At the Governors Awards on Sunday, a lot of conversations in the aisles or at the bar or around the blistering heat lamps outside the Ray Dolby Ballroom seemed to be musings on a question that has become increasingly nagging: What’s new? Or, to paraphrase, has anything really changed in this year’s awards race in the last two months?
In a lot of ways, the answers to those two questions seem to be not much and not really. Two months ago, on the heels of the Venice, Telluride and Toronto film festivals, Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet” has been anointed a favorite of sorts. Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” had screened to a rapturous reception and immediate acknowledgement that it, too, was at or near the top of the heap. Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” out for five months, was hanging on as a rare spring movie to remain in the forefront of the Best Picture conversation. And Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” which had screened in Cannes a few months earlier, continued to bask in goodwill.
And now, in mid-November, here we are, with the four presumed frontrunners for Oscar being … “Hamnet,” “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners” and “Sentimental Value.”
Does that mean the 2025-2026 awards season has been boring? Well, sort of. Does it mean that first impressions are correct and one of those films is going to waltz to the finish line? Maybe, but four months is a lot of time for a bored group of voters to shake things up. (So is three months, which is closer to the actual time between now and the start of final Oscar voting.)
Looking at the race now, the movement seems to be on the edges – which, in a way, is where past Best Picture winners like “CODA” and “Parasite” came from, so it’s best to keep an eye out.
Favorites
“One Battle After Another” thrills audiences and “Hamnet” moves audiences and they both have to worry about peaking too early. “Sinners” hasn’t been pushed out of its expected-nominee spot by all the movies that have come out since it premiered in April. And “Sentimental Value” is likely to be a beneficiary of the influx of international Oscar voters in recent years (more on them in a minute), riding the same wave that got best-pic noms for “I’m Still Here,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” “The Zone of Interest,” “Triangle of Sadness” and “All Quiet on the Western Front” in the last three years alone.
It’s hard to imagine a situation in which those four don’t get in.
Strong contenders
The next three are slightly trickier, because “Wicked: For Good” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash” are both sequels, albeit sequels to Best Picture nominees. “Wicked” has screened to respectably positive reviews and seems poised to boost the dismal box office; “Avatar” is awaiting its December unveiling, but James Cameron’s epic saga is two-for-two in noms so far, and the new one will no doubt be spectacular. Then there’s Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme,” a whole lotta fun with a real movie star in Timothée Chalamet.
They all make sense as nominees, but it’s also conceivable that one or even two could slip.
Definitely in the mix
Here’s where the intricacies of Oscar nomination voting come into play. To land a nom, it’s better to have 15% of the voters love you than to have 60% like you; passion, not consensus, drives the ranked-choice system. And that could work to the advantage of smaller, weirder and/or tougher movies like “Train Dreams,” “A House of Dynamite,” “The Testament of Ann Lee” and “Bugonia,” any of which could wind up near the top of enough ballots to sneak in.
“Bugonia” could also benefit from the international bloc of voters, which is around 25% of the 10,000-member Academy. So could Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident,” Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice” and Kleber Mendonca Filho’s “The Secret Agent.” (Real sleepers from this area include the absolutely harrowing “The Voice of Hind Rajab” and the heartwarming “Rental Family,” both of which are longshots but neither of which should be completely written off.)
And then there are a couple of films whose path to Best Picture runs through the below-the-line branches of the Academy: Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” which will get lots of BTL noms, and Joseph Kosinski’s “F1,” which will no doubt land a couple. The road is probably easier for “Frankenstein” at this point – and it’s also possible for its inverse, Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly,” which will be strong with the Academy’s largest branch, the actors. (But they’re not the largest branch by nearly the margin they used to be.)
Are there other films in the conversation? Sure. To some people, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” and “Weapons” seem like possible choices; to others, it’s “Song Sung Blue” and “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.” You probably have your own list of would-be contenders that you think I’m nuts not to mention.
After all, if there’s not much movement at the top, maybe this year’s race is more interesting in the margins.
