Predicting Best Picture at the 2026 Academy Awards

January 12, 2026

I’m back with the Oscars Best Picture model, albeit a little late. I had a busy holiday season, but the story of December was surprising: The Secret Agent was the favorite, followed by One Battle After Another. This was largely due to The Secret Agent’s runtime, which is right in the sweet spot for Best Picture winners.

However, remember from the last two years that my model is assuming these movies have been nominated for Best Picture. The biggest barrier facing The Secret Agent is being nominated; it is a non-English language film. While the only non-English language film to win has been Parasite (2019), the nominations are rare enough that, given that the film has been nominated, having no English dialogue isn’t a barrier to winning. The DGA and PGA nominations make me think The Secret Agent won’t be nominated, however.

It also surprised me that One Battle After Another wasn’t favored more, given Paul Thomas Anderson is a generationally phenomenal writer-director, but none of his films have won Best Picture. Looking into the data, it looks like the “career award” is not much of a thing for Best Picture (like it seems to be for the acting and directing categories). Just the opposite: If a director has had a film nominated or won Best Picture before, it actually hurts their chances of winning in my model.

That was then, this is now, though. No more awards in my models will name nominees or winners before the Oscar nominations. Where do we stand going into the announcement?

One Battle After Another is the favorite, at about 15% chance of winning. Following it closely is The Secret Agent (10%), followed by Marty Supreme (9%), Hamnet (8%), Wicked: For Good (8%), and Frankenstein (8%).

You can read more about the details of the model from my post last year and the year before. The big change I’ve made here is calibrate the probabilities so that the model isn’t too sure of itself. I will see you on the other side of the Oscar nominations.