Oscar race enters final stretch as Sinners wins actor awards | film

Voting for the Oscars closed at 5 p.m. PT on Thursday, meaning the months-long ad campaigns for cult favorites have put their incentive on hold: red carpets are rolled out, hospitality suites are shuttered, and PR people are preparing for the Academy Awards ceremony itself. The primary campaign is over — on-stage Q&As, special performances from photographers, a series of less-than-important awards ceremonies — and now there’s nothing the candidates can do but sit back and count the days.

Over the course of a long awards campaign, which arguably began with the near-simultaneous summer film festivals in Venice, Telluride, and Toronto and culminated in mid-February with the start of Oscar voting, rune-reading became a full-time activity across the entire film industry, and an absolute obsession for in-house Hollywood publications like Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline. Each ebb and flow of the process — a critics’ award nomination here, or a trade guild snub there — is endlessly cherry-picked for what it might mean for the end result.

The Oscar is worth the hype. The “box office receipts” represent an average of $39 million (£29 million) for a film that is nominated and then wins Best Picture, depending on its place in its theatrical release cycle. An Oscar can change a crew’s career, and change an actor or director’s life. Studios can achieve bragging rights and, sometimes, in the case of A24 with Moonlight or Neon with Parasite, radically change the entire profile of the company.

At the most recent high-profile ceremony, the Actor Awards (granted by the Artists Guild, Screen Actors Guild), the surprise win for Sinners’ Michael B. Jordan in the Best Actor category had prominent commentators suggesting that momentum had shifted decisively toward Sinners, the Ryan Coogler-directed vampire thriller that features Jordan in a dual role. Having been nominated for 16 Oscars, Sinners is locked in a long-running battle with Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as an ex-revolutionary with a teenage daughter, played by Chase Infinity.

In an article titled “Michael B. Jordan’s Triumph at the Actors’ Awards.” [Sinners] “Kudos to the Oscars,” Variety’s Clayton Davis spoke of the film’s prospects, saying, “The entire DNA of Oscar season [had] Convert[ed] “Under your feet.” Deadline’s Pete Hammond also believes the Actor Awards have boosted Sinners’ chances, saying: “It’s undeniable that Sinners Caught a wave Sunday night with a chance to ride it all the way. Although it’s generally more ambiguous, The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg said sinners are more likely to benefit from the Oscars’ preferential ballot system.

Another regular feature of the Oscar race is the publication of “anonymous voters” opinions, which provide anecdotal evidence of how preferences have changed. Variety has published a selection of anonymous reviews, suggesting that Sinners and One Battle After Another are heavily favored for Best Picture, that Jessie Buckley appears to be a surefire nominee for Best Actress, and that despite his well-known disdain for the Oscars, Sean Penn is benefiting from a late rise in the Best Supporting Actor category. Conversely, Timothée Chalamet’s chances of taking home the Oscar for Best Actor for Marty Supreme appear to be declining in the wake of Robert Aramayo’s win for I Swear at the Baftas; With the drama about Tourette syndrome activist John Davidson not being eligible for the 2026 Oscars due to the film not yet being released in the US, that leaves Jordan and DiCaprio as major contenders.

While many of the pre-Oscar awards are considered groundbreaking, differences in voting pools make direct comparisons difficult. Over 122,000 Sag Aftra members are eligible to vote for the Actor Awards. There are said to be just over 10,000 eligible voters in the Oscar race, though many of them overlap with other organizations, including the Producers Guild of America and the Directors Guild of America, which present their own awards. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ampas), which organizes the Oscars, also recently created a system that allows only those who have seen all the nominated films to vote.

The nature of the Academy Awards ceremony itself has become clearer, as Ambass announced a number of presenters, including Robert Downey Jr., Paul Mescal and Gwyneth Paltrow, in addition to previously announced host Conan O’Brien and his fellow presenters Mickey Madison, Adrien Brody and Demi Moore.

Deadline also reported that Barbra Streisand is in talks to participate in a tribute to actor and director Robert Redford, who died in September, as part of the In Memoriam section celebrating the Oscars. The pair appeared in the hit romance The Way We Were in 1973. When Harry Met Sally Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan are also set to appear in In Memoriam, a tribute to director Rob Reiner, who was found murdered in his home with his wife, Michelle Reiner, in December.

The Oscars ceremony will be held on March 15 at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles.