Nominations for the 2026 Academy Awards will be announced on Thursday morning, January 22, as races heat up for who will take the top prize at this year's Oscars.
Prediction market Kalshi has odds posted for which films will get nominated at the 2026 Academy Awards.
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The 2026 Academy Awards are scheduled to take place on Sunday, March 15, from the Dolby Theater in Hollywood. The ceremony will be broadcast on ABC with Conan O'Brien as the host.
Below is my analysis of the odds for the favorites and long-shots to score Best Picture nominations at the Oscars, as well as where the value lies.
Best Picture Nominations Odds
As a reminder, 10 films get nominated for Best Picture each year, and what we're looking at here is six spots that are locks and another three that are close to locks, leaving one spot open to a wild card.
One Battle After Another, Sinners, Marty Supreme, Frankenstein, Hamnet, and Sentimental Value are getting nominated for Best Picture. As you can see from the chart, they're all tracking at 98% or better and it would be a massive shock if any of those six get left out.
Next up are Bugonia, Train Dreams, and The Secret Agent, which all seem close to locks, and then It Was Just an Accident at 68%.
Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, and It Was Just an Accident are all non-English films. It used to be uncommon for international films to be nominated for Best Picture, but it's become more common in recent years.
Since the Academy expanded its Best Picture category to 10 nominees, we've seen a significant uptick in nominations for those films, with a win by Parasite in 2020 standing as the only victor. At least one has been nominated in seven straight years, and we saw three in 2024 and two last year.
With Sentimental Value locked in, the question is if enough Academy voters saw and are willing to recognize both The Secret Agent and It Was Just an Accident to get three in again this year.
Of the four favorites tracking below 98%, I would likely lock in Bugonia and The Secret Agent. The former was directed by an Oscar mainstay, Yorgos Lanthimos, who has had two previous nominations: Poor Things in 2024 and The Favourite in 2019. It also stars Oscar darling Emma Stone and another favorite of voters, Jesse Plemons. I think it's safe.
The Secret Agent is a Brazilian film directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, who is less of a mainstay, but the buzz around the film has only grown since awards season started, though most of that centers around the candidacy of its lead actor, Wagner Moura. Still, it feels safe enough to be, and around the 80% mark feels right.
That leaves Train Dreams and It Was Just an Accident.
In terms of predictive powers from previous nominations, the go-to is the Producers Guild, which announced nominations for its top prize a little more than a week ago. Of the 10 favorites to score a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards, the PGA nominated eight. Its outliers were Weapons and F1, which were nominated over two non-English-language films, The Secret Agent and It Was Just an Accident.
This is not incredibly uncommon. Just last year, the PGA matched 8-of-10 nominees, with I'm Still Here and Nickel Boys scoring Oscar nominations while the PGA left those two out in favor of A Real Pain and September 5. Like this year, one of those films (I'm Still Here) was non-English language. In recent history, the PGA has opted for international films far less frequently than the Academy.
So, there are a couple of ways to play this.
You could opt to go 'No' on both/either Train Dreams or It Was Just an Accident at 19% or 34%, respectively, and/or go with 'Yes' on one or two underdogs to score nominations in their place.
Weapons has an uphill climb to take one of those spots because it's a horror film, and the Academy has been loath to nominate that type of film in the past. But the surprising nomination of The Substance last year bucked that trend. At 16%, it's worth a sprinkle.
F1 is trading at 29%, and that feels too high. It's a big-budget Hollywood production starring Brad Pitt, yes, but that means little when it comes to Oscar nominations these days.
The other darkhorses are No Other Choice, another non-English-language film by esteemed Korean director Park Chan-wook, or Blue Moon, an Amazon production directed by a familiar face to American movie-goers, Richard Linklater.
Linklater has been directing understated cult favorites for more than three decades now, and scored his last Oscar nomination in 2015 for Boyhood.
Neither Train Dreams nor Blue Moon got lengthy theatrical runs given their distributors, with the former on Netflix and the latter on Amazon, but that has started to work in films' favor in recent years as they're more easily accessible to voters. It's highly likely that more people have watched Blue Moon than It Was Just an Accident.
Ultimately, if I'm betting against Train Dreams or It Was Just an Accident, I'm looking at Blue Moon or Weapons to take their places. Playing 'No' on the two favorites is a worthy play, but I see more value in the 'Yes' proposition for both of the underdogs. If one hits, we'll be in good shape.
