Oscars 2026 Best Picture Nominees: Part Two - The Long Shots & Predictions!

In our last article, we took a look at the favourites for this year’s top prize at the Academy Awards. Now let’s devote a little time to the also-rans… which would still be a strong line-up in any other year.

The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto)

And the award for the coolest-looking movie of the year goes to… The Secret Agent. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s sun-kissed slice of retro Braziliana is so rich in intoxicating period detail that it feels like we’re watching an unearthed classic of South American cinema, and the dress-sense of its star Wagner Moura has even sparked booming sales of his vintage yellow Pitombeira T-shirt in Brazil.

Set in 1977, the film opens with a note of tongue-in-cheek understatement: it’s a “period of great mischief” in the country, which seems an odd way of describing a nation ruled by a military dictatorship. But then there is little conventional Filho’s vibrant and freewheeling political thriller, which took Cannes by storm but lost out on the top prize to Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident.

The outstanding Best Actor-nominated Moura (Pablo Escobar in Narcos) plays Armando, a left-leaning former academic who travels from São Paulo to the city of Recife seeking refuge and also to re-connect with his young son, who lives with his maternal grandparents after the passing of Armando’s wife. It’s the Carnival season and the city is buzzing with raucous parties, but media hysteria and brutal murder also stalks the streets: A bomb has killed dozens and the newspaper reports the grisly discovery of a human leg found in the stomach of a shark. Typically of Filho’s left-field approach, this ghoulish tale takes a wild turn later in the movie.

Under this regime, the rich and powerful have the cover to kill with impunity. We discover that Armando is on the run after punching a corrupt businessman, taking shelter with the frail but redoubtable Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), who runs a safe house for political refugees. Armando wants to get his boy out of the country to safety, but his passport has been frozen and his enemy from the big city has hired a couple of killers to whack him.

The plot is fairly standard but that’s not really what The Secret Agent is all about. Filho uses the story as a framework for a sprawling street-level portrait of what life is like for ordinary people under a tyrannical government.. That might sound heavy, but here’s the wondrous thing: While death is an almost ever-present threat, the film is absolutely bursting with life and vivid late-’70s Brazilian colour. Front and centre is Moura’s soulful performance as a dignified and intelligent man who shows a quietly generous nature to anyone he meets, just trying to work out the threat and how to survive.

At 160 minutes, it’s a movie to luxuriate in as Filho takes his sweet time, moving the plot forward at a leisurely pace and allowing the maximum room for his characters and his home town to breathe. The ambling nature might frustrate some viewers expecting a more high-octane thriller, but otherwise it’s a treat immersing yourself in this gorgeously recreated time period despite the horrors occurring under the regime. 

Bugonia

Even when things are rough, I always try to be a glass half-full kind of guy. That may be why I’ve struggled with the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, perhaps the most consistently original filmmaker around today but whose cynical outlook grates on my nerves. The idiosyncratic Greek director’s films are regularly described as “nihilistic” and “misanthropic”, and I don’t particularly enjoy two hours of him telling us that everything stinks and it’s all pointless anyway.

Nevertheless, Lanthimos appears to be mellowing a little - by his standards, The Favourite and Poor Things were positively crowd-pleasing. He’s shooting for a similarly broader appeal again with Bugonia, a remake of the 2003 South Korean black comedy Save the Green Planet.

Lanthimos regular Emma Stone (who won her second Oscar for Poor Things) is typically assured form as Michelle Fuller, the slick and extremely driven CEO of a large American pharmaceutical company. Her orderly day is ruined when she is snatched by Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy nut and amateur beekeeper, and his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis, who is on the spectrum in real life). Teddy has “done his research” online and believes Michelle is actually an alien from the Andromeda constellation masquerading as a human seeking to subjugate mankind and destroy our ecosystems – a bit like a CEO for a huge corporation. See what they did there?

Forcibly shaving Michelle’s head and shackling her in the basement, Teddy gives her a deadline of the lunar eclipse in four days’ time to set up a meeting with the Andromedan Emperor so the boys can thwart a full-scale invasion.

