FINAL 2026 Oscar Predictions: ORIGINAL SCORE and ORIGINAL SONG

Among the few but very solid locks of Oscar night will be Ludwig Göransson’s score for Sinners, earning him his third Oscar in this category in just seven years, after 2018’s Black Panther and 2023’s Oppenheimer.

A win here will be historically substantial as he’ll become the first composer to win three Oscars for original score in the 21st century and, at 41, will be the second youngest to ever do it after André Previn, who was 35 when he won his third Oscar for Irma LaDouce in 1964. That he’ll do it with another film directed by Ryan Coogler will make it the first time since Howard Shore, and his wins for The Lord of the Rings films, that a composer has won twice with the same director.

But wait, there’s more! Last month, Göransson also won the Grammy for Score Soundtrack for Visual Media, his third in that category, previously winning for his Oscar-winning scores.

With no true challenger here we turn to Original Song, which is still a pretty competitive race and, as also features Göransson as a nominee. A previous nominee here for “Lift Me Up” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Göransson’s Sinners centerpiece song “I Lied to You,” co-written by Raphael Saadiq, did well with two of the music guilds–Hollywood Music in Media and Society of Composers & Lyricists–but lost both Critics Choice and the Golden Globe to “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters, the latter two being in direct competition (they were in separate categories at the guilds). To add another fun wrinkle, both songs won Grammy Awards last month but against each other in the same category, “Golden” came out the champ.

So, on one hand you have a massive global hit (and the first Billboard Hot 100 chart topper for a female KPop group) that’s won everything it’s been nominated for and in the likely Animated Feature winner, and on the other you have a multi-award winner from a top two Best Picture contender in the most memorable scene in the film. The Oscars sure seem to think it’s only one or the other as they’ll be the only two songs performed at the show this year.

Even with several opportunities in recent years, we haven’t seen wins for these two categories come from the same film since 2016’s La La Land. Not a leap to say it can’t happen this year, it largely depends on how deep the Sinners loves goes down ballot, a truism for several categories in this final stretch.

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

MUSIC (ORIGINAL SCORE)

MUSIC (ORIGINAL SONG)

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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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