The 98th Academy Awards nominations 2026: Battle royale in Oscars ceremony like no other

It’s hard to remember an Oscars year like this one in recent years.

It’s genuinely exciting for the prognosticators and the cineastes – and it is, it really, really is – because there’s such a strong contingent of critical favourites this year, with very few duds up and down the nominees list.

But more importantly, this year is a showdown between two titanic movies, Sinners and One Battle After Another, that are, in many ways, very similar in that they are both crowd-pleasing blockbusters that are beloved by mainstream audiences and high-brow critics.

Those movies have always existed, and you might even find two or three in the best picture race most years, but they’re rarely the two leading contenders. For once, no matter who wins, everyone wins.

Moviegoers win, critics win, and Hollywood wins. And Warner Bros wins because both came from that same studio.

In Sinners and One Battle After Another, the industry gets to declare that the Oscars are still relevant, and even more so, that American studios can create films that appeal to popular tastes without compromising on art.

It’s instructive that both frontrunners didn’t premiere at a prestigious film festival such as Cannes, Venice or Telluride where auteur-driven and arthouse fare are feted with 15-minute standing ovations.

These two films were made for multiplexes attached to shopping centres where large assembled crowds should laugh, cheer and react in unison.

Sinners is a cross-genre historical action-horror-drama by Ryan Coogler, about 1920s twin brothers Smoke and Stack who return home to the American South to start a juke joint, buying a warehouse from a white supremacist. That night, during the heady revels of its opening party, vampires attack.

It’s a potent parable about the cultural appropriation of black American history and music, and the continuing challenges faced by the community. It’s decidedly political without being overtly polemical, and it’s wildly entertaining.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle too is political, and it’s notable that its opening shot is of an ICE detention centre on the border of the US and Mexico, and the film features sequences in which government forces infiltrate protests to deliberately provoke a violent response from armed, black-clad immigration agents.

The main characters are a former revolutionary and his teenage daughter, who have been in hiding for a decade-and-a-half when a military man, in a bid to join an elite white supremacist group, decides to hunt them down.

It’s a wild ride, at times literally, with a car chase scene that is so entrancing and thrilling that all those dumb explosions in Fast & Furious movies look even more idiotic.

Both films are proof positive that you can be all at once political, resonant, urgent, engaging, entertaining and art, while still being made for a mainstream audience. They’re challenging and provocative, sure, but they’re not distancing.

Sinners has a record-breaking 16 nominations while One Battle After Another has an impressive nods haul of 13.

Both films scored recognition in the main categories including picture, director, writing (Sinners in original, One Battle in adapted), and acting (Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro for One Battle, Michael B. Jordan, Delroy Lindo and Wunmi Mosaku for Sinners), as well as throughout the craft races.

One Battle was considered the runaway favourite for a long time, and it’s still a hair in front in the best picture race, having won significant pre-cursor awards such as the Producers Guild Award, one of the most reliable for predicting an Oscars winner.

But Sinners has been surging in the last act of the competition, especially at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, where it won its top prize, the ensemble cast gong, and best actor for Michael B. Jordan.

You’d be hard pressed to commit too much on the betting market on how the Oscars will shake out.

There are myriad combinations of what could happen, including a best picture and best director split where Sinners win the big one but Anderson goes home with the director’s prize.

This kind of battle royale between genuine audience heavy hitters (Sinners’ global box office was $US369 million while One Battle’s was $US209 million, not Avatar money, but decent) hasn’t happened for a very long time.

Last year’s best picture winner, Anora, is legitimately a perfect, rollicking film, but it was also an independent movie made for $US6m by a filmmaker, Sean Baker, who is famous for refusing to work within the studio system, likes casting unknowns, and once shot a feature, the excellent Tangerine, on iPhones.

Anora’s stiffest competition was The Brutalist, a costume drama about a post-war architect, another work by a mercurial auteur filmmaker, Brady Corbet, who is known for crafting challenging stories.

Two great films, but collectively, they barely cracked $US100m at the box office – although given their small, scraped-together budgets, both were profitable.

The point is, they were films that the general public were reluctant to embrace because they weren’t necessarily made for them. They’re kind of niche.

Oppenheimer, the best picture winner the year before, was, but it had no real competition and steamrolled its way through awards season as a foregone conclusion that the film, its director Christopher Nolan and lead actor Cillian Murphy were going to go home with trophies.

