Oscars 2027: Who might be nominated for next year’s awards? | Oscars

WAlthough this time last year we may have already been aware of Oscar-winning films like One Battle After Another and Hamnet, Sunday’s ceremony showed that the race isn’t always easy to predict just yet. Horror films like Sinners, Wilms, Frankenstein and the KPop phenomenon Demon Hunters were not all competitive, while international films continued to surprise.

It makes this annual game increasingly difficult, but here again are some ridiculous early picks for next year’s Oscars:

Aaron Sorkin

It’s never wise to bet against Aaron Sorkin, the BAFTA, Emmy and Golden Globe winner who won his only Oscar for the screenplay for The Social Network. A lot has changed, all for the worse, since that early look at Facebook in 2010, and Sorkin tries to cover some of it in The Social Reckoning, an unconventional quasi-sequel that will focus on the 2021 leak from whistleblower Francis Haugen. She will be played by last year’s Best Actress winner, Mickey Madison (who reportedly made the wise decision to choose this film over the Star Wars and Colleen Hoover films), while Mark Zuckerberg will now play The Apprentice nominee Jeremy Strong. It’s by no means a sure thing (Sorkin’s last film was the biopic “Being the Ricardos” and Internet movies are very hard to come by) but the Academy loves it (even The Trial of the Chicago 7 scored it a nod), and the time is never right to take down Facebook.

Sandra Holler

It took a while for Hollywood to take notice of German actress Sandra Höller, who had won several awards in Europe before helming the suspense thriller Anatomy of a Fall in her mid-40s. The film went from winning the Palme d’Or to winning the Academy Award with five nominations, including Best Actress for Howler (she eventually won for Original Screenplay). At the same time, Holler also appeared in Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest, a film that beat Anatomy of a Fall to win an international award. The inevitable rush of offers has come, and this month saw her cash in on her highest-grossing offer, starring opposite Ryan Gosling in the $200 million sci-fi adventure Project Hail Mary. It’s unlikely there will be Oscar buzz from this film, but later this year she will star in the even more award-winning Cold War drama 1949, the new film from director Paweł Pawlikowski, whom the Academy has previously shown love, awarding Ida an Oscar and nominating him for Cold War. She also has a supporting role in director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s long-awaited Tom Cruise-led black comedy Digger which will likely be slated for an awards play later this year.

Charles Milton

It briefly looked as if Charles Melton was poised to pave an unlikely path from Glee to Riverdale to the Oscars again in 2024. The high school heartthrob turned serious actor looked like a supporting actor nominee nods for best performance in Todd Haynes’ slippery drama in May, but that’s not the case, as the critics circle hails his failure to impress the Academy. This year we see him in two follow-up projects lined up for the festival: Nicolas Winding Refn’s thriller Her Private Hell, which will likely be at Cannes, and then Saturn Returns from Sing Sing/Train Dreams duo Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley, which could make it to the fall festival. While Refn is less suited to the Oscars, the latter could spark their attention, with the pair’s last two films collecting seven nominations between them. It’s a sweeping romantic drama that follows college sweethearts as they transition into adulthood over the course of a decade and boasts a behind-the-scenes plan for Netflix and Brad Pitt, both of whom are familiar with guiding the actor to awards glory.

Ryosuke Hamaguchi

Although Sunday didn’t deliver the international wins some had hoped for, there were enough major nominations for films like Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent to show that the diverse new academy is continuing to look for contenders outside the English language. Back in 2022, Drive My Car became the first Japanese film ever to take home the Best Picture award while also winning Best International Feature and giving writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi two additional nominations for screenplay and director. His new film, which is expected to premiere at Cannes, is a mix of French and Japanese and concerns the relationship between a nursing home director and a terminally ill playwright. Set to be an emotional drama (Hamaguchi was inspired by a real-life dynamic that “touched him deeply”) and behind it is Neon, the same company that led Parasite and Anora to Oscars glory, and the stars appear to be aligning with the Academy’s favored foreign pick.

Ruth Madeley

While 2021’s Coda may quickly become one of the most forgettable Best Picture winners of the past decade, writer-director Sian Heder’s gentle drama about a deaf family and their hearing daughter at least provided a different kind of representation on the Oscar stage. She hopes to do the same again with Being Human, a drama based on pioneering disability rights activist Judith Human who brought her together with Apple. Her life is ripe for biographical treatment, if treated as little more than a Wikipedia summary, and Heder has cast Ruth Madeley in the lead, a British actress who has made strides as one of the most prominent wheelchair-using stars on television with roles in Doctor Who and Years and Years. Backed by Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo and man of the moment Dylan O’Brien, this film appears poised for Oscar consideration, and if Madeley is nominated, she will make history.