Will Tracy’s screenplay mashes together zany sci-fi comedy with dark satire of late-stage capitalism, equally taking to task the voracious nature of corporate America and a range of familiar conspiracy theories including Flat Earth, Atlantis, and sinister alien overlords. In the latter respect, Teddy is chillingly plausible, a half-smart malcontent in thrall of the online echo chambers that lead so many ordinary people to reject reality in favour of the outlandish.

It’s an intriguing premise, setting up a contest between paranoid grassroots freedom fighters and a figurehead of all-consuming corporate greed. However, Bugonia is disappointingly straightforward for a Lanthimos movie, failing to say anything particularly original about either camp before closing out with a twist so astoundingly obvious that you’ll easily guess it from the trailer.

Gripes about the screenplay aside, Bugonia is still worth watching for the powerhouse clash of acting between the two stars. It’s Emma Stone’s fourth collaboration with Lanthimos and she is fully attuned to his distinctive style. Fuller  isn’t the most sympathetic victim but Stone commits fully to the role, essaying a strong and independent woman trying to negotiate the situation through buzzwords and corporate speak. Stone agreed to shave her head for the role as long as the filmmaker did the same, and it’s a shrewd choice. Shorn of her locks, the severe look accentuates the size of her eyes and makes her look uncannily… well, alien.

Stone is equally matched by Jesse Plemons, who gives the film’s best performance as Teddy. Plemons has quietly gone about his business over the past decade or so becoming one of our finest character actors, and this might be his most compelling turn yet. I’ve always thought of him as a more low-key Philip Seymour Hoffman, and he certainly warrants that comparison here. He avoids turning Teddy into a caricature of a tin-foil-hatted troll, sounding reasonably level-headed even when spouting utter fantasy. He and Stone’s performances are so locked together that the film’s most exciting moments are simply watching the two of them go back and forth in a battle of wit and willpower.

Aidan Delbis also deserves kudos for his feature film debut. It’s encouraging that we’re seeing talented actors with the actual disabilities they’re playing coming through nowadays (see also: CODA a few years back), and his fuzzy and sympathetic turn provides a welcome touch of heart that Lanthimos movies generally lack.

So come for the strong performances, but don’t expect Bugonia to tell you anything new. It’s a Lanthimos joint, after all, and it inevitably falls back on his favourite theme: Humans suck.

Train Dreams

I’ve been complaining about the choice of movies on Netflix’s streaming service almost since the day I signed up for it, bemoaning the lack of imagination in their picks. Sure, they have some very good films available, but they’re usually popular classics that anyone with half an interest in cinema would have seen already. So much of the rest is just mediocre filler. 

But occasionally they’ll stump up for something a bit more arty and potentially Oscar-friendly, and last year they bought Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams after it wowed critics at Sundance – and it’s one of the least Netflixy films to appear on the platform for a while.

Adapted from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Train Dreams tells the elliptical life story of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a taciturn itinerant logger doing his tiny bit to carve modern America out of the wilderness. He’s a man of few words who finds direction when he falls in love with Gladys (Felicity Jones). The couple marry, raise a log cabin in the woods, and build a life of simple domestic bliss with their baby daughter. But when tragedy strikes, Robert is forced to contemplate his place in the world all over again, aided by a late-in-the-game appearance by Kerry Condon (big year for her, also starring in F1: The Movie) as a sympathetic surveyor who gives him a fresh perspective.

Spanning a time period from the early 20th Century to the late 1960s, Train Dreams is the story of America’s transition into the modern era writ small. I don’t mean that in a negative sense; on the contrary, by zooming in on a largely unexceptional man like Grainier and confining the drama to whatever patch of forest he’s currently helping tear down, the film paradoxically evokes the vastness of the American landscape and the trials and tribulations of the ordinary men who built the country as it is today.

Soulful and contemplative, Train Dreams has drawn numerous comparisons to the films of Terrence Malick. It certainly looks the part – the cinematography by Adolpho Veloso is absolutely gorgeous, gazing at the world with a hushed sense of wonder. Grainier is also a very Malickian protagonist, stoic on the surface but searching for meaning within, which Joel Edgerton conveys wonderfully in a career-best performance.

