2026 Oscar Predictions: BEST CASTING (December)

The final category this month with a shortlist and the brand category, Best Casting.

We all weren’t sure exactly how this branch was going to go about putting forth its first shortlist of contenders. Would it be just large casts, likely Best Picture contenders, and how many casting directors would show up multiple times? Well, let’s just say they came with some big surprises.

For some backstory on this new category, casting directors did not have a branch of their own until 2013, as they were a part of the Members-at-Large branch. After casting got their own branch, 210 members were pulled from Members-at-Large to create it and as of today, has more than doubled in size to 544 people, making them the second-fastest growing branch in the Academy, after only Documentary. Actors remain the largest individual branch but shrinking in terms of percentage every year.

Now let’s start of with the the snubs, because they’re pretty significant. It was a rough time for Netflix, where two contenders that seemed like sure bets–Jay Kelly and Wake Up Dead Man–did not make the cut. Nothing for Train Dreams or Nouvelle Vague either, for that matter. Only Frankenstein survived, which has been the Netflix story of the season so far across several categories. These snubs meant no first nominations for legends like Mary Vernieu or Douglas Aibel. Nina Gold, who cast Jay Kelly, and Avy Kaufman, who cast Train Dreams, did find themselves in contention for other films however (Hamnet and Sentimental Value, respectively), but the shortlist also revealed that, quite surprisingly, we won’t see any person double-nominated. While I anticipate future years we’ll see that, I was fully expecting to for the first year.

We have three non-English language films on the shortlist: Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent and Sirāt, with the latter being the big shock inclusion of the list. That film’s strength across the board on these shortlists really opened a door for it to be one of the stories of the season.

Weapons, while not a big surprise, is a great example of this category and the work that casting directors do. The film originally had an entirely different cast (save Austin Abrams) when it went into pre-production but the strikes turned schedules upside down and the film had to be completely recast by Allison Jones. Considering that new casting gave us Amy Madigan, one of the season’s top supporting actress contenders, that’s going to speak to this branch. Frankenstein ran into a similar issue when Andrew Garfield dropped out of playing Creature just nine weeks before production was to start and Robin D. Cook brought Jacob Elordi to director Guillermo del Toro’s attention and now he’s a top supporting actor contender.

Here are my 2026 Oscar predictions in Best Casting for December.

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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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