2026-27 Oscar Nomination Predictions

Laika has been nominated for five best animated feature Oscars. It has lost every single one.

For nearly two decades, the Portland, Oregon-based stop-motion animation studio, backed by Nike billionaire Phil Knight and run by his son Travis Knight, has produced some of Hollywood’s most painstakingly crafted movies — only to watch Disney or Pixar take home the trophy every time.

But this year, the winds have shifted. Disney has lost four consecutive Oscar races; Pixar hasn’t won in the category since 2021. The Academy’s increasingly international membership has embraced everything from The Boy and the Heron to Flow. And Laika has mounted its biggest gamble yet: Wildwood, a PG-13 fantasy that took more than five years, more than 1,000 workers and a reported $100 million-plus to produce. It could finally win them that Oscar.

Directed by Travis Knight, Wildwood is the first film Laika is essentially self-releasing, partnering with Fathom Events to get into theaters and handling marketing entirely on its own. That included pop-up events at the Telluride and Toronto International Film Festivals, a world premiere at the London Film Festival and a $12 million opening weekend on just 1,400 screens — particularly notable for an animated movie with a PG-13 rating, even with that nine-figure budget.

But its team isn’t leaving its Oscar chances entirely to the movie itself. The studio has been flying awards voters and journalists to Portland to witness the extraordinary labor behind its films — a campaign designed to make the craftsmanship impossible to ignore. The puppets, sets, microscopically detailed props and shockingly lifelike faces are all handmade by people — many of them the same ones who worked on the studio’s first movie, 2009’s Coraline.

→ See the Laika studio visit at TheAnkler.com

The latest installment of our series diving deep into the acting races, with Awards Watch’s Erik Anderson and Ryan McQuade joining Christopher Rosen and me to look at the state of play in best supporting actor, where it might be anyone’s game — unless I’m right that there’s an obvious frontrunner hiding in plain sight. (Hint: His name rhymes with Schmobert Schmattinson.)

→ Watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on Apple podcasts.

Take one look at recent best picture winners, and it’s clear the Academy has transformed dramatically over the past decade. Moonlight, Parasite, Nomadland, Everything Everywhere All at Once and Anora are not the types of movies that historically won Oscars before the Academy broadened its membership with an emphasis on greater diversity and globalization.

But while the Academy has changed, Hollywood’s expensive Oscar campaigning machinery may not have kept up.

Stephen Follows, a film data researcher, educator and Substacker, has analyzed nearly a century of data for his new site, Awards Almanac, and I’m exclusively revealing four findings that challenge conventional wisdom about what it takes to win an Oscar.

→ See the charts at TheAnkler.com

What we’re seeing in public is nothing short of a phenomenon. You Can See Everything has an unrivaled mix of critical acclaim and box-office power, with a sterling 97 Metacritic score and the biggest opening weekend for a documentary in more than 20 years. The documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim follows Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she began her prison sentence in 2023 and branches in many directions from there — and it’s likely to become A24’s biggest hit in what’s been a year full of them.

What’s happening behind closed doors may be even more fascinating.

My fellow Oscar pundits have been speculating for weeks about whether a semisecret participant in the film could score a basically unprecedented acting nomination for a documentary. But the pricklier discussion is about the documentary itself, which could be snubbed in the best documentary category even while landing an equally unprecedented best picture nomination.

“I had a conversation with an Academy Award-winning documentarian who said they think this may be in the conversation for the greatest documentary of all time,” one documentary branch voter tells me. “I also had conversations with very well-established colleagues, and I would describe their response as being incredibly jealous and not very favorable — way more than anything we’re seeing in the public discourse.”

To understand why the biggest documentary of the year might have to sit out the Oscars category that honors the film’s genre, you have to understand the Academy’s documentary branch and its fraught, self-flagellating history. The documentary branch voter I spoke to puts it bluntly: “If there is a populist film that we perceive is going to win the Oscar, it doesn’t get nominated.”

Yes, expect some spoilers ahead.

→ Read Everything at TheAnkler.com

Can you even have an international feature Oscar race without Neon?

Barely a decade old, the distributor co-founded by Tom Quinn has already won twice in the category — in 2020 for Parasite and this year with Sentimental Value — among 10 overall nominations. But even that doesn’t tell the whole story: At this year’s Oscars in March, four of the five nominees came from Neon — with a fifth movie, No Other Choice, likely just missing.

That’s absurd, but it’s not even the company’s biggest flex.

