Here’s the State of the Oscars Race — According to the Data

If the awards race hadn’t fully started before, it’s in full swing now.

The first full week of 2026 saw a deluge of developments on the road to the Academy Awards in March. Guilds like SAG and DGA named their nominees, while Critics Choice presented their annual winners. Meanwhile, Producers Guild nominations will be released Friday morning, while Hollywood prepares to attend Sunday’s Golden Globes one day before Oscar voters begin to cast their ballots for nominations that will be announced on Jan. 22.

Data tells a story, and this week brought no shortage of intelligence to parse for this year’s awards race. TheWrap’s Awards Tracker sorts through decades of awards season history to see what it can tell us about this year, and after a week of key nominations and wins, it tells us quite a bit.

“After the Hunt,” “Avatar,” “A House of Dynamite,” “No Other Choice,” “Nuremberg,” “Springsteen” — all movies that had Oscar hopes once upon a time — have less than a 5% chance at a Best Picture nomination, based on the tracker. Award-winning performers like Jeremy Allen White and Rami Malek have next to no chance of getting nominations this year. Cynthia Erivo seemed like a lock in November on predictor sites including Gold Derby and now has about a 1% shot.

Oscar winners Julia Roberts (“After the Hunt”) and Jennifer Lawrence (“Die My Love”) all scored in single digits for Best Actress, and are essentially out of the race, with little historical reason to believe they can be nominated. 

But awards newcomers Amy Madigan from “Weapons” (OK, nominated 40 years ago for “Twice in a Lifetime”) and Wunmi Mosaku from “Sinners” are, shockingly, in the top five slots of the Best Supporting Actress tracker for their roles in horror movies, leaving in the dust such A-list names as Oscar winner Gwyneth Paltrow and Oscar nominee Emily Blunt. 

Between “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners” and “Weapons,” Warner Bros. stole the top spot in five out of eight categories.

The data

This season, TheWrap introduced a comprehensive tool that gives you the key awards season statistics all in one place. The Awards Tracker looks at precursor ceremonies from the past 26 years to determine what nominations mean the most (and what misses do the most damage) on the road to the Academy Awards.

After this week, the Tracker has six new elements to track: nominations for Critics Choice, Actor Awards, Golden Globes and DGAs, and winners from last weekend’s Critics Choice Awards ceremony. PGA nominations come on Friday, while new data will roll in as Golden Globes winners are announced.

What does the data tell us about this year’s awards race?

The developments

When new nominees and winners roll in, three types of contenders emerge: sustainers, risers and fallers.

Jacob Elordi, who plays the forlorn Creature in “Frankenstein,” is the biggest riser in the Best Supporting Actor race. The category is stuffed with two “One Battle After Another” performers — Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro — and along with strong work by Stellan Skarsgård and Paul Mescal, many wondered if Elordi could make the cut.

This week, however, a SAG nomination and Critics Choice win gave Elordi a massive boost. No Critics Choice Best Supporting Actor winner has ever missed out on an Oscar nomination. The last time the two ceremonies didn’t share a winner was 2016, when Sylvester Stallone won Critics Choice for “Creed” but lost the Oscar to Mark Rylance for “Bridge of Spies.” Historically, this gives Elordi 100% nomination odds — so expect him in the lineup, barring a massive upset.

The sustainers are easy to spot. Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay at Critics Choice, broke the Actor Awards nomination record and landed on the DGA lineup. The data says that “One Battle After Another” is the top contender in Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Another favorite, “Sinners,” had a similar week, tying “Frankenstein” for most wins at Critics Choice, grabbing the second-most Actor Award nominations and scoring a DGA nod. “Frankenstein” and “Hamnet” saw similar success, allowing the data to support this insight: Statistically, it’s nearly certain that you will see these films in many of the key above-the-line races.

Amy Madigan lands in a similar boat after her Critics Choice win. The only Critics Choice Best Supporting Actress winner this century who didn’t get a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination was Kate Winslet in “The Reader,” who was nominated in and won in the lead actress category at the Academy Awards. This makes Madigan, another horror performer who could have easily been written off, an all-but lock with a 95% chance of nomination.

And then there are the fallers, those whose poor showing this week put their Oscar odds in question. “Jay Kelly” and “The Testament of Ann Lee,” both already on the margins of the race, did not win at Critics Choice or land nominations at the Actor Awards or the DGA. “Wicked: For Good” only got a single nomination at the Actor Awards (for Ariana Grande, who stands at 88% Oscar nomination odds, in Best Supporting Actress) and no wins at Critics Choice.

These films aren’t out of the race. Several of them still have odds in the Awards Tracker that put them in the middle of the pack. Still, there are a few unquantifiables that probably won’t work in their favor.

The X factors

Decades of data establish trends and norms that, each year, give us a pretty good idea of how the Oscars race will shake out. But these trends can only take us so far. Just as every year audiences watch expected nominees and winners take the stage, a number of X factors exist that keep the race in limbo to the end.

Though the SAG and DGA lineups indicate who’s coming our way on nomination morning, neither ceremony recognizes international films at the same rate as the current Academy Awards. This is good news for movies like “It Was Just an Accident,” “The Secret Agent” and “Sentimental Value,” which were shut out in both SAG and DGA nominations.

But statistically, this gives them far worse odds than their more nominated competitors. Lately, however, as the Academy has recruited more global members, it has given itself a far different makeup than the American guilds.

For example, based on his nominations so far, Wagner Moura’s odds are pretty low to get an Oscar nod. But last year Fernanda Torres broke into the Best Actress Oscars race without a SAG nod.

This week showed us what happens when movie critics vote, and when people who make the movies vote. But the Academy is its own beast, and those other groups can only tell us so much.

So check out the robust dataset available on TheWrap’s Awards Tracker and see what stories are being told through the numbers. Just remember — the awards race isn’t over until it’s over.