This Year's Contenders

It is early for the race that ends at the 2027 ceremony. Venice, Telluride and TIFF have not happened, and most of the fall slate is still months out. Cannes has already crowned its winners though, and a couple of the year's biggest awards swings have opened in theaters. Here is where things stand.

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 alone makes Fjord the year's clearest Best Picture frontrunner. 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 are still hunting U.S. distribution, which is the real hurdle between a Cannes prize and an actual nomination.

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.

What is still ahead

Venice's fall lineup includes Wild Horse Nine, Martin McDonagh's reunion with Searchlight and his first since The Banshees of Inisherin, premiering ahead of a November release. Reception there will be the first real read on it. Dune: Part Three closes Denis Villeneuve's trilogy on December 18, the same day as Avengers: Doomsday, a collision already nicknamed "Dunesday." The first two Dune films were tech-category regulars and this one is seen as Villeneuve's best shot yet at Picture and Director. On the literary-adaptation side, Sense and Sensibility from Working Title and Focus, directed by Blue Jean's Georgia Oakley, arrives October 16, following the same studio's four-nomination run with Pride & Prejudice.

When this page starts moving fast

Festival reception through September is soft signal. The precursors that my model actually weights heavily do not arrive until the guilds vote, which runs from the critics' circles in December through PGA, DGA, SAG and BAFTA in January. That is the stretch where the forecast page changes week to week.

This page gets updated in place rather than archived year to year. For the model behind the numbers, see How the Oscars Forecast Model Works. For live win probabilities, visit Oscars Forecasts.