Best Actor 2026 Oscar Race Is More Uncertain Than Ever

There are some seasons when the Oscar race feels like the same people winning the same awards week after week for months. Not this year! As final voting wraps up, a number of major races look to be going down to the wire. In Best Picture, One Battle After Another is trying to fend off a late Sinners surge. In Supporting Actress, three different women have won the three major trophies. Even Supporting Actor doesn’t feel sewn-up: Though Sean Penn triumphed at both SAG and BAFTA, he’s barely been campaigning and is already a two-time winner, so you wouldn’t necessarily be surprised to see the Academy go with someone else.

But it’s Best Actor that embodies the current state of the race, which is to say it’s totally up in the air. It wasn’t that long ago that Marty Supreme’s Timothée Chalamet looked set to waltz to victory, his recent 30th birthday functioning as a magical amulet that warded off the Academy’s longstanding bias against young men. Then, in what seems like the universe conspiring to teach young Chalamet an important lesson about humility, his luck abruptly ran out. At the BAFTAs, Chalamet lost to the hometown favorite, I Swear’s Robert Aramayo, and lest anyone chalk that up to BAFTA being a tricky away fixture, he lost again at SAG’s Actor Awards, this time to Sinners’s Michael B. Jordan. It’s been over 20 years since anyone won Best Actor without winning at SAG or BAFTA — Sean Penn for Mystic River (him again!) — so were Timmy to hold on, it would be a historic achievement.

Throw in the Golden Globes, and four different men have won televised Best Actor trophies this season, one of whom isn’t even eligible for the Oscar. As NumLock’s Walter Hickey told me last week, “If the race is telling you there’s not unanimity among the voters, you want to listen. When there’s not unanimity in the lead acting races, it can get really weird.” In that situation, voters stop gaming out front-runners and simply vote for their guy. Which means that truly anything can happen. This is the rare instance where we could see any of the five nominees emerge victorious on Oscar night.

Here are the contestants. Which one has your vote?

For a small film like Blue Moon, just getting the nomination is usually the win. Earning an Original Screenplay nod on top of that is gravy. But I wonder if Hawke has a little career-achievement equity here. He’s got four previous nominations without a win (two for acting, two for co-writing the Before movies), and this time he’s repping a showy, transformative performance in a film where he’s almost never offscreen. His status as an ambassador for the craft could boost him, too: When Aramayo won the BAFTA, he dedicated his speech to Hawke, who’d stopped by his drama-school class and delivered some life-changing advice. Still, it’s rare to win this trophy without a corresponding Best Picture nomination, so Hawke will come into Oscar night with the longest odds of anyone. Fun piece of trivia: In a category traditionally dominated by biopics, Hawke is also the only nominee this year playing a real person.

All fall I considered DiCaprio the one who’d benefit if Chalamet faltered. My logic was thus: He’s the star of the Best Picture front-runner, and nowadays, movies that win Best Picture usually win a lead acting award, too. And DiCaprio feels like a guy who should have more than one Oscar. A second trophy would wash away whatever lingering taste of bison liver still remained from The Revenant. But though he got nominated everywhere, things never really coalesced for him. Maybe because the film is such an ensemble showcase, and maybe because he wasn’t really gunning for it. As with Killers of the Flower Moon two years ago, he stepped back and let his co-stars take the spotlight. That thing about Best Picture winners still applies though, and if One Battle winds up sweeping, Leo could get swept up anyway.

If you’re proficient in advanced awards-season calculus, you can make a strong case for Moura as a threat to win the Oscar. The Brazilian was the only Oscar nominee who didn’t make it in at BAFTA, meaning he was the only one who didn’t lose to Aramayo. He wasn’t in the running at SAG, either, so he technically didn’t lose to Jordan. Given that those bodies have the most overlap with the Academy’s membership, one might want to hold those misses against him. However, our mathematician would argue that The Secret Agent only opened in the U.K. a week ago, and point out that SAG overlooked every other foreign-language performance, too. If there is a path for Moura, it’s the one traced by If Beale Street Could Talk’s Regina King in 2019, who was likewise snubbed by SAG and BAFTA before going on to win the Supporting Actress trophy. It all depends on how you see Moura’s Golden Globe win. Was it a sign of passion for him and The Secret Agent among the ever-more-influential international contingent? Or was it merely a reflection of the fact that the Globes’ new votership has a ton of Brazilians?

