THE WASHINGTON POST: Five questions about the 2026 Oscars race after the Golden Globes

Sometimes Oscar winners feel like such a foregone conclusion that the march to the ceremony becomes a slog. Get excited in 2026, though, because if last night’s Golden Globes proved anything, it’s that we have ourselves a race.

It’s been a great year for movies, and this feels like the first time in ages that we’ve had such a competitive field. There have been predictions that two movies, One Battle After Another and Sinners, might break the all-time record of 14 Oscar nominations, but on the night, Sinners only took home best score and the consolation prize of cinematic and box office achievement. This battle of two behemoths, unfortunately for this Sinners fan, might end in a rout.

Even best actress, which had seemed like a lock for Jessie Buckley, is looking like a toss-up. Ever since Hamnet debuted at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, she’s seemed sure to run away with it. And she’s still poised to do that, having won best actress in a drama.

But Rose Byrne, who won best actress in the comedy category for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, delivered the night’s most delightful speech, in which she explained that her partner, Bobby Cannavale, had skipped the awards because they’d bought a bearded dragon and he was at a reptile expo in New Jersey. If she keeps that up, maybe she’s got a chance to charm her way into the top of the race.

It’s a wonderful, glorious nail-biter! Here are our other burning questions about the Oscars after last night (and before nominations are announced January 22).

Is One Battle After Another an unstoppable force?

Paul Thomas Anderson’s $300 million Pynchon adaptation, One Battle After Another, has felt like a freight train barrelling toward an inevitable destination all season.

The cheeky, high-octane father-daughter tale of dormant revolutionaries who reemerge to take on White supremacists has won the top prize from nearly every critics body, even when those critics have spread the wealth to other movies in other categories.

At the Gotham Awards, it lost so many awards that Anderson truly seemed shocked when he won best picture.

But the big one has always seemed safely in hand … until now.

Could Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet be picking up steam at the exact right moment? This adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about the life-altering tragedy in William Shakespeare’s family that may have inspired Hamlet was the darling of the fall festivals, where critics called it the most devastating movie of the year. It won the People’s Choice Award at Toronto, but OBAA hit theaters two weeks later and stole its thunder. By the time Hamnet came out around Thanksgiving, an awards narrative favoring OBAA had already been set. Detractors called Zhao’s movie manipulative.

That seems to have changed over the holidays. Voters for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who may have been putting off watching Hamnet because of advance word on the emotional wreckage it leaves seem to have finally watched it. Fans have been coming out of the woodwork, like Seth Rogen, who told Zhao in a public conversation, “As someone who makes movies, your entire third act is, like, unbelievable and incredibly bold and original and not something I’ve ever seen, I don’t think, in a movie before.”

With OBAA winning the Golden Globe for best picture in comedy and Hamnet winning for drama, this suddenly feels like a two-movie race. They’re both facing off in the Producers Guild Awards, the Directors Guild Awards, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and probably BAFTAs (which has released only a longlist so far). I’d argue that Hamnet winning best picture at Saturday’s AARP Movies for Grownups Awards is a sign that it may have the stronger momentum. As much as the Oscars have tried to get younger, hipper membership, the overlap with the AARP is still stronger than you’d think.

Will Timothée Chalamet break the young man’s Oscars curse?

The Oscars have a well-documented bias against young men. Academy members seem to want them to wait until they’ve earned some gravitas. Adrien Brody is still the only man to win best actor under 30, whereas more than 30 young women have won best actress before the age of 30, including last year’s winner, Mikey Madison for Anora. Leonardo DiCaprio, a leading contender this year for One Battle After Another, was 19 when he got his first Oscar nomination for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and 41 when he got his first win for The Revenant. (This does not, by the way, bode well for Jacob Elordi winning best supporting actor for Frankenstein.)

Timothée Chalamet, who’s turned 30 since his Oscar close call last year for A Complete Unknown, won’t break the record, but he’s been looking more and more like he could be the next exception to the rule. He carried his ping-pong odyssey Marty Supreme on his back with a relentless and bonkers promotional campaign that many thought would ruin his Oscars chances. But it’s hard to argue against someone who gets an independent movie double its predicted opening box office.

His Globes win over DiCaprio and strong contender Ethan Hawke for Blue Moon is the first step to what looks like world domination. (He also won the Critics Choice Award.) That he beat out two beloved American stars over 50 is a good sign. But charming Brazilian Wagner Moura, 49, winning best actor in the drama category for playing a professor on the run from the Brazilian dictatorship in The Secret Agent, could be the bigger threat. He’s the soulful, hip alternative to Chalamet, in a movie with striking political relevance, and in the perfect age bracket.

