The Guide #234: Five big questions before the 2026 Oscars
Happy Oscars Eve eve to you all.The film industry’s glitziest night takes place on Sunday, at an ungodly hour for those of us covering it from the other side of the Atlantic.Coffee will be essential for anyone staying up, as will the Guardian’s annual liveblog, covering every last minute of the ceremony as well as its red carpet run-up.Head over to the homepage on Sunday evening for that, plus news and commentary on the night’s events.There’s plenty to read before that too: our annual Oscar hustings, making the case for each of this year’s best picture nominees (I sided with Sentimental Value); an interview with Academy top dog Bill Kramer; a piece on the increasingly toxic discourse around many of this year’s nominees; and Guardian film editor Catherine Shoard’s reader Q&A on this year’s race and the state of film in general.
There will be plenty more to come over the weekend too.Meanwhile, as is tradition, in this week’s Guide we look at the pressing questions around this year’s ceremony …Is the Sinners surge real?For a long time, this year’s best picture race seemed a saunter for One Battle After Another.Its director, Paul Thomas Anderson, had reached Scorsese levels of being considered overdue an Oscar, and the film was a timely and terrific comment on the heavily militarised, anti-immigrant enforcement organisations at the heart of Trump 2.0.But in the last month there have been vague stirrings of a Sinners surge, especially in the wake of strong showings at the Baftas and the Actor awards presented by Sag-Aftra (previously the much catchier Screen Actors Guild awards).
How seriously should we take it? Well, it’s easy to see why Oscar voters might be vibing with a highly lucrative, well-crafted original movie celebrating Black America, a community so often overlooked by the Academy.Still, a Sinners win would count as a shock: One Battle has hoovered up pretty much every precursor award going.Has Chalamet blown best actor?It’s hard to remember a stranger race than this year’s one for best actor.For months Timothée Chalamet had seemed an inevitable winner for his wild swing of a performance in Marty Supreme, coupled with a truly global awards campaign that saw him mix the usual Academy glad-handing with kitchen performances alongside mysterious masked scouse rapper EsDeeKid.But in recent weeks the shine seems to have chipped off Chalamet’s presumptive Oscar: even before his poorly received drive-by on ballet and opera, there was a growing sense that maybe the actor is too divisive a figure to clean up in a preferential-ballot voting system that tends to punish Marmite-types.
Sinners’ Michael B Jordan, who triumphed at the Actor awards, would be best placed to capitalise on any Chalamet slip-up, though don’t rule out Wagner Moura, well-liked by the Academy’s international voting bloc for his magical performance in The Secret Agent.Is Netflix’s award-chasing era coming to an end?Bar a vanishingly unlikely victory for either Frankenstein or Train Dreams, another year will have gone by without Netflix winning the best picture gong it has long coveted.This failure comes despite a very obvious Oscars push that saw them deliver five auteur-driven films last autumn, three of which – Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Edward Berger’s Ballad of a Small Player and Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite – basically fizzled from view the second they were released.Given all this, you might wonder whether Netflix might decide that all this Oscar-chasing is a bit pointless when you’re a planet-straddling streaming giant, and instead just stick to the flashy, trashy thrillers and clunking Mark Wahlberg action movies that have increasingly become the main chunk of their movie division.And yet, a best picture win would buy instant credibility with an industry that still views Netflix as a disruptive upstart, so perhaps a complete awards season abandonment is unlikely.
To that end they have the Quentin Tarantino-penned and David Fincher-directed Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sequel The Adventures of Cliff Booth on the way later this year.Who will win the newest Oscar category?Quite how the Academy has overlooked casting, an essential component of any good movie, for so long is anyone’s guess.But in 2026 casting directors will finally receive their own category at the Oscars.Granted, a category that will probably be whizzed past in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment to make more room for skits and the like, but still, it’s progress of sorts.Francine Maisler, a casting veteran who has worked on everything from Reality Bites to 12 Years a Slave, is heavily fancied to claim the inaugural award for Sinners, though it would be great to see Nina Gold, arguably one of the most important behind-the-scenes figures in the history of British film, take the gong home for Hamnet.
Next year, meanwhile, another overdue category is added: stunts!What will the Oscars look like in a time of war?When the 2003 Oscars took place, three days after the start of the Iraq war, the result was a ceremony mired in uncertainty, with presenters pulling out and Michael Moore delivering a now-notorious speech decrying the invasion while boos rained down on him from the audience,Two decades later, another ceremony is happening in the shadow of a US-led war in the Middle East,But how will that conflict be marked? The most obvious way would be through wins for the two Iranian films nominated this year – Jafar Panahi’s brilliant It Was Just an Accident (for best international film and best original screenplay) and Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki’s dynamic Cutting Through Rocks (for best documentary) – though neither film is fancied to triumph in their respective categories,Failing that, will another winner pluck up the courage to speak out, Moore-style? There’s been an increased unwillingness among celebs for political broadsides in the second Trump era (with the exception of a few nods towards Palestine), but perhaps this unpopular war might put an end to such reticence,To read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday
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