Everything that was true about Chalamet’s candidacy a month ago remains true. He gives an electric performance that manages the impossible task of balancing charisma and repulsion. He almost single-handedly powered Marty Supreme to A24’s best-ever box office and a Best Picture berth. He may be Hollywood’s best shot at keeping Gen Z invested in cinema. Well, make that almost everything: The past two weeks have punctured the sense of inevitability that had built up around Chalamet’s campaign. Take that away, and does he still have enough juice to get across the finish line? In the event he does fall short, we’ll be in for a full forensic accounting of exactly what happened with this campaign — this week’s furor over his comments on ballet and opera seems to indicate that the knives are out — and probably be setting ourselves up for a controversial career-achievement win 15 years down the road. But considering nothing about Chalamet’s onscreen performance has actually changed, I wouldn’t count him out just yet.

When an ecstatic Viola Davis read Jordan’s name aloud Sunday night, you could hear a million people suddenly wonder: Wait, why not Michael B. Jordan? For much of the season, I’d mentally slotted him in the same bracket as Bugonia’s Emma Stone: someone who would show up everywhere but wasn’t really in contention for the win. Why was that? For one, his performance felt like more of a feat of movie-star charisma than the kind of strenuous emoting that typically wins awards. (But then why was I bullish on Wagner Moura on the basis of his movie-star charisma?) And Jordan rarely got the solo spotlight: He often campaigned alongside his co-stars or casting director Francine Maisler.

Ultimately I just thought Sinners was a little too much of a blockbuster to be an acting contender. Now I see it differently. If Sinners is indeed surging, Jordan has just as much a shot of riding its coattails as DiCaprio does with OBAA. Even for voters who don’t rank Sinners above OBAA, voting Jordan in Best Actor could become a way to ensure the film still gets its due. And his off-the-cuff acceptance speech at SAG did a brilliant job of tying the award into the metanarrative of his career. We’ve watched Michael B. Jordan grow up onscreen — The Wire was almost 25 years ago — and now here is a chance to reward him for coming into his own. The fact that Jordan was clearly surprised to win only added to the contrast with Chalamet, whose own podium appearances have had the air of a preplanned coronation.

Photo: AppleTV+

Final Oscar voting ended Thursday night, which means that, as surely as plants bloom in spring, the first anonymous Oscar ballots have begun popping up across the internet. It seems like they’re coming slower this year, which could be due to many voters procrastinating on turning in their ballots until the very last minute. (Which Will Mavity thinks is a factor of the new rule requiring Academy members to attest they’ve seen every nominated film in each category.) But though the offerings may be more scant than in the past, they are still as enjoyably bitchy as ever. As is tradition around these parts, here are the meanest lines from this year’s editions:

5. “When F1 makes the Best Picture lineup, it’s a rough year for movies.” (Variety)

4. “Hamnet was emotional and beautifully rendered, but a bit overwrought — I didn’t want Jessie Buckley turned up to a ten the entire time.” (THR)

3. “I absolutely hate ‘Golden.’ It’s such an annoying song.” (Next Best Picture)

2. “Are we allowed to finally talk about why One Battle After Another is a bad movie, or are we still just pretending it’s not the most problematic movie for the Black community since maybe Green Book?” (Variety)

1. “I found Chalamet’s portrayal of Marty loud and annoying, and I just didn’t care for him … I wish Wagner had done more with his performance … And I was bored out of my mind by Blue Moon, which made it hard for me to appreciate what Hawke was doing.” (Next Best Picture)

After last week’s BAFTAs mishegoss, the BBC has finally released the results of its internal review attempting to explain why their production team let a racial slur make it into the telecast despite the ceremony airing on a two-hour delay. The official line is that it was simply a massive cock-up: There were two racial slurs shouted at the ceremony, but the crew working in the production truck had only heard one of them. “Therefore, when they were told a racial slur had been shouted, they believed they had removed it,” BBC director-general Tim Davie wrote in a letter to the government, per Deadline. Still, much remains unclear.

“We are now looking in more detail why the team did not ascertain sooner that there had been two instances of the use of the racial slur, and why post broadcast further action was not taken to edit or remove the programme from iPlayer sooner,” Davie added. Real Armando Iannucci hours over there.

For weeks now, I’ve been mentioning Moonlight as an example of a film that won Best Cast at SAG on its way to winning Best Picture. However, as a reader reminds me, that did not happen. Hidden Figures won Best Cast in 2017; Moonlight’s only major precursor wins came at the Golden Globes and WGA Awards. I was getting Moonlight confused with Parasite (which did indeed win SAG), presumably because they rhyme. I regret the error.