September 25, 2026

By Nate Jones and Joe Reid

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Everett Collection (Brook Rushton/Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Neon, Netflix)

In the Oscars-season calendar, late September is a time for taking stock. Most of the big contenders have now premiered at one venue or another, and soon the studios will take their films on the road, sending them off to regional festivals like Mill Valley and Middleburg to see how they play in the Oscars equivalent of Peoria. (In this case, vacation towns full of rich people roughly the same age as the median Academy member.) All month, campaigns will be monitoring reactions that determine who they’ll prioritize over the season to come. So while we typically prefer to comment on the race rather than influence it, we figured now was the right time for us to attempt to put our own thumbs on the scale. Just this once, we promise! With the power vested in us as Vulture’s “Gold Rush” bloggers, here are the contenders we’d love to give a big awards push. Some are festival titles just beginning their journeys, others are early-season films we hope won’t get lost in the end-of-year shuffle. All of them deserve a spin on the Oscars-season talkback circuit.

It’s no shade to Robert Pattinson’s performance as Chris Hansen to say that I came out of Lance Oppenheim’s debut feature just as impressed by his co-stars. Merritt Wever does typically excellent work as a harried producer and malfunctioning moral compass on To Catch a Predator. Phoebe Bridgers, in her first film role, pulls off an uncanny transformation as a decoy who bends lines of age and gender. But the heart of the film belongs to Skyler Gisondo. The 30-year-old plays an aspiring actor whose “nubile” look lands him a gig as another of the show’s decoys, the bait that lures pedophiles into Hansen’s waiting trap. While Bridgers’s character sees the job as a form of activism, Gisondo’s sees it as his big break. In a film full of surfaces — Pattinson’s TV-ready sheen, a physical landscape dominated by ever-present screens — his guileless vulnerability provides necessary depth. In fact, he’s the only figure in the movie who’s a full human being, and one of the tragedies of Primetime is realizing this young man has essentially been groomed by the show. (Plus he sings “Seasons of Love” from Rent, twice!) Gisondo is every bit Pattinson’s equal in making Primetime work, and while A24 is giving RPatz a Best Actor push, I hope they put some effort into making these two a package deal.

Ahead of the fall festivals, I heard that Netflix was planning a Best Actress push for Léa Seydoux for the Cannes title Gentle Monster. All respect to Ms. Seydoux, whose movie I have not seen (though critical reactions were generally muted), but after the effusive response the Korean drama Possible Love received at Venice, I hope the streamer diverts some of those resources Jeon’s way. The film is an ensemble piece, following two married couples — one working class, the other wealthy — who cross paths during the production of a documentary. But any sense this might be more sociological treatise than movie is curtailed by the sheer amount of life director Lee Chang-dong puts onscreen. Much of that life is supplied by Jeon, playing the wife of the poorer couple who’s tasked with inhabiting a complex emotional stew: pride, regret, curiosity, frustration, provocation. While the Academy still has a regrettable tendency to overlook Asian talent, I hope that Youn Yuh-jung’s Oscar win for Minari cracked the door further open for international talent. A savvy campaign would be able to introduce Jeon as an esteemed star within the Korean film industry and sell a narrative around her collaboration with Lee, who previously directed her to a Cannes Best Actress prize for 2007’s Secret Sunshine. Think of the way Sony Pictures Classics successfully steered Fernanda Torres to a nom for I’m Still Here, another seemingly second-tier contender that wound up outperforming expectations.

Speak to anyone who’s following the Oscars race this year, and they’ll tell you that the Best Actress category is especially weak this year. That assessment is almost never true for any acting category; it’s just a matter of how far past the usual Oscar-predicted fare you’re willing to look. And it turns out you don’t even have to look all that far to find one of the year’s best performances hiding in plain sight in a survival thriller-comedy that released at the very beginning of the year. What Rachel McAdams is delivering in Sam Raimi’s Send Help is a master class in blending tone and temperature. She knows how to stay balanced across the film’s tension and lunacy and within her own character — a put-upon office worker who finds herself thriving after a plane crash lands her and her obnoxious boss (Dylan O’Brien, also worth a look for awards) stranded on a deserted island. McAdams is giving part Misery, part Batman Returns–style Selina Kyle, and part Tom Hanks in Cast Away. If awards voters value horror or comedy, McAdams will be a shoo-in for her second career nomination (after getting recognized for 2015’s Spotlight).

ADVERTISER CONTENT

After I May Destroy You turned Michaela Coel into one of the most celebrated new creative talents of the 2020s, it’s only been a matter of time before she made her mark at the movies. This was the year for her big-screen breakthrough. She holds her own with no less a talent than Ian McKellen in Steven Soderbergh’s lithe and literate art-world dark comedy The Christophers. For many reasons, McKellen is the headliner, but while Coel is absolutely his counterpart in the movie, I’d gladly look the other way if Neon felt like fudging it and pushed her as a supporting actress. Coel is similarly formidable when stacked up against Anne Hathaway in A24’s Mother Mary. This was a movie that seemed to leave critics and audiences divided, and even as someone who mostly appreciated what it was doing, I’ll admit it didn’t really deliver the kind of movie I was expecting or hoping for. But Coel and Hathaway were electric together. I’d love to get back to a time when studios campaigned for great performers in small, misunderstood, or only so-so movies. