Your Guide to the 2026 Oscar Best Picture Nominees
Plus: An assigned comedy!
AT OSCAR TIME, I LIKE TO DO a little service journalism. Part of that service entails giving you the leg up on the competition in your office Oscar pool, hence my chat with Katey Rich and Christopher Rosen from the Ankler on this morning’s podcast. Check it out, you’ll have a good time:
2026 Oscar Nominations: A ‘Sinners’ Paradise?
The Oscar nominations dropped yesterday morning and I grabbed our favorite Oscar prognosticators, Katey Rich and Christopher Rosen of The Ankler’s Prestige Junkie, to chat about what it all means. Does Sinners’s 16 nominations mean it could upset One Battle After Another
The other element of this service journalism is helping you prioritize your viewing by ranking the potential Best Picture winners in order and letting you know where you can watch them. Here are the ten nominees:
The only of the ten I have yet to watch, The Secret Agent, is still in theaters. So you’ll have to find an arthouse playing it. Good luck! In the whole Dallas area there is one theater showing it once a day. I imagine it’ll get a re-release here following the nominations for best picture and best actor, and it should hit video on demand soon. But I can’t rank this one as I haven’t watched it yet. I hear it’s good! Looking forward to carving out the nearly three hours it will take to watch it.
9. Frankenstein is streaming now on Netflix. This one left me feeling a little cold—I just don’t cotton to director Guillermo del Toro’s idea that man is always the real monster—but it could wind up winning some production awards because, like all del Toro films, it’s among the most beautifully designed movies you’ve ever seen.
8. F1: The Movie is streaming now on Apple TV (no more +). The biggest surprise on Oscar morning was this movie picking up a nomination for Best Picture. I think it has absolutely no shot at winning, but I’m glad to see it get nominated because a.) if this spot had to go to a big, blockbuster-style movie I’d rather it went to F1 than something that was actively bad, like Wicked: For Good1 or a retread like Avatar: Fire and Ash and b.) the world needs more successful Sonnys out there. Sonny Hayes: a hero we can believe in!
7. Train Dreams is streaming now on Netflix. I found this film almost impossibly moving, but I’m a sucker for stories about men who live in a world that has passed them by and voiceover narration about the slow march of progress that grinds us all into dust.
6. Bugonia is streaming now on Peacock. For my money, the best movie of the year was Eddington and it wasn’t nominated. But among the nominees, Bugonia is the movie that best captures the spirit of the moment—what we might describe as horseshoe cinema, this sense on the right and left alike that forces beyond any of our ken are controlling our fate.
5. Hamnet is still in theaters, check your local showtimes. I remain unsure if this movie is a profound statement on the healing powers of art or a manipulative tearjerker the strings of which you can see being pulled throughout the film’s runtime. Regardless, I found it immensely moving and effective almost despite myself. Dead kids, man. It’s Niagara Falls, Frankie angel every time.
This is a weirdly tight Oscar season. I think you could make an affirmative case for any of the following four movies winning, though there’s definitely a frontrunner and a close second at the moment.
4. Sentimental Value is currently available for rental or purchase on video on demand and still playing in some movie theaters. I don’t think people should sleep on this one, as it is a movie about movies that appeals to movie people searching for found families in their movie careers. (There wasn’t room this awards season for two such movies about movies, hence the Jay Kelly shutout.) But I have a hard time believing this is anyone’s favorite movie of the year, particularly given the genuinely pleasing nature of the three films to follow.
3. Marty Supreme is still playing in theaters and going strong: It’s the highest-grossing A24 film of all time, domestically, and has a decent shot at hitting $100M before all is said and done. People really like this movie—it’s had great legs compared to some other A24 movies—and that suggests to me it could sneak into serious contention. With the weirdness of ranked-choice voting and the fact that everyone seems to really enjoy this kinetic, charming outsider sports movie—as well as the fact that Timothée Chalamet seems headed for a Best Actor Oscar, a win that would make him one of the youngest winners ever—I could see vote-splitting leading to Marty Supreme sneaking through and taking the gold. It’s a long shot, but it wouldn’t be shocking.
2. Sinners is streaming on HBO Max and Prime Video. It is the most-nominated film of all time, with sixteen nods. And it is the highest-grossing film of the year, domestically. I still think it’s an underdog right now to the final movie on this list. But in my heart of hearts … I think Sinners wins Best Picture. In part because it is just extremely well made and a rousing, crowd-pleasing film. But there will also be a narrative that helps it: a backlash against the number of nominations for, what, a (gasp) horror film, followed by a backlash to the backlash that posits racism as the reason for the disrespect, followed by a push to reject said racism.
1. One Battle After Another is also streaming on HBO Max. Yeah, look: this is still the favorite. In part because it is relevant: Every ICE raid is like free advertising for this movie. In part because it is often quite charming: People love the Leo and Benicio buddy-comedy hour in the middle of this film. And in part as a sort of lifetime achievement award for Paul Thomas Anderson, even if I consider it to be one of his more middling works. This is the favorite! It has everything going for it. But I’m starting to talk myself into a Sinners upset.
Assigned Viewing: The Chair Company (HBO Max)
No Other Choice was shut out at the Oscars this year but I quite liked it. And I quite liked it because it reminded me of one of my favorite TV shows from last year, The Chair Company (streaming on HBO Max). I tried to briefly explain the connection between the two in my review of No Other Choice:
PARK CHAN-WOOK’S LATEST FILM, No Other Choice, belongs firmly in the canon of South Korea’s burgeoning lament for late-stage capitalism alongside Bong Joon Ho’s high-octane Snowpiercer and his Oscar-winning Parasite, as well as the Netflix blockbuster show, Squid Game. More than those, however, No Other Choice reminded me of something else, something closer to home: Tim Robinson’s absurdist workplace comedy for HBO, The Chair Company.
The Chair Company is nominally about a guy trying to figure out why the chair he sat on during an important business presentation collapsed, causing him to look foolish in front of his peers and his bosses. Answering this question entails an incredibly byzantine adventure through the bowels of business and local government that may or may not involve an international drug cartel. But the show is only nominally about this, because it’s really about Ron Trosper (Robinson) and his inability to handle success at work. About his own lack of self-control.
Every time Ron is given a chance to stop his mad pursuit of the labyrinthine puzzle this chair company represents—its lack of a board of directors; its phony website; the call service that gives him the runaround when he tries to report the defective seat that has caused him so much anguish—he rejects it. He cannot allow himself to be happy despite his well-paying job and the support of a loving family. He is one of the lucky winners in the game of late-stage capitalism, yet he cannot focus on the task he has been hired to do: design an outdoor mall in Akron, Ohio. His problem isn’t the chair. His problem is himself.
The show is funny but definitely in the cringe-comedy mold of something like Robinson’s sketch comedy show, I Think You Should Leave. So it won’t be to everyone’s taste. But it is very much to mine!
As an aside, Wicked: For Good received zero nominations, which I can only take as confirmation of the fact that my review was dead on and that the movie was not good. Where’s my “Sonny Is Always Right” stickers, Bulwark Store?!
Sonny,
I loved Train Dreams, and have recommended it to many. After watching it, I found your review. It was very helpful to me, putting into words a description of the movie that I felt, but couldn't have described with such clarity. Thanks for that.
Just another day ending in Y where Sonny's newsletter absolutely slaps. Such an underrated part of the Bulwark