Oscars 2026: Who Will Win, and Who Should Win?

What It Covers

NYT chief film critic Manohla Dargis previews the 98th Academy Awards with NYT host Michael Barbaro, analyzing front-runners across Best Actress, Best Actor, and Best Picture categories, arguing that 2025 produced an uncommonly strong slate of studio films that speak directly to the current American experience.

Key Questions Answered

• •Best Actress front-runner: Jessie Buckley in *Hamnet* plays Agnes, Shakespeare's wife, and is considered a near-certain winner. Her performance spans romantic love, maternal grief, and animalistic loss after her son Hamnet dies while Shakespeare works in London. Dargis notes the Academy historically rewards emotionally expansive, physically demanding performances — what she calls the "Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment" archetype.
• •Best Actress alternative worth watching: Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve in *Sentimental Value* delivers a quieter, more layered performance opposite Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning. A key scene uses deliberate focus-pulling cinematography — Fanning blurred in the foreground, Reinsve sharp in the background — to let the audience read complex, unspoken emotion without directorial instruction on how to feel.
• •Best Actor three-way split: Timothée Chalamet (*Marty Supreme*), Michael B. Jordan (*Sinners*), and Ethan Hawke (*Blue Moon*) each represent distinct performance styles. Chalamet plays an abrasive post-WWII table tennis hustler; Jordan plays twin brothers with separate personalities in one film; Hawke portrays alcoholic lyricist Lorenz Hart on the night Oklahoma premiered in 1943. Dargis personally favors Hawke's restrained, age-worn portrayal.
• •Best Picture contender — Sinners: Ryan Coogler's film uses a juke joint vampire horror framework to explore Black cultural history from Africa through Mississippi to the present. A single continuous camera movement during a blues performance collapses time to show the full arc of African American music — blues, funk, hip-hop, and contemporary dance — making the film's historical argument visually rather than through dialogue.
• •Hollywood's commercial lesson from 2025: Both *Sinners* and *One Battle After Another* succeeded critically and commercially by grounding big-studio budgets in stories directly reflecting contemporary American anxieties. Dargis argues studio executives should read this as evidence that audiences actively seek well-crafted films engaging with real-world conditions, rather than blockbusters disconnected from lived experience.