2026 Oscar Predictions: BEST ACTOR (December)

The first week of December brought us a deluge of industry and critics winners and nominations, including the AFI Top 10 list, National Board of Review, Critics Choice, Golden Globes, Los Angeles and New York film critics, the Gotham winners, Spirit Awards nominations and more.

So far, critics have been widely split with Leonardo DiCaprio picking up Atlanta and NBR wins, Ethan Hawke with Los Angeles and Toronto, Wagner Moura with New York and Michael B. Jordan with Michigan, African American critics and DC. Timothée Chalamet has yet to carve a notch on the board and is currently running a pretty unorthodox campaign, almost an anti-campaign with none of the usual appearances on the awards trail and opting for basketball games, wrestling matches and oddball interviews hyping himself up in a blurred line of actor and character. It’s a bit reminiscent of Joaquin Phoenix in the years before he finally won (for 2019’s Joker) and if anything is going to turn off voters it’s that.

Here are my 2026 Oscar nomination predictions in Best Actor for December.

Other contenders: Austin Butler – Caught Stealing (A24), Benicio Del Toro – The Phoenician Scheme (Focus Features), Ralph Fiennes – The Choral (Sony Pictures Classics), Rami Malek – Nuremberg (Sony Pictures Classics), Guillaume Marbeck – Nouvelle Vague (Netflix), Matthew McConaughey – The Lost Bus (Apple Original Films), Harry Melling – Pillion (A24), Paul Mescal – The History of Sound (MUBI), Dylan O’Brien* – Twinless (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions), Brad Pitt – F1: The Movie (Apple Original Films/Warner Bros), Toni Servillo – La Grazia (MUBI), Channing Tatum – Roofman (Paramount Pictures), Tonatiuh – Kiss of the Spider Woman (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions), Denzel Washington – Highest 2 Lowest (Apple Original Films/A24) ↓

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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