FINAL 2026 Oscar Predictions: BEST CASTING

The first new category at the Oscars in two decades and even with three available precursors the results are impacted by everything from inconsistent competition to winners that aren’t nominated here.

We’ll start with Casting Society (CSA), which has been around for 41 years and has no less than six live action feature film categories and a membership requirement for a nomination. Sinners bested Marty Supreme and Hamnet in the big budget drama category and… that’s all we have. The casting directors of One Battle After Another (Cassandra Kulukundis) and The Secret Agent (Gabriel Domingues) aren’t members and couldn’t be nominated in what likely would have been big budget comedy and international film (although Sentimental Value was nominated in independent drama, so who knows).

BAFTA has had a casting category for seven years and not once has it connected to their Best Film category. Where it has had fusion is in one of the acting categories where in all but one year saw the casting award and an individual acting trophy come from the same film. This year, like 2020, BAFTA went for I Swear, a film not in the Academy’s eligibility for last season but will be for the next. Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another and Sinners were all nominated so all of them losing to a non-Oscar nominee is back to square one.

Critics Choice also started a casting category this season where Sinners beat out Hamnet, Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another but without connection to a Best Picture win or any individual acting win.

While not a 1:1, the SAG win for Sinners for its cast, which is sometimes seen as a default Best Picture category, can also be seen as a win for legendary casting director Francine Maisler, who took the stage with the cast when they won.

We obviously will need quite a few years to see how this category evolves, both in the nomination stage and the winner stage, and how the voting body at large sees it. Will it be connected to an individual win? Best Picture? With that, Sinners is a pretty safe bet here, proving strength against its most likely competition (One Battle) once.

Here are my final winner predictions in Casting for the 98th Academy Awards, which will take place on March 15, live at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, California.

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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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