Like some wise Boyz II Men once sang, we’ve come to the end of the road — and it’s time to let go of the 2026 Oscar season. The final voting window officially slammed shut on March 5, kicking off the 10-day countdown until the winners’ names are read at the Dolby Theatre on March 15.
That’s given your Gold Derby crew time to gather their collective thoughts about the wild cycle we’ve all lived through, which saw the rapid decline and fall of once-mighty early contenders like Dwayne Johnson and Julia Roberts, regular resets of specific races (most notably Best Supporting Actor and Best Actor, still two of the most volatile categories), and a steady winnowing of the field until only two movies — One Battle After Another and Sinners — seem to matter.
Naturally, we can’t do a full autopsy on this year’s Oscars until the statuettes are handed out. But we’ve seen enough to offer up five lessons we’ve gleaned from our time on the awards circuit this cycle.
The Best Picture calendar has changed… for good
The days of the December surprise have been over for some time when it comes to Best Picture winners — Clint Eastwood‘s Million Dollar Baby put the nail in that particular coffin. But within the past four years, the clock has been turned even further back. The 2021 Best Picture winner CODA had its first screenings at Sundance in January; Everything Everywhere All at Once peeked out at SXSW in March 2022; Oppenheimer opened wide alongside Barbie in July 2023; and Anora started its Oscar journey at Cannes in May 2024.
This year, fully half of the category’s nominees launched well before the fall corridor with top upset contender Sinners flexing its might in April. And even though the favored-to-win One Battle was a September release, it neatly sidestepped that month’s overcrowded festival schedule and ended up owning the news cycle as a result while other titles were lumped into the Venice-to-Telluride-to-Toronto-to-New York logjam.
While recency bias and fall festival approvals long favored later-calendar releases, the fact that Sinners and One Battle are the only two movies in the Best Picture conversation confirms that the ground has shifted in favor of movies that have more runway — and the undivided attention — to make their case. That should bolster the optimism of early-to-debut 2026 contenders like the Sundance award winner Josephine, Amazon MGM’s critically adored Project Hail Mary, and the highly anticipated Zendaya and Robert Pattinson collab The Drama. In this new era, voters’ memories are long.
Best Picture
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Embrace the silence
Conventional wisdom held that Sean Penn had torpedoed his One Battle Best Supporting Actor Oscar hopes by refusing to walk the campaign trail after the movie’s initial theatrical run. After back-to-back BAFTA and SAG Actor Awards, though, conventional wisdom turned out to be wrong. Far from punishing Penn for his silence, voters seemed to appreciate the fact that he let his performance do the talking.
Contrast that with former Best Actor frontrunner Timothée Chalamet, who saw his Best Actor odds go into free fall after his loose lips at multiple FYC events sank the S.S. Marty Supreme. If Chalamet’s relentless campaigning indeed turned voters off, the A24-distributed feature will be on track for an 0-for-9 Oscar Night, making it the least-awarded film among the major players.
Don’t expect every acting contender to immediately make like Penn and clam up during FYC season, though. After all, performers like Wagner Moura, Delroy Lindo, and Kate Hudson can chalk their nominations up, in part, to the way they gamely worked every room they were in. But there does very clearly come a point in anyone’s campaign where it behooves them to model their behavior after a ballet dancer… and stay quiet.
Best Supporting Actor
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Sean Penn
One Battle After Another
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Stellan Skarsgård
Sentimental Value
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Benicio Del Toro
One Battle After Another
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Jacob Elordi
Frankenstein
Think global, vote local
When Parasite made history as the first non-English language Best Picture winner six years ago, it seemed like the increasingly global base of Academy voters were successfully expanding the Oscars’ borders. Indeed, this year saw a record number of international nominees landing in major races with Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent leading the board with nine nominations and four nominations, respectively. In comparison, the tastes of individual guilds like SAG — where voters studiously ignored international contenders — looked downright parochial.
But the global revolution won’t be televised this year. Sentimental Value is only predicted to take home one of its nine nominations — Best International Feature — as the heat around The Secret Agent has significantly cooled off in recent weeks. Moura’s own Best Actor surge peaked early, with Michael B. Jordan instead leapfrogging ahead of Chalamet to occupy the No. 1 spot on our leaderboard. And Stellan Skarsgård went from Best Supporting Actor frontrunner to also-ran as Penn made his silent comeback.
Non-English language contenders even face a tough road to victory in the usually reliable documentary and short film races. Netflix’s Florida-set doc The Perfect Neighbor holds the edge in the former, while All the Empty Rooms leads the Best Documentary Short race, and A Friend of Dorothy is ahead in Best Live Action Short. (The French-language animated short Butterfly is sitting at No. 1 in that race, at least.) The world may be watching the Oscars, but this year they’re unlikely to see themselves reflected in the winners.
Best Actor
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Michael B. Jordan
Sinners
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Timothée Chalamet
Marty Supreme
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Leonardo DiCaprio
One Battle After Another
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Wagner Moura
The Secret Agent
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Sequelitis suspected
For those who lived through it, The Lord of the Rings narrative is tough to let go of — I can personally attest to that. Ever since Peter Jackson‘s trilogy-capping Return of the King made a clean sweep of the 2004 Oscars, it seemed like voters were ready and willing to wait for the end of a blockbuster franchise to award the achievement in full. Even as recently as last year, Dune: Part Two played the LOTR card in its march towards a Best Picture nomination.
This year, though, neither Jon M. Chu‘s Wicked: For Good nor James Cameron‘s Avatar: Fire and Ash could sing a similar tune as they closed out their respective series — although we may still see some version of Avatar 4 and 5 in a few years’ time. The second act of Wicked was completely snubbed, failing to replicate a single one of its predecessors’ 10 nominations. And Fire and Ash only found its way to a Visual Effects nod, a statuette that it is, admittedly, certain to win. In fact, the only sequel to score any Oscar recognition this cycle is Disney’s Zootopia 2, but even being the biggest animated hit in Mouse House history isn’t enough to overcome the original pop culture phenom that is KPop Demon Hunters in the Best Animated Feature race.
Look for next year’s Dune: Part Three to be the proverbial canary in the coal mine for the Academy’s current feelings about big budget studio sequels. On paper, that Denis Villeneuve-directed third chapter has Return of the King vibes all over it, including genre literature pedigree and Best Picture nominations for the previous two installments. But maybe voters are in the mood for a different spice than one they’ve sampled already.
Best Animated Feature
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Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
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Nobody knows anything
Let’s give the last word on the season that was to one of the best to ever do it. William Goldman‘s pithy mantra about why Hollywood functions despite itself kept running through my head from my first Oscar precursor shindig — the Gotham Awards way, way back in December — to my last, the WGA ceremony on March 8.
Sure, we had some known unknowns, most notably Jessie Buckley‘s near-mortal lock on that Best Actress statuette as soon as the credits rolled on Hamnet‘s first Telluride screening. But I didn’t have Wunmi Mosaku on my Best Supporting Actress nominee Bingo card until she won at the Gothams, and I wasn’t certain that Rose Byrne could be this year’s Andrea Riseborough — a Best Actress nominee for a challenging, little-seen movie — until wave after wave of precursor nominations rolled in.
This may run counter to everything G.I. Joe wanted to teach my generation, but when it comes to the Oscars, not knowing is half the battle… and all of the fun.
