Flasz On Film

The 2026 Oscar race is officially underway as the nominations for the 98th Academy Awards have been announced earlier today. Sinners was given 16 nods (the most ever awarded and only one short of full complement of eligible nominations), One Battle After Another collected 13. A few upsets here and there. But it looks like these two are going to be flanked by Marty Supreme, Frankenstein, Hamnet and Sentimental Value in the upcoming struggle for Oscar primacy.

Which is where I asked myself the most important question of all: Is there a column in this?

I thought for a hot second about peeking behind the curtain to see if there are any emergent narratives that may or may not propel any of the nominees towards a victory in March, but having skimmed a few articles in Variety and other outlets—and seeing how some well-paid pundits can produce barely legible drivel like their lives depended on it—I decided I’d give it a pass and instead I wondered if I could shoddily concoct a (quasi)data-driven approach to divine which of those movies is likely to walk away with the big one from the comfort of my sofa. Now, since all the major awards indicators like the DGA, WGA, PGA and SAG awards are yet to be dished out, there’s very little gravity to whatever magic one could apply to this process, but I thought it would be a fun way to pass five minutes of spare time.

I decided to engage ChatGPT to do some heavy lifting for me and do some data aggregation on my behalf. By the way, this is where I encountered some strange resistance that made me feel a little bit like Neo in The Matrix Reloaded. “Mmm, upgrades.” And that’s because ChatGPT responded by telling me it couldn’t be done because it would involve a lot of work.

“Hold on a minute,” I responded. “I’m pretty sure I can go on Wikipedia myself, tally up Oscar nominees with the most nods, aggregate their wins and check how often the most-nominated titles correlated with Best Picture wins. It’s easy. But it’s time-consuming and labor-intensive. But I’m pretty sure you can do it.”

“OK, I’ll try,” responded ChatGPT and went on to do its work… only to stop after a few seconds and complain that it was hard. I’m not kidding. This is also where I applied my subtle, trust-based leadership touch and coached Skynet through the process. A few words of encouragement helped together with a suggestion to break up the work into smaller chunks. And boom—after a short while, I had a table ready to look at and draw conclusions from.

And what did I learn?

First of all, the second-most nominated movie in the pool is the most likely to win based on no other data, though the most-nominated movie and the one with the third-largest number of nominations are are also highly likely to matter. In the last 25 years, the Best Picture winner was among the top three movies with the most nominations 23 times. Based on that—and after a brief attempt at making stuff up and having to be corrected by yours truly on what the numbers meant, ChatGPT decided to immediately leave out Bugonia, F1, The Secret Agent and Train Dreams because a movie from outside of the top three most-nominated titles only won twice over the last 25 years. CODA and Anora, in case you were wondering.

So, based on this little dataset, we both surmised that One Battle After Another is statistically the most likely to win Best Picture, but Sinners is almost just as likely. In fact, it’s pretty much a coin toss when it comes to raw probabilities. However, Marty Supreme, Frankenstein and Sentimental Value can come in from behind with an upset. Hamnet is much less likely to matter.

So, these are what I’d call the initial conditions for the Oscar race based on historic patterns of nominations. Now, we can start to filter in additional modifiers that are already available. For example, in this century, a movie nominated in the Best International Feature category went on to win Best Picture only once in 2019 (Parasite), which means that Sentimental Value might be disfavored. At the same time, a strong narrative has been building behind Sinners as a surprising critical darling. But equally, movies released early in the year rarely go on to win Best Picture. To further complicate things, the initial strong praise for One Battle After Another also saw some scathing criticism peppered in, which may over time calcify into a backlash narrative based on political messaging. Also, voters like Guillermo Del Toro, which adds some weight behind Frankenstein and Marty Supreme might tap into the same vibes as Rocky did fifty years ago. So, really it’s anyone’s game and as the various guild awards add more granularity to the picture, a more robust pattern will emerge.

But if you asked me personally, I’d say that looking at the data available now and nothing else, I’d put my weight behind One Battle After Another… while also keeping a close look at Hamnet because those industry insiders do love movies about storytelling and and how art imitates life and comments upon it, while Chloé Zhao is also an industry golden girl; which helps. And it wouldn’t be the first time that a movie about Shakespeare would rally support and win in a major upset. Still, One Battle After Another seems to have the data propping it up at least for now, and it also happens to be one of the few “movies of the moment” together with Bugonia, Eddington and a handful of others, as it openly comments on political divisions in America and the rise of authoritarianism, while also championing hope and familial bonds as the antidote to the mayhem enveloping the world.

But remember: this is not financial advice. All I did was force an LLM to burn some calories while I was looking for a reason to put a thousand words together. Proceed at your own risk.

“Is There a Column in This?” is a series in which I stare at one of my intrusive thoughts until I find a way to write 800 words on the matter, if only to prove that it is possible.