Here’s the State of the 2026 Oscar Race

Almost a week after the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, with the French Riviera showcase’s most prestigious awards now presented, press conferences and photo calls completed, and all those illegal naked dresses returned to fashion houses, Hollywood’s top publicists are hard at work. Next on the agenda? Crafting Oscar campaigns for all of those who came out on top.

Yes, I realize the 98th Academy Awards are over nine months away, and a lot can and will change between now and then—but, revisit the nominees for the 2025 ceremony, and you’ll remember just how pivotal Cannes can be. Last year’s Palme d’Or winner, Anora, went on to secure the best-picture statuette, and two of its nine fellow nominees in the top category, Emilia Pérez and The Substance, also premiered at the festival. In best director, three of the five nominees debuted their film at Cannes (including Sean Baker, who won), and of the 20 acting nominees, over a third walked the Croisette before they landed on the Oscars red carpet. Two of them, Anora’s Mikey Madison and Emilia Pérez’s Zoe Saldaña, left with two of the four acting prizes on offer. It’s a truly staggering showing for a single festival, especially considering how early it falls in the awards season calendar.

It’s difficult to imagine this year’s Cannes cohort—which includes many quieter, more contemplative films compared to the hoopla of Anora, The Apprentice, Emilia Pérez, and The Substance—having quite the same impact on the Oscar race, but still, there are plenty of releases that could very well dominate across the board, from best picture and the writing and directing line-ups to the highly competitive acting races.

Below, a rundown of the releases currently surging, as well as those which have faced setbacks following a more muted Cannes debut than expected.

It Was Just an Accident’s Palme d’Or win could take it into the best-picture line-up

Almost as soon as Iranian dissident director Jafar Panahi scooped the Palme d’Or, the questions began to swirl: Would his lauded film, It Was Just an Accident, a surreal comedy inspired by his own imprisonment for so-called “propaganda against the system,” follow Parasite and Anora in taking the best-picture statuette, too?

The answer is complicated. It Was Just an Accident is a highly worthy Cannes winner, and one which, as jury president Juliette Binoche put it, “springs from a feeling of resistance [and] survival, which is absolutely necessary today.” But it is also incredibly intimate—an ensemble chamber piece of sorts—which, at least to me, doesn’t feel like a best-picture winner, per se, though it very much deserves to be among the 10 nominees.

Having said that, Panahi—an industry mainstay who is widely beloved and has a very moving personal story and track record of making films against seemingly impossible odds—could easily end up on the best-director shortlist, which has become much more international of late, and his razor-sharp and very funny script should get an original-screenplay nod, too.

The award it could feasibly win, though, is best international feature, but that could prove tricky. Iran, the film’s country of origin, won’t select it as its Oscar submission, given it was made without the government’s permission. The film was co-produced by France and Luxembourg, and while the former seems unlikely to choose It Was Just an Accident over a French-language release as its Oscar submission, might the latter? If it does, the situation would resemble the one involving The Seed of the Sacred Fig at last year’s Oscars, a film made by Panahi’s friend and fellow Iranian dissident Mohammad Rasoulof, which was submitted to the Academy by Germany, a co-producer and the country to which Rasoulof has fled. It successfully landed a nomination—so watch this space.

Sentimental Value could go all the way

Meanwhile, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value was widely predicted to pick up the Palme, but instead left with the second-place Grand Prix. However, in the Oscar race, it seems to be slightly ahead of It Was Just an Accident. Trier has more of a track record with the Academy, with his last film, The Worst Person in the World, picking up best-international-feature and original-screenplay nods. His follow-up is more mature and moving—a mode the Oscars love—and took Cannes by storm, with rave reviews and a 19-minute standing ovation, among the longest ever recorded. At this (admittedly very early) stage, it’d be my pick to win best-picture—family sagas have proved popular with the Academy in recent years (Everything Everywhere All at Once, CODA, Parasite) and this one has all the humor, heart, and humanity required to go the distance, as well as a sense of eras-spanning scale and scope despite its narrow focus. However, it being mostly in Norwegian (with interludes in English) could certainly be a hurdle.

Regardless, Trier feels like a shoo-in for both best director and best original screenplay, for his collaboration with Eskil Vogt. And if the film really connects with voters? Well, it could do astonishingly well in the acting races. Considering the best-actress line-up now almost always includes an international star who feels like a discovery for many viewers (I’m Still Here’s Fernanda Torres, Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller, Roma’s Yalitza Aparicio a few years ago), it’s feasible that the wonderful Renate Reinsve will make that shortlist. Stellan Skarsgård is also a standout in the part of her father, and could fare well in best supporting actor, as could Elle Fanning in best supporting actress, a Hollywood favorite who has never been nominated for an Oscar before and has a few very touching scenes here. The dark horse to look out for, though, is Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who is spectacular and could easily get a surprise, Marina de Tavira-in-Roma-style supporting-actress nomination.

Oh, and if It Was Just an Accident somehow isn’t submitted for best international feature, Sentimental Value might have that statuette in the bag, too.