Which international feature has the juice to get into best picture?

Just over a month ago, when Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident took home three Gotham Awards, including best director and best original screenplay, it seemed like the Iranian film was the strongest in the international field. After all, the searing drama about former political prisoners who kidnap the man they believe was their torturer had won best picture in Cannes and is based on Panahi’s two long stretches in Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison.

The day of the Gothams, Iran gave Panahi a jail sentence in absentia for his outspokenness about the regime — a new blow to a filmmaker who had only recently been released from a decades-long ban on making movies or leaving Iran.

For months, pundits have been predicting that he could get Oscar nominations for original screenplay, best director and best picture — making history as the first Iranian to do so — in addition to best international feature.

But the last week was not kind to Panahi. Unsurprisingly, the film was not nominated by the DGA or PGA, which tend to favor studio productions. But it also lost out at the Critics Choice Awards, and Panahi didn’t make the BAFTAs long-list for directors. Could this be the end of those high hopes?

It Was Just An Accident still seems solid for an international feature nomination, but with The Secret Agent winning the Globe and Critics Choice, is the Brazilian film now the presumptive winner? Or could the wave of protests in Iran bring Panahi’s bold critique of the regime back to the forefront?

And is Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, once seen as a shoo-in for best picture and best director nominations, now on the brink, especially after SAG completely ignored its cast?

Where does Sinners stand?

Winning just two awards at the Globes doesn’t bode well for Ryan Coogler’s vampire movie about racism.

But the box office doesn’t lie, and the popular strength of Sinners could still propel it back into contention in some categories, especially if Warner Bros. does another big Imax release before final ballots are due to prove how much of a chord the movie struck with the masses.

The issue with the Oscars is members often have a recency bias (hence why tons of big movies always release on Christmas, right before the eligibility period ends). Marty Supreme is fresh in their minds; Sinners, which came out in April, is not.

Coogler’s movie is still looking strong in pretty much every crafts category, particularly casting. Score for composer Ludwig Goransson, on a movie that is about folk, gospel and 1930s Delta blues, seems like a lock. Acting categories are a little shakier, but here’s hoping that Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan are safe. (Lindo’s spot is a tad in jeopardy; SAG passed him over for his younger co-star Miles Caton.)

Coogler looks like he could become the seventh Black director to be nominated for an Oscar, but it’s likely that history will remain unchanged and he won’t become the first to win. A best picture win also seems unlikely with Hamnet surging into the No. 2 slot, but you never know.

His best chance at an individual Oscar is for original screenplay. He won at Critics Choice but lost at the Globes in a category that combined original and adapted. With Anderson (who won the Globe) in an entirely different category, Coogler’s chances for glory are still intact.

Which Globes non-winners are still in the game?

No publicity campaign could ever beat Julia Roberts riffing at the mic, staring straight into the camera and telling the entire world to watch Victor’s debut feature, Sorry, Baby, a darkly comic look at their own journey back from sexual assault.

This bodes extremely well for Victor to get an original screenplay nomination.

Going into the Globes, Amy Madigan was probably the acting nominee who was surging the most. That hasn’t changed.

The Weapons star won the Critics Choice Award, made the BAFTA long-list, got a SAG nomination and saw her box office phenomenon of a horror movie get a surprise PGA nod — all after pundits and critics spent months championing her but wondered if the industry would be cool enough to take notice.

She’s a beloved industry vet whose last Oscar nomination was 40 years ago. She’s still a lock for a nod, but does she have the juice to beat Globes winner Teyana Taylor, who is also beloved and gives fantastic speeches?

And while Bugonia came up empty on Globes night, the movie showed incredible industry strength last week. I’d thought that there would be some kind of fatigue around Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos making movies together, but their weird, wonderful conspiracy-theory comedy about a CEO who might be an alien got a ton of guild nominations.

Stone and her co-star Jesse Plemons were both recognised by SAG and the BAFTA long-list, and Bugonia got a PGA nomination.

Alongside Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, it seems like the movie that’ll offer the most surprises come Oscars nominations day — while Wicked: For Good, Jay Kelly and Avatar: Fire and Ash will likely have to settle for a sad trombone.

© 2026 , The Washington Post