, it’s this one—these are two big-budget blockbuster movies with passionate fans (and maybe even more passionate detractors) going head-to-head. But, realistically speaking, One Battle After Another’s awards résumé simply dwarfs Sinners’.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s film was a favorite in critics circles before going on an unparalleled awards circuit run. In addition to winning the Producers Guild Award for Best Theatrical Motion Picture, the most accurate Best Picture predictor among the precursor trophies, it took the top prizes from the Golden Globes, Directors Guild, BAFTAs, and, over the weekend, Writers Guild. No film with an equivalent trophy shelf has ever lost the Best Picture Oscar. One Battle’s only slipup—which has created chaos among prognosticators over the past 12 days—was that it lost the Actor Award (formerly the SAG Award) for Best Ensemble to Sinners. That upset occurring so close to the Oscars does feel like the sign of a last-minute surge, and the final Academy Awards voting window closed four days after the Actor Awards aired, so it’s entirely possible that some late ballots were influenced by that upset. But is that enough to disregard One Battle’s bona fides?
This turn of events is very reminiscent of last year’s Best Picture race, in which Anora, which also had the PGA, DGA, and WGA Awards under its belt, lost the SAG Award to Conclave. Anora, of course, went on to win the Oscar despite not being nearly as dominant an awards player as One Battle has been. (Anora also lost the BAFTA and the Golden Globe.) Plus, Sinners’ only major win so far has come from a largely American voting body (SAG), and One Battle has fared much better with the international cohorts, which have had an increasingly significant impact on the Oscars in recent years.
All of this is to say: Despite the late upset (and Variety’s bold predictions, which strongly favor Sinners—what do they know?!), Best Picture is still firmly One Battle’s to lose. Sure, anything could happen, but One Battle losing would be a generational fumble on the level of, well, what’s happening in the Best Actor race (more on that later).
Best Director
Who will win? Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another
Who could win? Ryan Coogler, Sinners
Who should win? Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another
Obviously, the rationale for determining Best Director often dovetails with the case for Best Picture, so I won’t reiterate One Battle’s credentials here. But there has been some speculation about One Battle and Sinners splitting Best Picture and Best Director, and while I won’t completely count out the possibility, I don’t think that’s what we’re heading toward. For one, that split just doesn’t happen all that often—five out of the past six Best Picture winners have also won Best Director. The last two times a division happened—Roma (Best Director) and Green Book (Best Picture) in 2018, and The Power of the Dog (Best Director) and CODA (Best Picture) in 2022—it followed a corresponding split between the top DGA and PGA Awards, which both went to One Battle this year. Anderson also has a compelling narrative on his side as a well-respected auteur who’s never won an Oscar. If Coogler does pull out a win, I suspect that we’ll see a Sinners Best Picture upset shortly after. But it’s looking very likely that Anderson will finally break his losing streak this year.
Best Actress
Who will win? Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
Who could win? Sorry, cat lovers—there’s no upset in store here.
Who should win? Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Someone didn’t give the Best Actress race the memo that the Oscars are supposed to be exciting this year. And frankly, the attempts to spice up this competition have been pitiful. If you have a severe case of Awards Season Brain (like I do), then your social media feeds may have been filled with Buckley’s cat controversy (catroversy?) over the past week. Sigh … I really don’t want to explain it, but here goes: A Hamnet junket in which Buckley said she doesn’t like cats and confessed that she asked her husband to choose between her and his cat resurfaced days before Academy Awards voting closed. What does this have to do with the Oscars? Nothing at all! But enough people were offended on behalf of the feline kingdom that Buckley felt the need to defend herself on The Tonight Show. Man, awards season has been so long this year that we’re really running out of things to talk about.
The other crack in Buckley’s undefeated campaign was the reception to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, in which Buckley stars as the Bride of Frankenstein. The film, which was released on Friday, bombed in its first weekend and was met with pretty harsh criticism, some of which singled out Buckley’s performance: “What [Buckley] does in The Bride! makes her look like she only has one trick, and that trick is shouting,” said Vulture’s Alison Willmore. Ouch! But The Bride! hit theaters right after Oscar voting ended, so Buckley should just narrowly avoid a Norbit situation. Her Best Actress win is one of the ceremony’s clearest locks.
Best Actor
Who will win? Michael B. Jordan, Sinners
Who could win? Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent
Who should win? Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another
On second thought, maybe Best Actor is chaotic enough on its own to cover both of the lead acting races. This race has sustained not one but two significant upsets over the final stretch of awards season: when longtime front-runner Timothée Chalamet of Marty Supreme lost the BAFTA to I Swear’s Robert Aramayo (who is not eligible for this year’s Oscars) last month and when Sinners’ Michael B. Jordan snagged the Actor Award for Best Actor and became the odds-on favorite for the Oscar the following week. Coupled with the bizarre controversy over Chalamet’s comment that “no one cares” about ballet or opera, which prompted Emilia Pérez’s Karla Sofía Gascón to offer some support—yes, it’s been a weird week for Oscar coverage—Chalamet seems completely cooked. He’s already far younger than the actors the Academy usually chooses to reward, so any knock on his candidacy was bound to feel catastrophic. FanDuel still has him with the second-best odds, and his Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award are nothing to sneeze at, but the momentum certainly shifted during the critical window of the final Academy Awards voting period.
That’s left Jordan at –160 odds to take home the statuette, even though he would be the first person ever to win the Best Actor Oscar with an Actor Award as his sole major precursor win. Jordan gives an impressive dual performance in Sinners that would certainly be regarded as worthy of the honor in a stacked field, and it’s entirely possible that voters were influenced by the celebratory scene at the Actor Awards when his name was announced, but this feels like a category that still has one more trick up its sleeve.
Moura’s name may have slipped out of the public consciousness over the past few weeks because he wasn’t nominated at the BAFTAs or the Actor Awards (neither of which has a great record of rewarding non-English-language fare), but this series of events feels like a perfect storm for the Secret Agent star to grab the attention of the increasingly international Academy. His fantastic, grounded performance earned him a Golden Globe in January, which makes him the only other nominee in this category with a major precursor win. DiCaprio (One Battle) and Ethan Hawke (Blue Moon) never really built up the awards season momentum we thought they might, and if Chalamet’s decline was too immense for him to overcome and Jordan’s surge came too late, Moura might just have the broad appeal to pull off a surprise.
Best Supporting Actress
Who will win? Amy Madigan, Weapons
Who could win? Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners
Who should win? Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another
Oh, look, another category that’s still impossible to call! The major precursors have been pretty evenly distributed among the top three Best Supporting Actress contenders: Madigan won the CCA and the Actor Award, Mosaku won the BAFTA, and Taylor won the Golden Globe. FanDuel currently has Madigan as the favorite—perhaps primarily because her Actor Award win was the most recent of the bunch, but she does also have a slightly stronger overall case than her peers. Dating back to 2009, the Actor Award has gone to the eventual Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actress all but one time, which has made it a more accurate indicator than any other precursor in that span. Plus, it’s never a bad idea to bank on the actor who underwent a prosthetics-laden transformation. But this category is far from a done deal: Demi Moore’s upset Best Actress loss for The Substance at last year’s Oscars might signal that the Academy isn’t quite ready to hand horror performers as many statuettes as we’d like it to, and in that case, either Mosaku or Taylor could pull ahead. This could also be a case where actors’ fortunes move in tandem with their respective films’ overall performance at the Oscars—if Sinners has a big night, that could signal that Mosaku will also be elevated, and the same goes for Taylor with One Battle. Regardless, this category is definitely staying in line with the “make all of the acting categories as unpredictable as possible” theme.
Best Supporting Actor
Who will win? Sean Penn, One Battle After Another
Who could win? Stellan Skarsgard, Sentimental Value
Who should win? Sean Penn, One Battle After Another
There’s always gotta be that one category with about 900 lead changes over the course of awards season, only for the consensus to come back to who we thought would win in the first place. Penn seemed like a shoo-in for the statuette from the moment One Battle hit theaters. Then, Benicio del Toro got some juice, Jacob Elordi won a trophy, Penn smoked indoors at the Golden Globes while Skarsgard accepted an award, and Delroy Lindo snatched a surprise nom. A lot happened! But ultimately, this category came full circle when Penn notched the BAFTA and the Actor Award in back-to-back weeks. However, Skarsgard, who was not nominated for the latter award, is a living legend who’s never won an Oscar, while Penn already has two. The Academy could be reluctant to hand him a third statuette before someone as beloved as Skarsgard has one. But despite Skarsgard’s compelling case (and the lingering thought that maybe Lindo could get a push from the Sinners hype), Penn’s victory is starting to feel like a lock(jaw).
Best Screenplay
What will win? Sinners (Original), One Battle After Another (Adapted)
What could win? Sentimental Value (Original), Hamnet (Adapted)
What should win? Blue Moon (Original), One Battle After Another (Adapted)
The screenplay categories trail only Jessie Buckley’s imminent Best Actress win as the biggest guarantees at the Oscars. Our two Academy Awards titans divide nicely into the Adapted and Original Screenplay slates, so they’ll each come away with a win for their writing. See, no one’s going home empty-handed! Surely that means that everyone invested in Sinners or One Battle will be satisfied.
Best International Feature
What will win? The Secret Agent (Brazil)
What could win? Sentimental Value (Norway)
What should win? It Was Just an Accident (France)
When a handful of non-English-language films had hopes of cracking the Best Picture slate, Best International Feature seemed set to become one of this year’s most competitive categories. Unsurprisingly, the race has coalesced around the two films that did make it into the Best Picture 10. Brazil’s The Secret Agent won equivalent awards at the CCAs and the Golden Globes, while Norway’s Sentimental Value won the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language. The BAFTA has been a strong indicator of where the Oscar will go lately—it’s accurately predicted six of the last seven Best International Feature winners—and Sentimental Value does have more of a presence in the general field categories, notching nine total nominations compared to The Secret Agent’s four.
But the way Brazil pulled off the win in this category last year, when I’m Still Here edged out Emilia Pérez, has me believing the country could do it again. The Secret Agent is a politically charged epic, stylistically in line with the last few Best International Feature winners: I’m Still Here, The Zone of Interest, and All Quiet on the Western Front. Sentimental Value is a comparatively quiet, contemplative film that might not conjure the same kind of broad appeal. If the Academy is as high on Moura’s performance as I think it might be, then The Secret Agent could ride his hype train to the statuette.
Stock Watch
To paraphrase one of cinema’s great stockbrokers: Nobody knows whether an Oscar stock is going to go up, down, sideways, or in circles. In this section, we’ll evaluate who’s on the up-and-up and whose momentum is sputtering out as the competition across categories heats up.
Stock up: One Battle After Another won the top prize from the American Society of Cinematographers on Sunday, giving it a welcome boost in the hotly contested Best Cinematography race. It also split the top prizes with Sinners at the American Cinema Editors Awards last week—Best Editing is a two-horse race. Meanwhile, Coogler’s film won Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing alongside Frankenstein at the Golden Reel Awards over the weekend.
Stock down: F1 has long been the favorite for Best Sound, but losing the Golden Reel might cause it to spin out. Sinners may have lost ground in the Best Visual Effects race after Avatar: Fire and Ash took home the most trophies at the Saturn Awards on Sunday. I know I already talked about Timothée Chalamet’s Best Actor tank job, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it again here. It really might be a fumble for the ages.