Jennifer Lawrence could rise above the divisive Die My Love

It Was Just an Accident and Sentimental Value aside, the other Cannes releases this year feel like a toss-up when it comes to Oscar recognition. There was a huge amount of buzz around Jennifer Lawrence’s take on a spiraling mother in Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love—a performance that dazzled many with its screaming, flailing commitment, but also left others, myself included, scratching their heads. But Lawrence is, and has always been, an extraordinary Oscar campaigner and a very likeable presence, both in a room with voters and on chat shows and doing interviews consumed by the wider public, so she’s not one to count out. There is also a great comeback narrative in her potentially getting her first Oscar nod in a decade. (She won for Silver Linings Playbook a staggering 12 years ago.) However, the fact that she lost out on Cannes’s best-actress prize to the relatively unknown Nadia Melliti for The Little Sister, when most prognosticators had tipped Lawrence to take it home, suggests that her turn could ultimately prove too alienating to win consensus support.

Elsewhere, Sissy Spacek is compelling in a supporting role, but it’s unlikely that she or Robert Pattinson will be able to squeeze into the acting races, and given how polarizing the film has been, it doesn’t seem poised to feature in any other categories, either. If Lawrence pulls through with a nomination, she could be the film’s sole representative, à la Blonde’s Ana de Armas in 2023 or Spencer’s Kristen Stewart in 2022.

Paul Mescal falters with The History of SoundPhoto: Gwen Capistran

Paul Mescal, fresh off of Gladiator II and ahead of playing a young Shakespeare in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet (and those Beatles movies, Richard Linklater’s Merrily We Roll Along, we could go on…), was generating much chatter in the run-up to the premiere of Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound, with the early word from critics who’d seen the film in advance being that he gives a deeply affecting, awards-worthy performance. The reality was, sadly, more muted, for both him and his talented co-star, Josh O’Connor, who do their best but never seem to fully emerge from the sepia-toned bleakness of this painfully restrained period drama. The pair have been far better elsewhere, and should probably save their Oscar campaigns for meatier fare.

The Secret Agent could be next year’s I’m Still Here

Don’t underestimate the power (on social media and otherwise) of Brazil. This year, the nation’s best-international-feature submission, Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, took home that prize while also landing best-picture and best-actress nods, the latter for the formidable Fernanda Torres. Now, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, which won two big prizes at Cannes—best director and best actor for Wagner Moura—seems to have taken that Brazilian baton. They’re very different films—I’m Still Here far more traditional in its style and subject matter, The Secret Agent more experimental and less easily digestible—so the latter might not get quite as far, but, like Torres before him, Moura (Narcos, Civil War) seems overdue a big moment on the global stage and is captivating here. He’d be a worthy best-actor Oscar contender, and the film could show up in international feature, too, where it might compete with other Cannes breakouts like Germany’s Sound of Falling and Spain’s Sirât, the two of which jointly won the festival’s third-place Jury Prize.

Nouvelle Vague is Netflix’s new Emilia Pérez

And no, by that I don’t mean it’s about to become engulfed in a huge scandal—at least, I don’t think so. Netflix’s big, glossy, non English-language Oscar hopeful acquired out of last year’s Cannes was the doomed Emilia Pérez, and this year, it’s Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, a black-and-white love letter to the French New Wave that chronicles the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. It’s charming and definitely less divisive than its predecessor, and the streamer certainly has the budget to give it a splashy launch and campaign, so it’s possible that it ends up on the best-picture shortlist, but far from guaranteed.

June Squibb has an outside shot in best actress

The 95-year-old June Squibb, previously an Oscar nominee for Nebraska, is a delightful presence in Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Eleanor the Great. She’s perhaps more at home with the deadpan comedy than she is in the film’s more emotional moments, but her veteran status could be enough to propel her to a best-actress Oscar nod in a slightly less competitive year. A best-actress-in-a-musical-or-comedy Golden Globe nomination should at least be on the cards, though.

If Gladiator II couldn’t get Denzel nominated, Highest 2 Lowest likely won’t

After his snub for his delicious turn in Gladiator II, I was curious to see if Denzel Washington’s swaggering lead role in Spike Lee’s latest joint, the thriller-slash-family drama Highest 2 Lowest, would put him back in the Oscar conversation, but, alas, no. The film is an enjoyable romp with some breathtaking sequences, but not the director’s or his actor’s best work, and not one that really seems to have been made with awards in mind. Fair enough.

The hunt is over for Eddington

In Ari Aster’s defense, his COVID era-set western, Eddington, is about as far from Oscar bait as it’s possible to get, given its general erraticism and contentious politics, but on paper it initially sounded like a real contender: a big, bold swing from the director of Hereditary and Midsommar, starring Oscar winners Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone, recent nominee Austin Butler, and the brilliant and totally unimpeachable Pedro Pascal. Unfortunately, the resulting film didn’t fare particularly well at Cannes—it got a five-minute standing ovation, the festival’s equivalent of a pan—and is likely to do significantly worse with audiences once it hits theaters. If there’s one Cannes release we can basically write off from the next awards season, it’s surely this.