ROY’S 2026 OSCAR PREDICTIONS (FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY)

OK cats and kitties it’s OSCAR DAY! Feel the excitement! 

I've been making Oscar predictions for years, peppered with what I used to call “sucker bets” until I realized I was using that term incorrectly. What I meant was, I sometimes get so sure that one specific nominee is perfectly suited to winning that I convince myself this feeling for the justice of their claim is actually a premonition of victory. That is, I play hunches.

That has worked out for me a few times, most spectacularly with Green Book in 2019*. My strong hunch was that Roma was too much more like a museum installation than a movie (at the time, that is -- by 2021, the similarly offbeat Nomadland was able to win) and Green Book was the kind of slop the dopes like (see also CODA). 

But usually my long shots don’t work out. In Oscar as in baseball, the sabermetricians have won out -- when I look at the vast resources employed by GoldDerby or other such award handicapping sites, and how influenced they are by the Bill James method and, of course, the crunches of Kalshi and Polymarket, I feel like some old sweaty, suspenders-wearing gump out of Damon Runyon at the sports desk saying a team is “due” and “has heart” while the crisp sabermetricians run their algos and put bets in DraftKings. 

This year I’m leaning in the direction of conventional wisdom, mainly based on GoldDerby and such like. But you know what? I am more an antique Runyon than a James. If it’s not fun and a little fanciful, I don’t see the point. So I do have a few, let us say, outside choices, marked here with a 🍭 icon. Keep that in mind and remember: For entertainment purposes only! 

(My reviews of the ten Best Picture nominees:  Bugonia, F1, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Sinners, and Train Dreams.)

* year award was presented, not when movie debuted

🍭 BEST PICTURE: Sinners. I buy the theory that it’s between this and One Battle After Another. Best reason to lean Sinners’ way is the magic of the premise. That other recent black visionary film Get Out had it too, but eight years ago the voters weren’t ready (plus Peele’s application of the magic tends creepy-negative, something else voters usually avoid). This year they’re ready. I LOST!

BEST ACTOR: Michael B. Jordan, Sinners. God did I want to put Ethan Hawke here!  I still have a strong feeling that he may upset and I may put down a side bet on him. But the odds are too great. Aside from Hawke, the contenders here are subtle -- that is, the performances of Moura and DiCaprio are vivid but not showy, and while Chalamet is energetic let’s just say he doesn’t show a lot of range (except from his previous more languid characterizations). Jordan’s twins are distinct in the way Jeremy Irons’ were in Dead Ringers; no giving one of them a higher voice or anything like that, just different responses to the same trauma. And he makes the sale.

BEST ACTRESS: Jessie Buckley, Hamnet. I have no Ethan Hawke premonitions for Rose Byrne, though her performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You had not only sensitivity and full character immersion but also nerve -- showing that woman’s collapse without flashy thespic signposts, just letting us see what she would do, was bold and paid off. But Buckley was excellent and she got the tears. I missed Kate Hudson, to my shame; Reinsve and Stone were excellent. But this isn’t their year.

🍭 BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Delroy Lindo, Sinners. From the moment Stack, Smoke, and Sammie came upon Delta Slim with his harmonica I reveled in this old pro’s performance and I know I’m not the only one. As I mentioned in my Sinners review, the story he tells after he and the guys drive through a chain gang containing some old friends is, beat by beat, an acting lesson. All honor to the other nominees, including Sean Penn -- who is favored here, but whose expressionistic performance, while well-suited to the movie, seems to me like the kind of thing that would turns some voters off.  I LOST!

🍭 BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another. Sort of a long shot; she was favored until Amy Madigan moved up, and was possibly pushed down by some controversy over the character’s allegedly stereotypical roots. Me? I think that’s like saying Aunt Gladys relies on stereotypes of Wiccans. Until this moment I was predicting Madigan -- yeah, I know what I just said about Sean Penn, but from what little I saw of Weapons (sorry I hate child-peril movies) Aunt Gladys doesn’t seem that out of key with the other characters -- just more interesting. All the other nominees are great but subtle, but Madigan and Taylor punched through the screen and I think Taylor’s presence in a top nominee film gets the win.  I LOST!

BEST DIRECTOR: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another. 

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Ryan Coogler, Sinners.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another.

No need to make this complicated. Ryan Coogler will be around a long time.

🍭 BEST CASTING: Jennifer Venditti, Marty Supreme. Fun new category! Sinners is favored but of all these nominees I was most captivated by the widely varied human beings who turned up in The Secret Agent -- it was like Jodorowsky meets Costa-Gavras. But the Academy voters probably know about and approve of the real-life non-actor machers Safdie seamlessly fit into his movie.  I LOST!