Sebastian Stan

Now mostly freed from the shackles of the MCU (with the Thunderbolts underperforming, this year’s Avengers movie could be his last appearance as Bucky), it’s time for Sebastian Stan to fully transition into the real human world. Last year, he earned his first Golden Globe for “A Different Man” and his first Oscar nomination for “The Apprentice,” and this summer he may return to Cannes with Christian Mungiu’s highly anticipated drama “Fjord.” Mungu may have been cruelly snubbed by the Academy for his Palme d’Or-winning breakthrough film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, but partnering with Stan and this year’s Best Actress nominee Renate Rainsef on a film that marks his first semi-English language project (with Romanian and Norwegian side by side) seems like a safer bet, especially now that the Academy is moving more international. The plot revolves around two families falling apart after a devastating accusation of abuse, and Stan’s transformation, which from the first image looks almost unrecognizable, also points to potentially big things.

Octavia Spencer

Director Chinonye Chukwu has a short history of directing women who were on the cusp of an Oscar nomination — Alfre Woodard for the prison drama Clemency (received BAFTA nominations, Gotham and Independent Spirit) and Danielle Deadwyler for Till (received BAFTA, SAG, and Critics Choice nominations in addition to a win for Gotham ) — and it looks like her next project might finally push her into the running. She brings a new version of Death of a Salesman to the screen with the help of four-time Oscar nominee and two-time Tony Award winner Tony Kushner. This will be its first major big-screen release since 1951, and Chukwu has set Oscar nominee Jeffrey Wright, Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer, Tony nominee Corey Hawkins and Kelvin Harrison Jr. to star in the film. It’s a hell of a cast and any of them could be in the running, but the Academy loves Spencer (she’s also been nominated twice), and if the film is ready in time for this season, one could see her take the lead in the Best Actress category.

Jack O’Connell

It was a welcome return for Jack O’Connell, who has drifted somewhat since his first breakout in early 2010. Last year saw him lean into his dark side with scene-stealing villain roles in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and Sinners, meaning he was part of the winning bunch at this month’s Actor Awards. Before cashing the check for Godzilla v Kong: Supernova, O’Connell will helm Danny Boyle’s adaptation of the Olivier and Tony Award-winning play Ink. He takes on the role of tabloid editor Larry Lamb opposite Guy Pearce’s Rupert Murdoch in the 1960s-set drama Fleet Street that was beloved on stage. The last time Boyle tackled a fact-based workplace drama was with Steve Jobs, which brought in nominations for Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet, and O’Connell will be deserving of recognition after his recent flourish.

Parker Posey

The journey hasn’t been smooth or easy, but Parker Posey, an actress long beloved by the industry, if not, unfairly, by many casting directors, has finally found herself landing roles she deserves. Small turns in Beau is Afraid, Thelma and Mrs and Mrs Smith led to her much-nominated performance in The White Lotus, which has now landed her a role in Martin McDonagh’s latest film, Wild Horse Nine. McDonagh’s last two films, Three Billboards and The Banshees of Inishirin, received 17 Oscar nominations between them, and his latest will likely follow a similar path later this year (gun first, acclaim next, awards after that). It’s the story of CIA agents in the 1970s, and although Poussey’s supporting role isn’t clear yet, she seems like a perfect match for McDonagh’s swearing-y, darkly funny dialogue.

Andrew Garfield

Andrew Garfield may have had a hard time justifying his latest collaboration with Luca Guadagnino – the wrong-headed campus thriller After the Hunt – but there’s enough to suggest that his next collaboration might be worth the effort. Garfield plays Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in Artificial, a film about the behind-the-scenes drama that led to his firing and rehiring in the span of a few days in 2023. It’s one of many AI projects in the works, most of which thankfully take a negative stance, and given the amount of bile that was directed at the technology at Sunday’s ceremony, this seems like a project voters should get behind. Garfield, who has two lead actor nominations, is also helming a new Paul Greengrass film called The Uprising, about the English peasants’ revolt of 1381. Greengrass isn’t sure he’ll be at the Oscars given how heavy-handed his films have been (his last, the wildfire thriller The Lost Bus, got just one nod for visual effects) but given how angry many are currently feeling about the gap between rich and poor, it might seem like this at the time. appropriate. Enough to break through.