The 98th Academy Awards are this Sunday, March 15, hosted by Conan O’Brien at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, live on ABC at 7 p.m. ET. And two days out from the ceremony, nobody can tell you with any real confidence who is going home with Best Picture. That almost never happens this late in the season.
For months this awards race has been a two-film story. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a vampire musical drama set in 1932 Mississippi starring Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers, became the most-nominated film in Oscar history with 16 nods. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a political action epic with Leonardo DiCaprio, swept nearly every precursor award from the DGA to the PGA to the BAFTAs to the Critics Choice to the Golden Globes. Both films are from Warner Bros. One of them will likely leave Sunday with five trophies. The question of which one, and whether the Best Picture goes to the right film, is what makes this one of the most genuinely uncertain Oscar nights in recent memory.
Here is what is likely to happen, what should happen, and where Sunday could get interesting.
Best Picture
Ten films are nominated: Bugonia, F1, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Sinners and Train Dreams. In practice it is a race between two of them.
One Battle After Another has the statistical case locked in. No film in history that wins at the Critics Choice, Golden Globes, BAFTA, ACE Eddies, DGA, PGA and WGA along with at least one SAG prize has ever lost Best Picture. That is a remarkable sentence. Paul Thomas Anderson’s film has done all of that. The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg, one of the most careful Oscar statisticians in the business, has held One Battle as his Best Picture prediction throughout the season and has not moved off it, noting that his job is to make picks based on facts, not feelings, and the facts continue to point one way.
And yet Sinners keeps refusing to go away. Sinners holds the ACE, SAG ensemble and WGA, and no film has ever lost with that combination either. So what you actually have is two films, both of which have never-lose precursor combinations. Something has to give.
The deeper argument for Sinners comes from how Best Picture voting actually works. The Academy uses ranked choice voting, where voters list all nominees in order of preference. That process has produced surprises before, from Spotlight besting The Revenant to the chaos when Moonlight upset La La Land. Ranked choice rewards consensus, films that land in the top three of many ballots rather than first on a few. NPR’s Glen Weldon made the counterintuitive case that traditional Academy voters who dismiss genre films may quietly push One Battle higher on their ballots, while Linda Holmes pointed out that the Producers Guild, a large and influential voting body with older-skewing members, went to One Battle rather than Sinners.
Stephen Thompson at NPR broke the other way, drawing a direct line between Sinners and Everything Everywhere All at Once: both came out early in the year, both made more money than expected, both maintained awards buzz for the better part of a year, and both feature largely non-white casts. Everything Everywhere won Best Picture. The parallel is not nothing.
What is also not nothing is the historic dimension. A victory for Sinners would bring the first Black woman a Best Picture win through producer Zinzi Coogler, and potentially a directing prize for Ryan Coogler, making him the first Black man to win Best Director. The Academy has shown it responds to these moments.
Gold Derby’s combined prediction of experts, editors and users projects Sinners and One Battle each winning five trophies, a dead heat. Hollywood Reporter projects One Battle taking six. Variety’s final prediction gives Best Picture to Sinners. Whatever you believe going in, be prepared for either outcome.
Best Director
This one is far less dramatic. Paul Thomas Anderson has won the Directors Guild, Critics Choice Awards, BAFTAs and Globes, among several others. Gold Derby gives Anderson a 90% chance of winning his first Oscar. He has been nominated eleven times across his career, for films including Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, The Master and Phantom Thread, and has never won. The Academy’s history of correcting long overdue directors is well established.
Ryan Coogler winning would be its own kind of history. He is one of the most talented filmmakers of his generation and has already directed three other Oscar-nominated films. But the precursor record here is simply too complete. Anderson is winning this.
Best Actor
This is where the season got genuinely strange. Six weeks ago, Timothée Chalamet was the frontrunner. He had won the Golden Globe and the Critics Choice for his performance as table tennis prodigy Marty Mauser in Marty Supreme and was becoming one of the youngest actors ever to receive three Best Actor nominations. Then BAFTA went elsewhere. Then the Actor Awards, formerly known as SAG, went to Michael B. Jordan. Then Variety reported that voters were saying Chalamet would get one when he is older.
