With new movies on the docket from a broad church of Academy-favorite auteurs, expect the 2026 Best Picture race to be a bloodbath. There will be no room for superhero movies this time around, although the Brad Pitt racing thriller F1 might slide in the way Top Gun: Maverick (from the same director, Joseph Kosinski) did in 2023.
The leading contender from the summer is the still-officially-untitled tenth feature film from Paul Thomas Anderson, which at one point was reportedly entitled The Battle of Baktan Cross but may end up being released as One Battle After Another. It’s said to be the beloved filmmaker’s biggest-budget movie to date, with an all-star cast featuring the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Regina Hall. PTA has been nominated for eleven Oscars so far, with arguably his biggest chance coming for bonafide classic There Will Be Blood—which would’ve likely swept in 2008, had it not endured the misfortune of coming out in the same year as No Country For Old Men. Should Battle meet its lofty expectations, we could see it steamrolling the opposition straight to the director’s first statuette.
Which brings us to the other candidates. A favorite among the Letterboxd generation, Luca Guadagnino has been consistently overlooked by the Oscars since he rocketed to international acclaim with 2017’s Call Me by Your Name, despite follow-ups like Bones and All and Challengers routinely finding their way to cinephiles’ year-end lists. But expectations are huge for After the Hunt, a timely cancel-culture thriller that shot over the summer last year. Julia Roberts plays a college professor whose colleague is faced with a “serious accusation,” which sounds like meaty material primed for an awards run.
Elsewhere, Nomadland director Chloé Zhao returns with Hamnet, which stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley as William and Agnes Shakespeare in a fictionalization of their life following the death of their son. A prestige period piece? That’s just the sort of material that the Academy laps up. An outside bet might be popstar drama Mother Mary, from A24—the studio that swept in 2023 with Everything, Everywhere All at Once and took three gongs this year for The Brutalist—starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, with original music by Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff. Suffice to say, it sounds very of the moment, appealing to the Academy’s younger voters, who just saw Anora take home five awards. But director David Lowery, routinely acclaimed for films like A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, has been historically snubbed at the Oscars so far.
On the subject of A24, The Rock’s first foray into the arthouse, The Smashing Machine, is set to release this year. Right now, we expect it to be more of a vehicle for a Dwayne Johnson awards campaign—the narrative around the film will inevitably coalesce around his performance, should it turn up the goods, and those who follow the Oscars love nothing more than a good redemption arc. We expect ping-pong drama Marty Supreme to be another major contender for A24, and it may just be the most viable of the lot: a sports drama directed by Josh Safdie (of Uncut Gems fame) with Timothée Chalamet in another lead that seems primed for awards contention, playing real-life table tennis star Marty Reisman.
