Welcome to the wildest Academy Awards race in years. The 2026 Oscars are just days away, and a majority of the most hotly contested battles seem to be hanging on a knife’s edge. Here’s the Vogue verdict on who will win, who should win, and who should’ve been a contender in 13 key categories.
Best picture
Will win: Sinners
Should win: Sinners
Should’ve been a contender: The Voice of Hind Rajab
I don’t want to jinx it, but I think it could actually be happening: after Ryan Coogler’s vampire saga triumphed at the Actor Awards—slap bang in the middle of the Oscars voting period, no less—it seems to have gained momentum and is now exactly neck and neck with One Battle After Another. Paul Thomas Anderson’s revolutionary epic has taken the top prizes at the Critics’ Choice Awards, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and the Producers Guild of America Awards—the latter, like the Oscars, uses a preferential ballot, meaning it’s usually the best indicator of what will ultimately take best picture. Still, the Sinners surge here feels reminiscent of the Parasite wave back in 2020, when Bong Joon-ho’s pitch-black satire pipped Sam Mendes’s 1917, the more traditional, establishment contender, to the post at the very last minute.
Both films are deserving, but I, for one, would love to see Sinners take it—One Battle’s dominance was slowly turning this awards season into a predictable slog, but Sinners has revived it. Viola Davis’s overjoyed response to handing the Actor Awards’ best actor prize to Michael B. Jordan? Samuel L. Jackson’s glee at naming the Sinners cast as the year’s best ensemble? This is the stuff that makes (awards season) life worth living. And Oscar night is in desperate need of exactly this type of shock, awe, and delight.
As for the release that’s glaringly absent from this 10-strong lineup? Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, of course, which has the heft, importance, resonance, urgency, and tear-jerking power that would have made it, in my eyes, a very worthy best picture winner.
Best director
Will win: Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another
Should win: Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another
Should’ve been a contender: Jafar Panahi for It Was Just an Accident
One Battle is far from my favorite Paul Thomas Anderson film, but it is, frankly, criminal that the visionary who made Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Phantom Thread doesn’t have a single Oscar, let alone this one. As was the case for Christopher Nolan the year he finally won for Oppenheimer, this is a long-overdue acknowledgment of an unparalleled Hollywood career. In the run-up, Anderson’s taken every directing prize going (the Critics’ Choice Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and the Directors Guild of America Award), and, in an unpredictable year, this feels like the only totally safe bet.
Ryan Coogler, Sentimental Value’s Joachim Trier, Hamnet’s Chloé Zhao, and Marty Supreme’s Josh Safdie complete the lineup, but It Was Just an Accident’s Jafar Panahi deserved a spot, too. In his hilarious and then heartbreaking Iranian farce, the dissident auteur distills his own traumatic experience of imprisonment for “propaganda against the system” into an endlessly surprising, surreal, razor-sharp, and rip-roaringly entertaining caper. It seems that many Oscar voters—who, I suspect, may have assumed the film is far heavier and more serious than it actually is—just didn’t get around to seeing it, which is a real shame. Given that Panahi has now been sentenced to yet another year in prison, not to mention everything currently taking place in his home nation, it would certainly have been heartening to see him here.
Best actress
Will win: Jessie Buckley for Hamnet
Should win: Jessie Buckley for Hamnet
Should’ve been a contender: Chase Infiniti for One Battle After Another