FINAL 2026 Oscar Predictions: BEST ACTOR
What a roller coaster this category has been, right?
Timothée Chalamet, who had long been the ‘on paper’ frontrunner for Best Actor for months, stormed out of the gate at with both Critics Choice and the Golden Globes in early January with wins for the table tennis pseudo biopic Marty Supreme. Everything was coming up Timmy. But in the weird world of Oscar campaigning, things can change on a dime, or in the case of this extra long season, unfold like a slow motion car accident.
For Chalamet, his press tour for Marty Supreme was a decidedly different tone than his Oscar campaign for it. Going fully back into his white boy rapper mode, making videos calling himself the ‘clit commander’ and doing a jacket giveaway that reached a fever pitch, it was a tour that was aiming for the Letterboxd audience vs the Criterion audience. Now, there is obviously a lot of crossover there, and maybe it’s not the best comparison, but his aim was for the under 30 set, having recently just crossed that threshold himself. But, as fast as that part was over, in came his awards campaign mode; more serious, quietly respectful of the room, simpler outfits, finally acknowledging Kylie Jenner as his ‘partner’ on a national stage, and catering to voters vs folks that would stand in line for hours for a piece of outerwear they could sell online for a 3x markup. It was following what felt like a logical transition and trajectory.
Then came time for BAFTA, and for Chalamet’s true coronation to begin. After all, CCA and the Globes are both journalist organizations. They may be televised shows, and we all do use them as precursors, but only BAFTA and SAG (and to a lesser extent, AACTA – the Australian Academy Awards) tell us what actual sections of voters are thinking. Marty Supreme had nine nominations at BAFTA but the tide shifted. Not only did Chalamet lose where he was heavily predicted, it was to someone not Oscar-nominated or even eligible this last season (Robert Aramayo for I Swear, will be eligible for next season). Now, in some regards, this wasn’t seen as a bad thing. Not a good thing, by any means, but he didn’t lose to competition so it kept him and his fellow Oscar nominees on the same field. Much like Jessie Buckley in Hamnet, Chalamet has been seen as his film’s only real hope for a win. But sole Best Actor wins when your film is a 9-time nominee isn’t that common. Let’s look at how many times it’s happened since the beginning of the SAG/Critics Choice era (1995), when BAFTA moved to before the Oscars, to now.
SAG/Critics Choice era begins
1995: Nicolas Cage, Leaving Las Vegas (GG – drama)
1996: Geoffrey Rush, Shine (BP nominee, sweeper)
BAFTA moves to before Oscars
2001: Denzel Washington, Training Day
2005: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote (BP nominee, sweeper)
2006: Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland (film’s only nomination, sweeper)
2014: Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything (BP nominee, BAFTA, GG – drama, SAG)
2021: Will Smith, King Richard (BP nominee, sweeper)
Chalamet doesn’t fit into that group at all. With just Critics Choice and the Comedy Globe, he has no real comp; Jean Dujardin (The Artist) and Jack Nicholson (As Good As It Gets) are the only Comedy Globe winners in the last 30 years to turn them into Oscars and Chalamet has no Best Actress co-winner and he isn’t in the Best Picture winner. While there are plenty of examples of solo Best Actor wins before these eras, many of of them have happened to veteran actors as legacy wins like John Wayne, Paul Newman and Al Pacino.
Also of note, the last acting winner to lose BAFTA and SAG when nominated for both was George Clooney in supporting actor for 2005’s Syriana and before that, Sean Penn in lead actor for 2003’s Mystic River. Incidentally, both Clooney and Penn were double-nominated at BAFTA in their respective years and categories and it’s hard to argue that Clooney’s win was more as a way to reward him for Good Night, and Good Luck that same year.
Which brings us to Michael B. Jordan in Sinners, who has his own obstacle to overcome as a SAG-only winner but advantages by being in a top two Best Picture contender. First, the obstacle.
Since the beginning of the SAG Awards in 1994, 24 men have turned a win there into Oscar success but none of them have done it with only SAG. We have seven examples where a SAG win didn’t translate to Oscar, most recently just last year, with Chalamet, no less. While we had a run of four of those years in a row in early 2000s, the more recent examples include Denzel Washington (Fences) and Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom). Exceptional cases both, as Washington had two Oscars yet never won SAG, and Boseman had sadly passed away months earlier.
Now, the advantage. While four of the five Oscar contenders here are in Best Picture nominees, Jordan is the only one to bring an industry award to the table on top of being in not just a top two contender, but the record-breaking nomination getter of all time. While Best Actor and Best Picture used to have a closer connection, they’ve only aligned four times in the last 25 years, that’s a pretty huge shift. It was just two years ago that Cillian Murphy did with Oppenheimer, but he was one of those sweepers. I guess you can look at this category a few ways; that Jordan will be one of dozens of actors to win here without his film winning Best Picture, or he sits beside Murphy, Russell Crowe (Gladiator), Colin Firth (The King’s Speech) and Dujardin who won in films that also did. I’m not sure Jordan needs that connection to win, in fact (spoiler alert), I’m sure that I don’t.
One of the season’s real mysteries has been how much of a non-presence Leonardo DiCaprio has been as the lead of One Battle After Another. He’s been nominated everywhere but he’s won as many precursors as Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon, zero. After getting snubbed for Killers of the Flower Moon, the Academy doesn’t seem to have been super friendly to him since his Oscar win, a bit of a cold shoulder, really. Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent) has that Golden Globe win for drama but both BAFTA and SAG noms were a no go. Makes for a tougher argument to see him as a surprise winner, but it would indeed be a surprise.
Here are my final winner predictions in Best Actor for the 98th Academy Awards, which will take place on March 15, live at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, California.
| 1. Michael B. Jordan in Sinners (Warner Bros) | BAFTA, CCA, GG, SAG |
| 2. Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme (A24) | BAFTA, CCA, GG, SAG |
| 3. Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another (Warner Bros) | BAFTA, CCA, GG, SAG |
| 4. Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent (NEON) | CCA, GG |
| 5. Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon (Sony Pictures Classics) | BAFTA, CCA, GG, SAG |
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.
FINAL 2026 Oscar Predictions: BEST ACTOR 
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AwardsWatch Podcast Ep. 336 – Final Oscar Predictions for the 98th Academy Awards