🍭BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Sinners. Cotton fields, rickety main street, deep dark woods, smoky club, all o’ercast with magic. The favored OBAA image-making is pretty cool, too, but with a brighter, flatter California palate, and I think Arkapaw has the edge in lushness. 

🍭 BEST EDITING: Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme. Car go fast means = good editing? Bullitt/F1! Tricky storytelling = good editing? The Social Network/OBBA! But as with winners like Whiplash and Dunkirk, voters dig cutting that really feels kinetic.  I LOST!

BEST SCORE: Ludwig Goransson, Sinners. Category is stacked, but the scene in which Annie and Smoke meet after years and renegotiate their union, with the blues sounds turning into something more like symphonic, did it for me. (Don’t be surprised if Max Richter’s Hamnet score leaps in, though; maybe people will attribute their tears to it.)

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN: Tamara Deverell and Shane Vieau, Frankenstein.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN: Kate Hawley, Frankenstein.

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING: Mike Hill, Jordan Samuel, and Cliona Furey, Frankenstein

Outside chance for another win for Ruth E. Carter, the Edith Head of black cinema. But del Toro movies sure look designed.

BEST SONG: “Golden,” KPop Demon Hunters. Duh.

🍭 BEST SOUND: Amanda Villavieja, Laia Casanovas and Yasmina Praderas, Sirat. I have an explanation! Everyone says F1 and maybe in the theater the cars sounded great but at home I didn’t feel it; plus I couldn’t make out what Javier Bardem was saying half the time and I know that was not me. As with Sound of Metal in 2019, part of idea of Sirat (I am told) is the sound. Voters love when they can recognize that.  I LOST!

BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM: Sentimental Value. Nearly always, a Best Picture nomination plus a Best Director nomination makes this inevitable. 

BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM: Florence Miailhe and Ron Dyens, Butterfly.  I LOST!

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM: Lee Knight and James Dean, A Friend of Dorothy.  I LOST!

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM: Joshua Seftel and Conall Jones, All the Empty Rooms.

I’ve actually seen 13 of these 15 nominees, which is probably the most dangerous ground on which to predict. They're all good! I wavered on a few: Two People Exchanging Saliva is very much in the mode of the 2024 Live Short winner I Am Not a Robot (this category is very rich this year), and I loved The Girl Who Cried Pearls. But I agree with the oddsmakers on these. And maybe they'll bring cuddly old Miriam Margolyes out on stage for it. (BTW, see Perfectly a Strangeness if you can. Such an eerie little thing.)

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: Joe Letteri, Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon and Daniel Barrett, Avatar: Fire and Ash. Love them 3-D living cartoon cat people! 

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE: Geeta Gandbhir, Alisa Payne, Nikon Kwantu and Sam Bisbee, The Perfect Neighbor. Haven’t seen a one, but my wife loved it.   I LOST!

There you go, folks! Don’t lose all your money! 

UPDATE: I did 61% -- not my worst, not my best! All honor to the winners, who were very good. 

BOO FUCKING HOO.

The latest martyr to the cause of No Homos is Ryan T. Anderson. Unlike Brendan Eich and the Duck Dynasty guys, though, Anderson has no inherent celebrity or entertainment value: I guess they've gotten to the point where they no longer even need avatars people might know, and are just breeding victims in their own propaganda labs.

Previously known mainly to people who cover anti-gay gasbags for a living ("Says Glee corrupts youth: 'We should be as concerned about what the FOX TV show Glee has done to corrupt a young generation as we are about anything the Court has done'"), Anderson recently received flattering coverage in the Washington Post (strange are the ways of the liberal media! I thought they were all in the tank for Gay ObamaHitler) as "a fresh voice on same-sex marriage," "fresh-faced" and "millennial," who tours the country lecturing on "anthropological truths that men and women are distinct and complementary," illustrating his points with polygamy scare-stories from The New York Post.

This was especially hilarious to me because I last paid attention to Anderson in 2007 when, as an assistant editor at First Things, he was already on the moral-panic beat, complaining that Princeton freshmen had to watch a sexual assault prevention program that had gross stuff in it like "sexual skits, innuendo, 'coming-out' scenes, gay kisses, and other nonsense that some students don’t want to be forced to sit through." If only they'd make sexual assault prevention programs that even rightwing plants can enjoy!

