This Year's Contenders

The festivals are done and the guilds haven't started. Cannes, Venice, Telluride and TIFF have all played, and the Gotham Awards announced its nominees on October 27. The precursors my model leans on most, the guild awards and the big critics' groups, begin in December.

Cannes gave the field its first real signal

Fjord, Cristian Mungiu's follow-up to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, won the Palme d'Or, his second. Neon has it for the U.S., and Neon has now released seven straight Palme winners domestically including Anora and Parasite. That pedigree makes Fjord the Best Picture film to beat on paper. My model weighs more than pedigree, and as of November 5 it has Fjord 22nd for a nomination. Stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve are both plausible acting nominees.

The rest of the Cannes jury's picks are shaping up as the International Feature field to beat. Minotaur, Andrey Zvyagintsev's first film in nearly a decade, took the Grand Prix. Fatherland (Pawel Pawlikowski, starring Sandra Hüller) and The Black Ball (Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, starring Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close) tied for Best Director. All of a Sudden, from Drive My Car director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, won Best Actress for its two leads, and Coward (Lukas Dhont) won Best Actor. Most of these were still hunting U.S. distribution when the festival ended, which is the main hurdle between a Cannes prize and a nomination.

What Venice, Telluride and TIFF added

Venice gave its Golden Lion to Woman Unknown, a postwar Danish thriller that also won Mathilde Arcel the Best Actress prize. It has sold in several international markets but had no U.S. distributor as of my last check, so its path here is narrow. Possible Love took the Grand Jury Prize. Wild Horse Nine, Martin McDonagh's reunion with Searchlight after The Banshees of Inisherin, won Best Actor. Primetime, with Robert Pattinson, drew strong Oscar-oriented notices there before A24 opened it on September 25.

Telluride gives no prizes. Its lineup produced You Can See Everything, which sits at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and 98 on Metacritic as of November 5.

At TIFF, The Black Ball won the People's Choice Award outright, on top of its Cannes Best Director tie. Netflix gave it a 46-day theatrical window starting October 16. I Play Rocky was first runner-up and Being Heumann second. Elsinore won the International People's Choice Award.

The first precursors

The Gotham Awards named eleven Best Feature nominees on October 27: Clarissa, Club Kid, The Debut, Dreams in Nightmares, The Invite, Josephine, Mouse, Paper Tiger, Primetime, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. As of November 5, only Primetime and The Invite are in my model's top 15 for a Best Picture nomination. The TIFF People's Choice Award and the Gotham nominations are the only two precursors the model has so far.

What has already opened

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opened July 17 to roughly $120M domestic and an A CinemaScore, the kind of launch that keeps a Picture and Director campaign alive all year, especially two years after Oppenheimer swept. Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling's adaptation of the Andy Weir novel, opened strong back in March. A Best Actor push for Gosling is plausible, though a genre film's likelier path runs through the below-the-line categories.

Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg's first UFO film since War of the Worlds, grossed over $170M in its opening weeks on a $115M budget. Obsession, a $14M horror acquisition, passed $148M worldwide and is a possible Original Screenplay dark horse if the writers' branch embraces horror as it did with Get Out and Sinners. Sense and Sensibility opened October 16 at 79% on Rotten Tomatoes and 72 on Metacritic, and costume and production design are its likeliest paths.

What is still ahead

Wild Horse Nine is due in November. Dune: Part Three closes Denis Villeneuve's trilogy on December 18, the same day as Avengers: Doomsday. The first two Dune films were tech-category regulars and this one is seen as Villeneuve's best shot yet at Picture and Director.

When this page starts moving fast

Festival reception is a soft signal. The precursors my model leans on most don't show up until the critics' groups and guilds report: the New York, Los Angeles and National Board of Review awards in early December, the Independent Spirit and Critics' Choice nominations on December 2 and 4, then PGA, DGA, SAG and BAFTA in January. That is the stretch where the forecast page changes week to week.

I update this page each year instead of starting a new one. For the model behind the numbers, see How the Oscars Forecast Model Works. For live win probabilities, visit Oscars Forecasts.