The year is storming into its final lap, and for cinephiles that means one thing: we’ve officially hit awards season, the long, winding, gladiatorial march toward the 98th Academy Awards on March 15, 2026. This is the moment when masterpieces, middleweights, and mavericks elbow their way into relevance; when agendas shift, narratives calcify, and the unexpected hits like a trapdoor under velvet heels. Sure, there are still a handful of premieres left to drop, but critics, programmers, and festival crowds have already begun laying bets. The conversation is loud. The stakes are louder.
Take Paul Thomas Anderson, perennial nominee. Eleven Oscar nods later, zero wins. It’s almost become its own subgenre: the Anderson Injustice Arc. This year’s antidote to that decades-long dry spell? One Battle After Another, the dramedy-thriller that swirls Pynchon’s anarchic chaos through Anderson’s restless lens. Loosely inspired by Vineland, it’s equal parts generational reckoning and flame lit family fuse. Front and center is Leonardo DiCaprio, finally serving unhinged emotional range . He plays Bob, a washed-up revolutionary exiled from cause and community, raising his teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) in a father-daughter micro-republic built on conspiracy instincts and wounded tenderness.
When Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) reboots the narrative sixteen years after the fall of the agitator group French 75, dysfunction explodes into a cross-country fever dream. Meanwhile, Chloé Zhao is staging her own second coming with Hamnet, a bawl-out period drama that dares to transform Shakespeare from crown jewel into cautionary grief spiral. With Maggie O’Farrell pulling double duty as co-writer and subject revivalist, Jessie Buckley is weaving devotion out of desperation, poised to dominate Best Actress predictions. No Elizabethan ruffles can soften the ache at the core: a woman forging endurance out of unimaginable loss, love weaponized into survival.
Then terror decides it wants its Oscars too. Enter Sinners, the Safdie-adjacent fever nightmare from Ryan Coogler. Franchise pupil no more, Coogler doubles Michael B. Jordan into twin brothers Smoke and Stack Moore, returning to their Mississippi Delta hometown to build a blues club in the birthplace of blues itself. It feels deceptively familiar, redemption arc by the jukebox and community healed through music, until the inevitable Coogler twist opens its jaws. Horror this calibrated and tender could just make Oscars history: the first genre heavyweight winning Best Director after decades of being told genre films are “too much” for the Academy until they’re exactly what it needs.
Josh Safdie is also fighting his own corner with Marty Supreme, an eccentric tribute to the one and only Marty Reisman. Timothée Chalamet is arguably giving the Academy the exact problem child performance it pretends not to crave. His Mauser is electric, unpredictable, borderline chaos, but isn’t that the point?
And let’s not pretend this season is only Hollywood’s sandbox. Cannes’ Golden Palm trendline still holds: every recent Palme d’Or champion has snagged a nomination for Best Picture. That makes Jafar Panahi’s Iranian suspense collision course, A Simple Accident, the international contender no one’s dismissing this year. The story interrogates vengeance without certainty, guilt without clarity, justice without receipts. Numbers, rumours, emblems, icons, cinema’s season of multitudes is here.
Welcome to the awards battleground. May we prepare to expect the unexpected this season ? We shall be ready for some legends emerging the podium.
