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After months (and in some circles, a year) of speculation, jostling for position, and campaigning, the nominations are in. The final curve of the road to the Oscars is set. And we now know who the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have deemed the best and brightest of 2025.
Yet while we are entering the home stretch, the final votes remain far from cast. Nevertheless, on a morning where folks are still basking in Sinners and horror’s overperformance—or wondering why One Battle After Another’s Chase Infiniti got snubbed for Best Actress in seeming favor of Kate Hudson in Song Sung Blue—we are ready to forecast where this all ends come March 15. Admittedly it is incredibly early to offer even an educated guess about the final winners come Oscar night. Consider that at this time last year, Emilia Pérez was still perceived as a Best Picture frontrunner before its star’s complicated social media history came to light. But we like to think of this as both a prediction as well as a snapshot of where the race is circa late January 2026, as well as a chance to cast our own phantom ballot.
For that reason, please know that the movies we think will win in the major categories will be bolded, the ones we want to see win will be italicized, and sometimes they will be one and the same.
Best Picture
Bugonia
F1
Frankenstein
Hamnet
Marty Supreme
One Battle After Another
The Secret Agent
Sentimental Value
Sinners
Train Dreams
Some awards seasons are easier to predict than others, and 2025 looks a bit like the year of Oppenheimer or 12 Years a Slave: a clear consensus favorite has emerged and it’s about as close to a sure-thing as Best Picture can be. We admit that Sinners becoming the most nominated film in Oscar history gives us a bit of pause. The Academy famously does not line up with most critics groups (see: The Brutalist’s dizzying list of critics wins last year). So there is reason to doubt AMPAS will agree when the New York Film Critics Circle or the Critics Choice Awards dubbed OBAA the best of film of last year. However, Sinners at the end of the day remains a horror movie, and One Battle After Another has three major things going for it.
First despite being widely considered one of the best filmmakers of his generation, Paul Thomas Anderson—the writer-director of Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Magnolia, The Master, and Phantom Thread—has never won an Oscar. So the “it’s his turn” narrative will be in full effect. Furthermore, like Sinners, OBAA was a cagey bet by WB Motion Picture Group co-heads Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, and the industry will likely want to salute both’s dedication for risky original films that can find a commercial audience in movie theaters, particularly in the face of what seems like an imminent takeover by streaming service Netflix. Granted, that narrative also applies to Sinners, but lastly the aggressively left politics of OBAA will play to an Academy voting body eager to signal support for anyone willing to resist state-sanctioned ICE thuggery and the oppression tactics by the current administration.
Finally One Battle After Another is just a thrilling piece of filmmaking and storytelling, working both as a suspenseful thriller and a shaggy-haired hangout flick with Leonardo DiCaprio at his most comical and pitiful. It’s an exhilarating film and honestly the best of last year.
Best Director
Chloé Zhao, Hamnet
Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme
Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another
Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value
Ryan Coogler, Sinners
For all the reasons stated above, we suspect Anderson will also win Best Director, although we suppose one could say if the vote were to be split, here might be where Coogler excels. Sinners is the most nominated film in Oscar history, and the three movies tied for the second most amount of nominations—All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land—all won Best Director, even when one of them failed to take Best Picture. Still, we’d bet on PTA to break that trend this year.
Best Actress
Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue
Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value
Emma Stone, Bugonia
Rose Byrne has been many critics’ pick for Best Actress, including my own when I voted for her in the Critics Choice Awards. However, industry folk notoriously differ from critics, and the Academy’s longstanding preference toward life-affirming stories, particularly in a historical or period context, will almost certainly make the more beatific vision of motherhood in Hamnet stand out and over Byrne and filmmaker Mary Bronstein’s cynical gallows humor vision of mom trauma via If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
Which is by no means a besmirch against Jessie Buckley. She gives a magnificent performance that is genuinely among the year’s best, with Hamnet’s entire climax hinging on the layers of grief, relief, and joy she is able to communicate in an instant as a woman who is at last afforded a moment of grace through the power of art. That also just happens to be a message better aligned with Academy interests than Legs’ screed about the indignities and grievances of motherhood.
Best Actor
Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme
Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another
Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon
Michael B. Jordan, Sinners
Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent
A day ago, I might have said my own personal choice for Best Actor—Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme—was the shoo-in to win, and part of me still believes that. So it might be a desire to stop pouring cold water on Sinners, but I am coming around to the idea of Michael B. Jordan surprising in this category, especially after the vampire epic is given a second or third look by Academy voters following its record-breaking run of nominations.
To be clear, Chalamet is terrific as Marty Mauser, a role deliberately crafted around an exuberance and arrogance that Chalamet is able to channel into manic humanity. However, the Academy curiously remains reluctant to give Oscars to too many actors under the age of 35. The youngest Best Actor winner is Adrien Brody for The Pianist when he was 29 (an irony given how many twentysomething women win Best Actress). Chalamet is 30 and his aggressive campaigning has rubbed some the wrong way. If he were to lose, traditional wisdom might suggest Leonardo DiCaprio would be in line to receive his second Oscar nomination, but Michael B. Jordan pulled double duty in Sinners and honestly, if someone else were to win, it’s a showy performance…
Best Supporting Actress
Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value
Amy Madigan, Weapons
Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners
Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another
Teyana Taylor created a blistering and unforgettable visage of revolution and resistance inside of 20 minutes during the opening of One Battle After Another. And I suspect it will be rewarded as such, but upon rewatching Sentimental Value this holiday season, it is increasingly Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas’ quiet but devastating performance as the only member of an estranged family who sees everything that the others don’t that has stuck with me. In a film full of stunning performances from well-known awards players, the unknown Lilleaas might be the best one.
Best Supporting Actor
Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another
Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein
Delroy Lindo, Sinners
Sean Penn, One Battle After Another
Stellan Skarsgard, Sentimental Value
There is an argument to be made for Benicio del Toro, who already has an Oscar and is in the club. That is more an asset than hinderance when nominated in a supporting category, and his win for Traffic was over 20 years ago. Seeing him do scenery-stealing work as the more subdued, competent dissident opposite DiCaprio’s screw-up is the kind of supporting work from a leading man that Oscar voters tend to reward. But Stellan Skarsgard’s even more introspective and aloof portrait of a wayward patriarch and over-the-hill artist desperate for reclamation as both filmmaker and father is the one that lingers.
Best Original Screenplay
Blue Moon
It Was Just an Accident
Marty Supreme
Sentimental Value
Sinners
Best Original Screenplay is where I suspect Coogler will earn his first Oscar, no matter what happens in the Directing category later that night. While the Academy notoriously has been reticent about awarding horror movies Best Picture or Director, they tend to be a bit more open-minded about recognizing “weird” or lurid genre content in the screenwriting category. See: Get Out and The Exorcist for more. Personally though, the carefully calibrated insanity of Marty Supreme was fairly intoxicating.
Best Adapted Screenplay
Bugonia
Frankenstein
Hamnet
One Battle After Another
Train Dreams
Paul Thomas Anderson’s big night will likewise begin in earnest with a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. And to be sure, one has to be a kind of mad genius to look at Thomas Pynchon’s decades-spanning novel about real-life radicalism from the 1960s through ‘80s, Vineland, and turn it into an action movie clarion call during the age of unchecked ICE brutality.
Best Cinematography
Frankenstein
Marty Supreme
One Battle After Another
Sinners
Train Dreams
The way that Autumn Durald Arkapaw filmed rolling hills of cotton in IMAX as if they were the Technicolor bricks of the primrose path was enough by itself to win this, and we didn’t even mention the lighting of a juke joint on fire when a vampire comes calling.
Best Film Editing
F1
Marty Supreme
One Battle After Another
Sentimental Value
Sinners
I could never begrudge Andy Jorgensen’s deft hand at keeping a nearly three-hour movie feeling taut and even eerie winning, but the way Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein were able to make the even longer Marty Supreme’s constant sense of oppression and grueling pressure feel somehow exuberant is its own kind of magic trick.
Best International Film
The Secret Agent
It Was Just an Accident
Sentimental Value
Sirat
The Voice of Hind Rajab
Only one of these was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, and thankfully it is Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, a movie that gets better the more time you sit with it.
Best Animated Feature
Arco
Elio
KPop: Demon Hunters
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
Zootopia 2
Netflix is going up, up, up, on that Oscar stage. Sorry, not sorry.
Best Original Song
“Dear Me,” Diane Warren: Relentless
“Golden,” KPop: Demon Hunters
“I Lied to You,” Sinners
“Sweet Dreams of Joy,” From Viva Verdi!
“Tran Dreams,” Train Dreams
Resisting the urge of making the same pun again. So let’s just say, Netflix and KPop will be feeling… golden on March 15?
Best Original Score
Bugonia
Frankenstein
Hamnet
One Battle After Another
Sinners
Ludwig Göransson already has two Oscars for Oppenheimer and Black Panther. I suspect this will mark three, although the melancholy of Jonny Greenwood’s sometimes jazzy, sometimes folksy, and always hypnotic One Battle After Another work is what sticks.
Best Production Design
Frankenstein
Hamnet
Marty Supreme
One Battle After Another
Sinners
We come at last to categories where Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein will shine, and in terms of production design Mary Shelley’s story hasn’t looked this lush and grand since the days of James Whale.
Best Costume Design
Avatar: Fire and Ash
Frankenstein
Hamnet
Marty Supreme
Sinners
Did you see those Gothic works of art Kate Hawley designed for Mia Goth?
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Frankenstein
Kokuho
Sinners
The Smashing Machine
The Ugly Stepsister
If somehow Jacob Elordi pulled off a surprise win for Frankenstein in the Best Supporting Actor category, I would not be upset. But I’d be flabbergasted if lead makeup and prosthetic designer Mike Hill’s transformation of Elordi into the undead Creature went ignored in this category.
Best Visual Effects
Avatar: Fire and Ash
F1
Jurassic World: Rebirith
The Lost Bus
Sinners
James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash went surprisingly overlooked this Oscar season, even though we’d argue it was a step up from The Way of Water, which was nominated for Best Picture in its year. Nevertheless, Avatar remains unbeatable in the Visual Effects category, whatever the year.
Best Sound
F1
Frankenstein
One Battle After Another
Sinners
Sirat
Meanwhile surprise Best Picture nominee F1 will likely have its moment in the combined Best Sound category—but only because Best Stunt Design is still not a viable category until next year.
Best Casting
Hamnet
Marty Supreme
One Battle After Another
The Secret Agent
Sinners
And here we end on an entirely new category, which has no historical precedent or basis to draw from. So I am going to simply pick what I perceived to be the best cast, filled with both stars and lifelong character actors combining to create an unforgettable ensemble: Sinners.
The post Oscars 2026 Predictions: Who Will Win and Why appeared first on Den of Geek.
