Oscars Preview 2026

 It’s an exciting year, with a lot of races that are still considered up in the air and an overall excellent list of nominees.

Big picture, it’s hard for me to think of anything that’s a real complete gobsmacking snub, i.e., not just that a great something or other hasn’t been nominated, but that I can readily identify the nomination whose torch I’d blow out with a good explanation why.

But for all the excitement and the buzz in the air, I’m frustrated and annoyed and peeved and something something something that there’s a strong sense that One Battle After Another is going to win Best Picture. It’s a good movie, sure. It’s on my top ten.  But it isn’t even the best Warner Brothers picture of 2025.  One Battle takes an awfully long time to find its footing, and it’s a good movie with some nifty stuff. In five or ten years I’ll be curious to see it again, kind of like how I’m kind of curious to see There Will be Blood.  I’m thinking of the car chase scene.  I’m thinking of the final scene with Sean Penn. And yeah, DiCaprio does a great job in the scene where he’s asked for the passcode to call into customer service.

But Sinners, I’ve already seen third times, and I liked it most the third time after loving it once and loving it twice. It’s a movie for the ages.  It’s a vampire movie, but ya know what, you don’t see no vampires for, like, the first hour, and I’ll tell anyone to at least go see the first hour and then walk out whenever you goddamn please because you don’t want to watch no stinking vampires.  But, you probably won’t walk out.  Because the photography and the script and the acting and the music and everything about the movie are just so good.  And it’s not really a voice about vampires.It’s a movie about family, and it’s a movie about belonging, and it’s a movie about freedom and friendship, and it’s a movie about music, and it’s a movie about eight other things before it’s a movie about vampires.  

But as much as I like Sinners, I’m not rooting for Michael Jordan in the Best Actor race. There’s a ton of great stuff going on in Sinners, but there’s no Marty Supreme without Timothee Chalamet’s lead performance.  He carries that movie on his shoulder like the turtle carries the Earth. But that said, the Best Actor category is so stacked this year.  I’ve liked Ethan Hawke from Dead Poets Society, and I don’t love the movie but it’s got one of the most wonderfully awkward scenes as Hawke’s Lorenz Hart badgers Richard Rodgers in a never-ending inescapable portrait of discomfort.  And Michael Jordan is really good in Sinners, and Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent.  Four of the five nominees could win, and it’s be a well-deserved win.

I don’t like Hamnet enough in a multitude of different ways to want to root for Jessie Buckley.  I’ve liked Chloe Zhao’s The Rider and Nomadland a ton, both of them great movies, but this one is a heavy icky sit that leads up to five great minutes at the end.  I’ll throw my weight to Emma Stone for Actress. And to Amy Madigan for Weapons.  

Speaking of Weapons, it doesn’t get on to my top movies list. With all the Ring cameras and such around and about in the world, it’s completely bogus bullshit that they don’t have the foggiest idea of where all the kids went, and that’s such a gaping logic hole large enough for an entire Christopher Nolan movie to vanish into.  But Madigan?  Well, that’s a memorable performance. 

I’m glad to see an award added for Casting. 

Frankenstein is another of those movies that benefits from the sheer weight of Netflix’s promotional power.  It’s not a good movie.  There isn’t a single thing I like about it.  It’s a piece of sludge.  And Train Dreams, the best I can say is that it’s better than Frankenstein.

But I’m giving a nod to Netflix in the Documentary category.  Perfect Neighbor over The Alabama Solution, which are the only two of the nominees that I saw.  They both deal in different ways with the carceral state of the US of A.  But the scene of the murderer being driven home by the police to collect her belongings and then to attempt to to bargain her way out of the arraignment is a killer app in a way that The Alabama Solution is not.  There was a really good documentary about Attica a couple of years ago that covers a lot of the same beats as Alabama Solution, but Perfect Neighbor, with its near total reliance on body cam videos, covers a lot of the same ground as a lot of other documentaries from a totally fresh POV.

It wasn’t a good year for film music.  Without John Williams will there ever be?  But that category has to go to Sinners’ Ludwig Gorannson.

And it’s an interesting time in the movie business, which has changed a ton over the past several years, much like the publishing industry has changed more in the 2020s than in any other of the four decades I’ve worked in publishing.

It’s surprising to me how resilient the business of theatrical exhibition has been, considering that people were discouraged more from going to the movies in 2020 and 2021 than pretty much anything else.  In New York State, people could go and watch an event at Madison Square Garden before they were allowed to go see a movie.  In CT, I remember walking through the food court of a mall that was kind of busy in 2020 ahead of the holidays in order to get to a movie theatre that wasn’t allowed to sell refreshments.  Because eating with a crowd of pre-holiday season shoppers in the mall food court was perfectly fine, but having popcorn in a movie theatre with half a dozen people in a space that could have held several dozen would kill you.  Or walking past restaurants on restaurant row in Stamford that we were encouraged to go to, in order to go get killed by seeing a movie with three other people in a very large space.  

And yet, young people are going to movies in decent numbers.  No, not like thirty years ago.  All of the multiplexes in NYC that were built in the late 1990s, early 2000s, they’ve been remodeled with fancier seating.  The AMC Empire has lost 10% of its capacity in the regular auditoria because of wider seats and way more in the ones converted into Dolby Cinema and Prime.  The AMC Lincoln Square has wider seats, more legroom, and a third fewer seats.  The Dolby Cinema has 250ish fancy recliners rather than 700 seats originally.  But people love to pay to see movies on the fancier screens and I’ve always thought it kind of crazy that the nicest screen in a multiplex cost the same as the smallest, as if the size of the screen and the quality of the sound don’t make a difference.  People can watch dozens of movies a month on subscription plans for $30.  They can see a move in discount day for under $10 in NYC, hardly more than the $6 that a movie cost when I first moved to NYC in 1986.  And they still do it.

And I still love going to the movies more than just about anything.  I can’t wait to celebrate the year’s best in just a few.

Join me, on the live blog, and at the movies.