Will win: “One Battle After Another”
Should win: “One Battle After Another”
Should’ve been nominated: “Sirāt”
Best Director
Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”
Ryan Coogler, “Sinners”
Josh Safdie, “Marty Supreme”
Joachim Trier, “Sentimental Value”
Chloé Zhao, “Hamnet”
The last time the top two races diverged was in 2022, when “CODA” won Best Picture and Jane Campion (“The Power of the Dog”) won Best Director. I’m not expecting a split outcome this year, though if one does occur, nearly everyone agrees that it will favor “Sinners” for Best Picture. Anderson’s hold on the directing trophy is too secure—and indeed, it’s felt inevitable since “One Battle After Another” opened last fall, earning the year’s most roundly ecstatic reviews and becoming the highest-grossing picture of Anderson’s career. Given the peaks of that career, which include “Boogie Nights” (1997), “There Will Be Blood” (2007), “The Master” (2012), and “Phantom Thread” (2017), you might expect Anderson to have won an Oscar, or several, by now. He has, in fact, gone glaringly unrewarded for a filmmaker who is routinely hailed as a latter-day Welles, Altman, or Kubrick. Then again, Welles, Altman, and Kubrick never won a directing Oscar. In that respect, at least, Anderson is about to take leave of their company.
Will win: Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”
Should win: Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”
Should’ve been nominated: Julia Loktev, “My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow”
Best Actress
Jessie Buckley, “Hamnet”
Rose Byrne, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Kate Hudson, “Song Sung Blue”
Renate Reinsve, “Sentimental Value”
Emma Stone, “Bugonia”
This is, remarkably, the only acting race that can be called with any confidence: Jessie Buckley’s victory has been a foregone conclusion all season long. As Agnes, the neglected wife of William Shakespeare and the grief-stricken mother of their children, Buckley gives us not just rawness but fullness of emotion; there’s an uncanny balance to this performance, a sense in which the tempestuous and the serene are miraculously reconciled. I suspect that “Hamnet” might have been a stronger contender over all if its director, Zhao, had not already won top honors for “Nomadland” (2020); even so, her latest film has many fans (and eight nominations), and Buckley will be the logical beneficiary of that admiration. The lack of comparable across-the-board support for “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a darker, pricklier tale of embattled motherhood, is precisely why Rose Byrne will have to content herself with a nomination for her brilliantly sustained and ferociously funny performance in the central role.
In a less competitive year, the lovely, lived-in soulfulness of Kate Hudson’s work in “Song Sung Blue” might have loomed as a potential spoiler, though her mere return to Oscar contention—her last nomination came twenty-five years ago, for “Almost Famous” (2000)—will surely draw votes regardless. So, too, will Renate Reinsve, whose nomination for “Sentimental Value” counts, in my book, as the nomination she didn’t receive for “The Worst Person in the World”; in both films, she evinces the kind of emotional legibility that can charge even a wordless closeup with meaning. Stone, who won her second Best Actress Oscar two years ago, will not win a third one so soon, though the mere fact that voters nominated her for “Bugonia”—a mesmerizing performance that she barely campaigned for—speaks to the near-Streepian regard in which she’s held.
Will win: Jessie Buckley, “Hamnet”
Should win: Rose Byrne, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Should’ve been nominated: Kathleen Chalfant, “Familiar Touch”
Best Actor
Timothée Chalamet, “Marty Supreme”
Leonardo DiCaprio, “One Battle After Another”
Ethan Hawke, “Blue Moon”
Michael B. Jordan, “Sinners”
Wagner Moura, “The Secret Agent”
An all-timer of a race, in terms of both the staggering quality of the nominated performances and the fiendish unpredictability of the outcome. Initially, it seemed that Timothée Chalamet, a three-time nominee at age thirty, would win handily, prevailing on the strength of not only his non-stop rush of a performance in “Marty Supreme” but also his much-admired turn as a young Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown” (2024), which almost netted him a statuette last year. But the momentum has since shifted, perhaps decisively, in favor of Michael B. Jordan, whose bourbon-smooth performance in “Sinners” nabbed an Actor Award from the Screen Actors Guild last week. What happened? More than a few believe that Chalamet’s clever yet immodest campaign tactics have ultimately backfired; Jordan has been a model of humility by comparison, as borne out by his Actor speech, which was all the more graceful and moving for having been delivered in an obvious state of shock. And although Oscar voters have historically been reluctant to award younger performers in this category, Jordan may represent the more palatable choice on that front: he’s nine years older than Chalamet and has been acting since he was twelve. He has to be considered the favorite going into Oscar night, with gusts of industry love for “Sinners” very much at his back.