Gold Derby gives Michael B. Jordan a 67% chance of winning for his performance in Sinners, where he plays twin brothers Smoke and Stack. The dual performance is not a gimmick. Two fully realized characters sharing the screen is genuinely extraordinary work, and the energy in the room when his Actor Award was announced reportedly shifted the conversation immediately.
The name nobody is discussing enough is Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent. Moura won the Golden Globe for Best Actor. He was not nominated at BAFTA or SAG, which are bodies with a documented difficulty recognizing non-English-language performances. But the Academy’s voting membership has become significantly more international over the past decade, and those members vote differently. If there is an upset in Best Actor, Moura is where it comes from.
Best Actress
There is one category where the outcome is not in question. Jessie Buckley is winning Best Actress for Hamnet and the only remaining question is what she says in her speech. Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley is universally expected to win Best Actress. Gold Derby had her at 100% at one point during the season. She plays a grieving mother in Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel and her performance received near-universal critical praise. She swept every major precursor in this category.
Emma Stone is a two-time winner in the mix for a third. Kate Hudson received her first nomination in 25 years, since Almost Famous, and the sentiment around that is real. Renate Reinsve is extraordinary in Sentimental Value. None of it moves the needle here. Buckley is winning.
Best Supporting Actor
The most genuinely open race of the night. All but one of the big six categories remain too close to call with any great degree of confidence going into the final days. Supporting Actor might be the least certain of them all.
Five men are nominated: Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro from One Battle After Another, Jacob Elordi from Frankenstein, Delroy Lindo from Sinners, and Stellan Skarsgård from Sentimental Value. Five different names have been floated as frontrunners at different points this season.
Penn won the SAG and BAFTA and enters as the consensus favorite. A third Oscar would place him in rare company. The counterargument that a certain type of voter quietly resists performances built entirely around villainy has historical backing. Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. Michael Fassbender in 12 Years a Slave.
Lindo is the emotional story of the season. Fifty years of acting, first Oscar nomination at 73, and a performance as a boozy old-timer blues musician already acquainted with the devil that has moved audiences deeply. He was not nominated at BAFTAs or SAG, which is historically a red flag, but as IndieWire noted, anything feels possible in this particular year.
Skarsgård won the Golden Globe. Elordi won the Critics Choice. Del Toro has his own block of passionate supporters. If any category produces a genuine surprise on Sunday, it is this one.
Best Supporting Actress
Amy Madigan enters as the favorite for Weapons, a horror film for which she received her first Oscar nomination since 1986. She won the Critics Choice and the SAG Award. The narrative of a 75-year-old veteran finally receiving her moment is exactly the kind of story that Academy voters respond to.
The complication is structural. Weapons is the film’s only Oscar nomination, and the history of supporting actress winners as their film’s sole contender is short. Teyana Taylor won the Golden Globe for One Battle After Another, and Best Picture frontrunners tend to carry adjacent categories with them. Wunmi Mosaku won the BAFTA for Sinners and represents the film’s most viable remaining acting hope in this category.
Everything Else
Beyond the six major acting and directing categories, the craft races tell a parallel story. Sinners is projected to win Best Actor, Original Screenplay, Casting and Cinematography. One Battle After Another is projected for Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay and Film Editing. Frankenstein is expected to take Costume Design, Makeup and Hairstyling and Production Design. KPop Demon Hunters is projected to win Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song.
The casting prize deserves a separate mention because it is the first time in Oscar history the category exists competitively. If Francine Maisler wins for Sinners, she makes history in a field that has waited decades for this recognition.
Ludwig Göransson winning Original Score for Sinners would make him a three-time winner, placing him ahead of Hans Zimmer, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross in career count for that category.
The International Feature race between Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent is closer than most people realize. Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Best International Feature is genuinely unsettled.
What Sunday Actually Means
The precursor argument for One Battle After Another has never been stronger. The cultural argument for Sinners has never been louder. Both films are from the same studio. Both would produce historic outcomes. The ceremony begins Sunday at 7 p.m. ET on ABC.
Whatever happens, this is a better-than-usual reason to actually watch.
