Predicting the Oscars 2026
Is this the year of the "makeup Oscar"?
Dear Squawkers,
I have waited until the last possible moment to send this newsletter to Lainey for editing, because these are my annual Oscar predictions, and I cannot remember a year in which the Oscars have felt so wide open, not even last year, when my predictions were hilariously terrible. In a way, it’s not surprising because it is all coming down to Sinners v One Battle After Another, which is the matchup we’ve been anticipating since December. But in another way, it IS wide open, because so many major categories do not have a consensus frontrunner, so it feels like most categories could break either way.
Which is fun! I have had a lot of fun writing these predictions, even though I am already resigned to being wrong a lot. I have interviewed three (3) Oscar voters about their ballots, and they were all over the map. Two of them did share a sentiment that One Battle will ultimately triumph (“Anderson made a movie no one hated watching for once”, said one voter), but another is a staunch Sinners defender, who thinks Ryan Coogler is the future of American cinema and that “some people should stop being bitch babies about a cool Black guy coming in hot” (this is giving me “Trump winning after Obama’s presidency” nightmares).
But this is where the idea of the “makeup Oscar” really comes into play, because as I have mentioned before, the Academy has famously whiffed it with Paul Thomas Anderson over the years. PTA is overdue and everyone knows it, and like my voters pointed out, One Battle is the most accessible film he’s made in decades. So I do think PTA still has an edge for Best Director, at least, but that just means we’re pushing off Ryan Coogler’s Oscar to some nebulous future film he hasn’t made yet. This is why the Oscars should be awarded on a five-year delay. With five years to think about it, I don’t think American Beauty ever wins Best Picture for 1999, and Magnolia would already jump out as a major masterpiece, which would leave a clearer path for Sinners today, never mind whoever inevitably gets screwed when Ryan Coogler’s Makeup Oscar comes due.
But we do have to reward the Oscars in real time with recency bias still going strong. So here they are, my extremely precarious picks for the 98th Academy Awards. I have no confidence in 90% of these picks, I am really just running on vibes. Let’s fucking go!
