Oscars 2026: Academy Voting Opens in Historic Race

The Race Is On

Hollywood's most consequential ballots are now being cast. As of February 26, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences began final voting for the 98th Academy Awards, with the ceremony set for March 15 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Voting closes March 5, leaving ten days for roughly 10,000 Academy members to decide a race that has rarely looked this competitive — or this historically significant.

One Battle After Another: BAFTA's Champion

Paul Thomas Anderson's sprawling political satire One Battle After Another enters the final stretch as the clearest frontrunner. At the 2026 BAFTA Film Awards, the film swept six prizes including Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Sean Penn), Best Cinematography, and Best Editing — one of the most dominant BAFTA performances in recent memory.

Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland, the film follows ex-revolutionaries reuniting to rescue a comrade's daughter from a resurfacing old enemy. Anderson, accepting his Best Director prize, offered a characteristically unfiltered reaction:

"Anybody that says movies aren't any good anymore should piss right off."

Beyond BAFTA, Anderson claimed the Directors Guild of America prize — a historically reliable Oscar predictor, with 18 of the last 20 DGA winners going on to win the Academy Award for Best Director. He has accumulated 32 directing wins across the awards season, per Variety's tracking, reinforcing his frontrunner status.

Sinners: Record-Breaking Contender

If One Battle After Another is the critical establishment's choice, Ryan Coogler's horror drama Sinners is the season's genuine phenomenon. The film earned 16 Oscar nominations — the most in Academy history — surpassing the previous record of 14 nominations shared by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997), and La La Land (2016), according to Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

Nominations include Best Picture, Best Director for Coogler, Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan, Best Supporting Actress for Wunmi Mosaku, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography for Autumn Durald Arkapaw. The film also carries historic off-screen significance: producer Zinzi Coogler becomes the first Filipino producer nominated for Best Picture, and she and Ryan Coogler are the first married Black couple nominated together in the category.

At BAFTA, Sinners won three awards, including a recognition of its bold visual craft. Coogler has described the record-breaking nominations as "pretty crazy."

The Open Categories

While Best Picture and Best Director appear to lean toward Anderson, several major races remain genuinely competitive. Timothée Chalamet is the frontrunner for Best Actor following Golden Globe and Critics Choice wins. Sinners is projected to capture Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score (Ludwig Göransson), and potentially Best Cinematography. The International Feature Film race remains wide open, with Norway's Sentimental Value holding a slight edge.

What's at Stake

The contrast between the two leading films captures a broader tension in Hollywood: One Battle After Another is an auteur's dense, literary epic aimed squarely at Oscar tradition; Sinners is a genre-bending, culturally electrifying work that broke records before a single vote was cast. Whether the Academy rewards craft-as-prestige or ambition-as-phenomenon will say much about where the institution stands in 2026.

The 98th Oscars ceremony, hosted by Conan O'Brien, airs March 15. Results of the Academy's vote will not be known until that evening — but the industry will be watching every signal closely until then.