Along with the sex angle, Anderson was (even then!) working the victim-status angle. From my post:

Anderson spends the rest of the article complaining that liberals make jokes about him and his buddies. Normal people learn to shrug this kind of thing off, but for wingers snide comments are hate-speech or bad-touch or something. "Professor [Lee] Silver’s attack wasn’t really aimed at Professor [Robert George]; it was aimed at the students," Anderson claims, because a laff on a prominent conservative buffoon sends students "a message about which points of view are acceptable and which are unacceptable. 

Well, little Ryan has grown up, and advanced from vicarious sufferer over the martyrs of his movement to abused saint himself.  After the Post story came out, his old high school first publicly acknowledged this accomplishment, then ham-handedly rebuffed him. To you and me, this would be tsk-worthy, but to Anderson's brethren it is the iron boot of repression.

"The shunning of Ryan T. Anderson: When support for gay marriage gets ugly," thunders Damon Linker at The Week. Rod Dreher needs two posts to wring his hands over it: "Intellectually bankrupt, morally corrupt," sputters Dreher. "Illiberal elitist liberalism at its ugliest. These people have the power, and will have the power." (He's talking about high school administrators, remember.) At The Federalist, credentialed wingnut Joseph Bottum plays the old trick of telling us he's cool with gay marriage, more or less, but since the Facebook posts of Anderson's high school he's outraged by Chappaquiddick: "Our lives and our discourse are narrowed to only a trickle of intellectual light if we encounter someone like the intelligent and serious Ryan T. Anderson—and simply close our eyes in holy dread." Etc.

I'm not sure what the long term strategy is here: Maybe they just want to get this idea spread around enough that young conservatives for whom there is no room on the wingnut-welfare gravy train can go out on the street with a tin cup and a cardboard sign that says PLEASE HELP, I AM A NO HOMOS MARTYR and wait for donations. Or maybe they think people will go back to persecuting homosexuals because they feel sorry for conservatives.

COLD SHOWERS FOR EVERYBODY! It's Friday -- and at National Review Online, you know what that means: time for sex hatred! The surprising dud in the bunch is Jonah Goldberg, who emits one of those No Guardrails thumbsuckers about how Madonna and Pamela Anderson (!) are turning girls into prostitutes with the help of the Democratic Party. He even writes "What matters is the signal such people send." As usual with Goldberg, this is the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.

The hapless K.-Lo. fares little better, submitting what seems to be a synopsis of a botched interview -- maybe the Margarita Hut had a generous buy-back policy -- with the authoress of a book called Girl Gone Mild: Fashionably Long, Overexplanatory Subtitle. From the precis, we may judge that insofar as the book has a point (besides serving as a rightwing front-group party favor), it is that some young women will not wear thongs, dammit, despite what Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi may think. "Today, more and more sensible young women are bridling when they hear 'bitches' and 'hos' on the radio," she writes. Very good! How do they react when they hear "bear my baby whether you want to or not, subhuman?"

As often happens in these dimwit competitions, the prize goes to a newbie: legacy pledge Ryan T. Anderson, "an assistant editor at First Things," who says that a skit the Princeton frosh are required to attend "amounts to little more than mandated indoctrination in liberal sexual ideology." Anderson fails to describe the "Sex on a Saturday Night" sketch, so I had to go read another rightwing kid's review, and even through that cloudy prism could see that the skit is a typical bit of agitprop telling the youngsters that date rape is bad. Does Anderson have a different POV? No, he says:

You can tell incoming freshmen that date-rape and other sexual assaults are illegal without subjecting them to an hour of sexual skits, innuendo, “coming-out” scenes, gay kisses, and other nonsense that some students don’t want to be forced to sit through.

I hear ya, kid. Similarly, Crest toothpaste didn't have to sell its product by putting commercials on "Will & Grace." They could have just told people how darned good for them Crest was. Turns out people prefer their selling messages to come with racy humor. Who knew?

Anderson spends the rest of the article complaining that liberals make jokes about him and his buddies. Normal people learn to shrug this kind of thing off, but for wingers snide comments are hate-speech or bad-touch or something. "Professor [Lee] Silver’s attack wasn’t really aimed at Professor [Robert George]; it was aimed at the students," Anderson claims, because a laff on a prominent conservative buffoon sends students "a message about which points of view are acceptable and which are unacceptable."

One always hears this from young conservatives who were subjected to just such allegedly soul-crushing mockery (Anderson is a Princeton grad), yet somehow managed to retain their contrary opinions into adulthood. How did Anderson do it? Maybe he passed long nights POW-style in his dormitory cell, scratching "God and Man at Yale" on the wall with a piece of purloined charcoal. In any case, is it true the overwhelming majority of students helplessly adopt every piece of nonsense their professors put in their heads? Because if so, I'm going back to college, and looking for a teaching job at an all-girls' school.