99th Oscars Projections: Initial, Post-Cannes Update

A Debut Look At The Best Picture Race Outlook For The 99th Academy Awards

May 29, 2026

Introduction

I’ve been an Oscars observer since I was in fourth grade during the big Titanic sweep season of 1997. The first Academy Awards ceremony that I watched from start to finish was the 2002 edition, when Chicago outran a late-surging The Pianist. I started writing about and predicting the Oscars during the 2021 season. Previously, I posted my predictions here while saving the more in-depth analysis for another website, Ordinary-Times. Well, the time has come to commit to just one place to share all my thoughts on film, and yes, my Oscars projections as well, and I’ve chosen to do that through my own Substack newsletter.

Last year, I pulled off something I never thought I’d be able to do in that I correctly predicted the eventual Best Picture winner, One Battle After Another, from the previous May all the way through Oscar night. So entering the 2026 season, I’ve already got a lovely concoction of personal stress over how I’m going to top that feat mixed with the volatility of trying to figure out exactly what the Best Picture lineup will look like at such an insanely early stage in the race.

In the past, I usually got my initial projections out before the Cannes Film Festival kicked off, but this year I decided not to rush things and instead wait until the festival wrapped up. At Cannes, Neon continued its streak of winning the top prize with its top priority, the family courtroom drama Fjord. However, other international films such as the queer period epic The Black Ball, the philosophical All Of A Sudden from Best Picture nominee Drive My Car’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the post WWII period piece Fatherland from Best Director nominee Paweł Pawlikowski, the WWI period piece Coward, and the dark Minotaur also emerged as potential contenders.

As for non-Cannes factors, Amazon’s Project Hail Mary released just a few weeks after the previous Oscars ceremony and went on to become both a critical and financial success, while still holding on to some of the strongest audience scores of the year so far. The film has all the makings of the kind of big studio populist blockbuster that sneaks into the lineup, but this year also features several other major studio genre films all fighting for that same lane.

Which brings us to the frontrunner at this stage, and picking out such is a much harder call for me than it was last year. On paper, Christopher Nolan’s upcoming epic The Odyssey has all the ingredients to be win-competitive, but it’s also been two decades since a director helmed more than one Best Picture winner so the film is going to have to truly blow away critics and audiences in a way the Academy will have no choice but to give Nolan the top prize twice in just four years.

Nevertheless, perhaps against my better judgment, I’ve got Nolan’s next epic as the initial movie to beat, followed by a board of fifty films that I currently consider to be in the race for a Best Picture nomination. Their chances range from movies simply waiting for an opportunity to open up, all the way to films that already seem right on the verge of making the predicted ten.

Rounding out my initial predicted ten there’s Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s satire Digger, which will see Tom Cruise buried beneath pounds of makeup as an old rich billionaire trying to save the world. There’s Martin McDonagh’s black comedy Wild Horse Nine. There’s Focus Features’ Sense And Sensibility, which at the moment feels like their top priority, though we’ll have to wait and see how The Uprising or the populist horror favorite Obsession performs down the stretch. There’s the follow-up to The Social Network with The Social Reckoning. There’s Spielberg’s latest, Disclosure Day. There’s Dune: Part Three, which may or may not pull off a Return Of The King. And of course we have the aforementioned Project Hail Mary alongside the two Cannes titles The Black Ball and Fjord.

History tells us the lineup of ten nominees will usually feature two or three major blockbuster films and one or two international titles. My current predicted lineup arguably includes more of the former than it probably should and a tad less of the latter. I’m personally more fond of populist fields like 2022 or 2024 than cinephile-centric fields like 2023 or 2025, so that’s probably my bias showing. Still, I would be surprised if my current lineup goes 10-for-10. Based on past history and what I was predicting post-Cannes, I’d say at least half of these are likely on the money, which is a decent start with so much time left to go.

We still have the rest of the summer blockbuster season to see if any major populist contenders emerge. We still have the fall festivals where plenty of contenders will screen for the first time. We still have the big holiday season studio releases that could make major waves. It is still very early, and by the next time I check in shortly after the July 4th weekend, I already expect things to have shifted dramatically as the season continues and these films spend the rest of the year jockeying for position in the race to make the final predicted lineup.

Until then, you’ll find my board of fifty possible Best Picture contenders below, divided into five tiers. The contenders right now range from the commonly predicted heavy-hitters to potential populist favorites to films that may or may not even release later in the year. Like the protagonists in our current frontrunner, we still have a long journey ahead of us, and it’ll be exciting to see where everything lands by the end.

Make sure to tune into the upcoming sixth episode of my weekly podcast, where I’ll be talking about all fifty of these contenders in much greater depth.