Everything Everywhere All At Once was a clear frontrunner going in (this was also the Top Gun: Maverick year but nobody was expecting that to win), and before that had been the pandemic victors, quiet dramas Nomadland and CODA.

Parasite won in 2020 against war movie 1917 and they’re both quite different films, and in 2019, saccharine historical drama Green Book’s victory made everyone unhappy, except its producers.

Arguably, you’d have to go back to 2003 for the last time mainstream multiplex movies were the frontrunners when Chicago beat out The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Even beyond Sinners and One Battle, this year’s best picture field is a diverse slate which caters to almost all tastes.

The normie dad crowd has F1: The Movie to represent them, while Gen Z-ers can look to their dented but not knocked out hero Timothee Chalamet in Marty Supreme. Literary types and historical drama heads have the big, weeping emotions of Hamnet while audiences who prefer things a little weirder have Bugonia.

The arthouse, international film crowd has Sentimental Value from Norway and The Secret Agent from Brazil, while Train Dreams fulfils that appetite for a quiet but beautiful drama about an ordinary person.

And then there’s Frankenstein, which some people like, and was watched by almost 100 million Netflix viewers by the end of last year.

Let’s also not forget that in the animated features category are two of the biggest commercial successes of 2025 – streaming phenomenon KPop Demon Hunters and Zootopia 2, the highest grossing English-language animation of all time with a box office of $US1.86 billion to date.

This is an Oscars year for everyone.

The Oscars ceremony will be broadcast on Channel 7 and 7plus on Monday, March 16 at 10am AEDT

BEST PICTURE

Bugonia

F1

Frankenstein

Hamnet

Marty Supreme

One Battle After Another

The Secret Agent

Sentimental Value

Sinners

Train Dreams

BEST DIRECTOR

Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another

Ryan Coogler, Sinners

Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme

Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value

Chloe Zhao, Hamnet

BEST ACTRESS

Jessie Buckley, Hamnet

Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue

Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value

Emma Stone, Bugonia

BEST ACTOR

Timothee Chalamet, Marty Supreme

Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another

Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon

Michael B. Jordan, Sinners

Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value

Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value

Amy Madigan, Weapons

Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners

Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another

Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein

Delroy Lindo, Sinners

Sean Penn, One Battle After Another

Stellan Skarsgard, Sentimental Value

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Bugonia

Frankenstein

Hamnet

One Battle After Another

Train Dreams

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Blue Moon

It Was Just An Accident

Marty Supreme

Sentimental Value

Sinners

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE

It Was Just An Accident

The Secret Agent

Sentimental Value

Sirat

The Voice of Hind Rajab

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

Arco

Elio

KPop Demon Hunters

Little Amelie or the Character of Rain

Zootopia 2

BEST CASTING

Hamnet

Marty Supreme

One Battle After Another

The Secret Agent

Sinners

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Frankenstein

Marty Supreme

One Battle After Another

Sinners

Train Dreams

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Frankenstein

Hamnet

Marty Supreme

Sinners

BEST FILM EDITING

F1

Marty Supreme

One Battle After Another

Sentimental Value

Sinners

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING

Frankenstein

Kokuho

Sinners

The Smashing Machine

The Ugly Stepsister

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

Frankenstein

Hamnet

Marty Supreme

One Battle After Another

Sinners

BEST SCORE

Bugonia

Frankenstein

Hamnet

One Battle After Another

Sinners

BEST SONG

Dear Me, Diane Warren: Restless

Golden, KPop Demon Hunters

I Lied to You, Sinners

Train Dreams, Train Dreams

Sweet Dreams of Joy, Viva Verdi

BEST SOUND

F1

Frankenstein

One Battle After Another

Sinners

Sirat

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Avatar: Fire and Ash

F1

Jurassic World Rebirth

The Lost Bus

Sinners

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

The Alabama Solution

Come See Me in the Good Light

Cutting Through Rocks

Mr. Nobody Against Putin

The Perfect Neighbour

BEST ANIMATED SHORT

Butterfly (Papillon)

Forevergreen

The Girl Who Cried Pearls

Retirement Plan

The Three Sisters

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT

All the Empty Rooms

Armed Only With a Camera

Children No More: Were and Are Gone

The Devil is Busy

Perfectly a Strangeness

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT

Butcher’s Stain

A Friend of Dorothy

Jane Austen’s Period Drama

The Singers

Two People Exchanging Saliva