Out of the supporting cast, William H. Macy stands out as Arn Peeples, a garrulous old-timer who sums up the film’s thesis with one of the most moving deliveries I’ve heard recently:

Arn: Beautiful, ain’t it? Just beautiful.

Robert: What is, Arn?

Arn: All of it. Every bit of it.

Train Dreams taps into many themes including legacy, grief, racism, time, and the systemic destruction of our natural environment for profit without coming down too hard on any of them. Bentley’s lightness of touch is a blessing, making all the different threads feel part of a larger meditation on the fleeting transience of life and the small roles we play in history’s great narrative.

Frankenstein

My initial reaction when I first spotted a poster for Gullermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was, “What, again?” For Mary Shelley’s original novel, by way of Boris Karloff’s iconic look in the Universal classic, has infiltrated pop culture almost as much as Bram Stoker’s Dracula – according to Wikipedia, over 400 movies feature some version of Frankenstein’s monster. 

But what I didn’t know when I performed that initial eye-roll was that adapting Frankenstein has been del Toro’s dream project for a very long time. That isn’t always a guarantee of success, of course, but the Spanish filmmaker has put those Netflix bucks to good use, helming an almost indecently lavish production that shifts the action from Shelley’s 1818-set novel to the Victorian era. 

That slight update has allowed him to stack the film with plenty of freaky steampunk tech, and he’s clearly having a great time staging ghoulish bits of business with buckets of gore and dismembered cadavers. His visual style is as distinctly jaw-dropping as ever (apart from some horrid CGI animals) and, as our premium fantasist of the past 25 years, his passion for the project surges through every frame. 

He pays a nod to the gothic vibe of James Whale’s 1931 version without directly quoting it, and remains faithful to the structure of the novel while tweaking the story just enough to make it feel fresh and new.

This time around, Oscar Isaac is our Baron Victor Frankenstein, playing the mad scientist with gusto. It’s a deliciously hammy performance, but nevertheless a tragic one – growing up unloved after the death of his mother, we keenly understand his desire to vanquish mortality. But as a grown man, he simply isn’t equipped with the tools to be a loving father once he accomplishes his lifelong goal by reanimating dead flesh.

Mirroring his current status as the hottest man on the planet, Jacob Elordi’s hunky creature is a far cry from Boris Karloff’s lumbering monster. Possessed with phenomenal strength, the welts and contours of his design simultaneously resemble a cyborg and Gunther Von Hagen’s controversial Body Worlds anatomical sculptures. Elordi’s performance is well-deserving of his nomination for Best Supporting Actor, investing the creature with lithe physicality and burgeoning intellect and emotions… That’s right, folks, Frankenstein’s Monster isn’t really the monster of the piece!

If there is one big criticism, it’s that del Toro loves his grotesques so much that he has tilted the moral complexity of the novel completely in the creature’s favour. There is no ambiguity here; Elordi portrays a pure soul who only commits acts of violence in self-defence, while Victor’s obsessive zeal quickly curdles into outright evil. But it’s difficult to screw up a story this good, and del Toro has delivered the best movie version of Shelley’s cautionary tale since James Whale’s masterpiece.

F1: The Movie

Well, I’ve been gushing about the strength of this year’s Best Picture line-up for almost two full articles, and now we come to F1: The Movie. This is a strange one, because a lot of people are treating it as an outlier in a really strong field. Some critics even dismissed Joseph Kosinski's high-octane crowd-pleaser as little more than an advert for the world’s richest motor sport competition. Which creates a strange scenario: A blockbuster with a $300 million price tag bringing up the rear as the underdog in the Best Picture race.

Following on from Kosinski's previous surprise Best Picture nod Top Gun: Maverick, F1 riffs on the same format with really fast cars instead of fighter jets. Brad Pitt looks wonderfully weathered as Sonny Hayes, a former hotshot racer now living in a van and making ends meet as a driver for hire. He’s approached by his old pal Rubén Cervantes (Javier Bardem) to step in as second driver for his struggling APXGP team to provide backup for the arrogant but inexperienced Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). The pair clash at first, but then Sonny becomes a wily wingman for the talented rookie – he’s something of a maverick, if you will – using his devil-may-care nous to give the crew their first shot at a podium finish.