Neon has backed the Palme d’Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival seven years in a row. The studio team is so rightfully proud of the feat that it decorated Neon’s pop-up office on the Croisette with photos of all its past Palme winners, then had to make room for one more: Fjord, from Cristian Mungiu, which Neon acquired just before the fest and, yes, it won the Palme. And Fjord isn’t the only strong card in Neon’s deck — Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, also a Cannes prize winner, is even more acclaimed and hits theaters in late November.

Netflix is no slouch in the category either, winning twice with Roma and All Quiet on the Western Front. This year, the streamer picked up Spain’s La Bola Negra at Cannes shortly before it took home a best director prize for Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo. Now, after winning the People’s Choice Award at TIFF last month, La Bola Negra looks like a major player in many categories beyond international feature. Netflix is also backing another festival sensation, Possible Love, the Silver Lion winner at the Venice Film Festival and South Korea’s official Oscar submission, with star Jeon Do-yeon firmly in the mix of a fluid best actress field. 

Right now on our international feature predications page, only one film not distributed by Netflix, Mubi or Neon is being predicted by anyone: Everytime, the official German submission backed by upstart distributor 1-2 Special. I’ll confess: I’m the outlier! But I think once more people discover the film, which won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and will have a qualifying release this year, I won’t be the only one standing up for Sandra Wollner’s beguiling family drama.

Still, this year, it’s all about La Bola Negra vs. Neon. Or maybe not.

→ Continue reading on TheAnkler.com to learn why pundit Tyler Coates says “the international feature Oscar is Netflix’s to lose.”

All the excitement in the movie world has been in Manhattan this week, where the New York Film Festival has brought splashy world premieres of Oscar contenders like Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth! and Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial.

On Monday, as the crowd filed into Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall for the world premiere of Artificial, I chatted with fellow Prestige Junkie Pundits Sophia Ciminello and Matt Neglia about Digger and whether it had the juice to make it through Oscar season despite calamitous reviews and worse box office. (My take: It does, but we can save that debate for another time.)

Artificial features the best Andrew Garfield performance in a movie since he should’ve won an Oscar for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut, Tick, Tick… Boom. Playing Sam Altman in Guadagnino’s ripped-from-the-headlines look at OpenAI’s rise, and how it has set humanity on a collision course with its own ruin, Garfield lords over the movie like a millennial cringe Bond villain without the shark tank. (Sample line reading: “Sooo, that just happened.”) 

I’ve already seen people compare Garfield’s performance in Artificial to Anthony Hopkins’ Oscar-winning work as Hannibal Lecter — and the fact that Guadagnino and his cinematographer, Malik Hassan Sayeed (He Got Game, After the Hunt), often replicate Jonathan Demme’s signature close-up shots, with Garfield and other actors looking directly into the camera lens, certainly lends credence to the juxtaposition.

→ Read more about how Artificial played at NYFF at TheAnkler.com

If the best actor race is about multiple A-list men with long histories of success vying for awards recognition, consider the best actress contest its opposite: one major frontrunner in Julianne Moore followed by a ton of newcomers and breakouts, a handful of respected veterans and, by my count, just two no-argument, above-the-title movie stars (Zendaya and Emily Blunt). That’s fun! Assuming Moore is nominated for her barn-burner performance in The Debut, it seems very likely that the other four actresses joining her in the category will all be first-time nominees — including several names that were all but unknown a year ago. 

Historically, actresses are far more likely than actors to win Oscars as newcomers, from Judy Holliday in 1950’s Born Yesterday to Mikey Madison for Anora just two years ago. But Oscar season has many different kinds of discoveries, and this year’s hopefuls can follow many different narratives on their way to trying to beat Julianne Moore. (Not that it’ll be easy, as I’ll discuss on tomorrow’s podcast with Christopher Rosen and Rotten Tomatoes awards editor Jacqueline Coley.)

As you can see on the Best Actress predictions page, there’s little consensus beyond Moore, which means those remaining four slots could be anyone’s game. For the sake of talking about breakthroughs of one kind or another, I’ll set aside the previous nominees who are in the mix — Helen Mirren for A Talent for Murder, Blunt for Disclosure Day, Sandra Hüller for Rose and/or Fatherland, Sophie Okonedo for Clarissa, Renate Reinsve for Fjord — and focus on the first-timers. If they’re getting their first Oscar nominations this year, how will they go about it?

→ Read the full breakdown at TheAnkler.com