Early predictions for the 2027 Oscar race

NEW YORK (AP):

Fall movie season also means Oscar season. It might be only just September but the jockeying for next March’s Academy Awards is well underway. Movies first started revving up their Oscar campaigns at the Cannes Film Festival in May. But, now that the fall festivals in Venice, Telluride, and soon Toronto are in full swing, so is the prognosticating about what’s in the mix for awards.

There is much still to come. Sandworms! ( Dune: Part III) Old Tom Cruise! ( Digger) Oh my! But here’s an early survey of the Oscar landscape, with a few predictions mixed in.

‘The Odyssey’ won’t end up the best picture favourite

At this point, Christopher Nolan’s epic deserves to be considered the movie to beat. His previous film, Oppenheimer, steamrolled its way to best picture and Nolan’s first Oscar, for best director. His singular stature is such that back-to-back wins might sound good to Academy members. But The Odyssey isn’t quite as well-loved as Oppenheimer, and, fun fact, no movie that Homer translators have come out against has ever won best picture. OK, so that’s a small subset.

But being the frontrunner for more than half a year is hard, and the academy has largely favoured smaller films in recent years. This prediction could come back to bite me but right now, I’d take the field.

The New York movie is alive and well

It’s going to be a good fall for NYC. A number of the season’s standouts derive a lot of their texture and grit from the Big Apple. That includes Jordan Firstman’s hysterical and surprisingly tender Club Kid (November 6), in which he stars as a gay clubgoer who finds out he has a child; Paper Tiger (November 13), James Gray’s engrossing Queens-set drama about family and 1980s mafia corruption; The Only Living Pickpocket (October 23), starring John Turturro as an ageing pickpocket in a much-changed New York; Once Upon a Time in Harlem (October 16), a long-in-coming documentary chronicling a 1972 gathering of Harlem Renaissance luminaries; and The History of Concrete (September 18), John Wilson’s delightfully meandering documentary about concrete and creativity.

Get ready to be reminded of this fact: John Malkovich has never won an Oscar. The twice-nominated actor (for Places in the Heart and In the Line of Fire) may have his best shot yet with his performance in Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine. In it, he stars alongside Sam Rockwell as an ageing CIA agent who’s grown tired of keeping secrets on a trip to Easter Island in the early 1970s. Like Malkovich’s best roles, his performance is full of wit, soulfulness and profanity.

The ‘Obsession’ sensation isn’t over yet

Curry Barker’s One Wish Willow horror movie has already set plenty of records, including being one of the most profitable movies ever made. But Focus Features is also preparing an awards campaign for the low-budget hit that could have Obsession competing in many of the top Oscar categories, including best picture and best actress for Inde Navarrette. It won’t be the only early 2026 release to factor in the mix, though. Expect to hear more from Christopher Miller and Phil Lord’s Project Hail Mary and Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, among others.

At the Oscars, international film is here to stay

As in recent years, many of the top Academy Awards contenders are sure to hail from overseas. The makeup of the Academy has grown more international in recent years, and global nominees have increasingly reflected that. Some of this year’s standouts include: All of a Sudden (November 25), an expansively tender Paris-set drama from Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi ( Drive My Car); Fjord (October 9), Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or-winning Norway-set drama about political polarisation; La Bola Negra (October 16), an epic that spans the interconnected lives of three gay men in Spain; Minotaur (November 20), Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev’s drama about betrayal and murder in Putin’s Russia; Possible Love (October 23), Lee Chang-dong’s awaited follow-up to 2018’s acclaimed Burning, about two couples making a documentary; Fatherland (October 23), Paweł Pawlikowski’s exquisite black-and-white drama about postwar Germany; Clarissa (December 11), Arie and Chuko Esiri’s shimmering Nigeria-set reinterpretation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.