I have to admit that I was a bit snooty when the Oscar nominations landed and I saw F1 in there. But I watched it again recently and you know what? In a year when even very enjoyable frontrunners (Sinners and One Battle After Another) carry a more serious message, there should also be room for pure escapism. And F1 delivers that in spades as it effortlessly cruises on Brad Pitt’s sheer charisma, who has little else to do other than be really cool. For many including myself, that’s worth the price of a ticket alone.

Some Formula One geeks have also criticised the film’s realism, but who cares? As someone who hasn’t watched a race since the days of Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill, the movie actually made the sport seem exciting for a casual viewer like myself. A lot of that is down to the tremendous race sequences that thrillingly puts us out there on the track with Sonny, Joshua and the other racers, including many real-life competitors appearing as themselves. 

With custom-designed tech capturing the action along with bowel-rumbling sound design, it’s a thoroughly immersive experience that deserves a little leeway regarding the more hackneyed and exposition-heavy beats. F1: The Movie is popcorn cinema at its finest, and surely that deserves a little acknowledgement in our troubled times.

Prediction Time!

As a guy who writes about movies, offering Oscar predictions is a sure-fire way to set yourself up for a fall. But here goes!! I’m not going to do the whole list, just the Big Five and the supporting actor categories…

BEST PICTURE

This is an Oscar year when I think one of the big favourites will almost certainly be the winners, but I wonder if two hugely popular frontrunners like Sinners and One Battle After Another might end up splitting the vote. Despite the bookies’ odds, it’s really a toss-up between the two.  I’m going for…

One Battle After Another

BEST DIRECTOR

It follows that Paul Thomas Anderson would take Best Director if One Battle wins the top prize, and it would be great to see him win his first Oscar after 14 previous nominations in various categories. But historically it doesn’t always work out that way, and maybe this is where the vote gets split. Ryan Coogler would also be a very popular winner and it would be a fair way of sharing the love between two instant classics. So this is where I’m going against the odds and saying…

Ryan Coogler

BEST ACTOR

There has been some talk that this might be the year for Ethan Hawke to receive some recognition for his long career, and the Academy often has a way of rewarding performers for their body of work rather than the movie in question (See: Al Pacino winning Best Actor for Scent of a Woman). But nobody has seen Blue Moon and it was released a year ago now. That’s why I can’t look beyond Chalamet in Marty Supreme. It’s a performance that takes a promising young actor's career to an entirely different level and there is still plenty of buzz around the movie with its Christmas Day release. So my pick:

Timothee Chalamet

BEST ACTRESS

On paper, this is the biggest no-brainer of the bunch. It feels like Jessie Buckley was the overwhelming favourite for Best Actress before Hamnet was even released, and I just can’t see any of the other nominees getting enough heat or momentum behind their campaigns between now and when the votes are cast. It’s about as much of a sure thing as you can imagine in Oscar-land…

Jessie Buckley

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Stellan Skarsgaard made history by becoming the first performer in an international film to receive a nomination in the Best Supporting Actor, and a first Oscar nod overall is belated acknowledgement for a career spanning over 50 years. Other awards bodies have been sharing this particular gong around (BAFTA gave it to Sean Penn in One Battle After Another) and another setback in the Skarsgaard victory parade is that he inexplicably failed to land a SAG nomination. But I still think the overall vibe will carry him over the line.

Stellan Skarsgard

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

The Oscar voters have traditionally loved a big showy performance from a screen veteran, and Amy Madigan has been one of the frontrunners in the category since Weapons first came out. But she represents the only nomination that the film has earned and she’s up against strong competition with Teyana Taylor (One Battle After Another), Wunmi Mosaku (Sinners), and Ibsdotter Lilleaas (Sentimental Value). This is the hardest one to call for me, so I’m tossing a four-sided coin and going for…

Teyana Taylor

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY & BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Conveniently, One Battle After Another is a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, so that means PTA’s film and Sinners get to take home one screenplay award each. Everybody’s happy.

Original Screenplay: Sinners

Adapted Screenplay: One Battle After Another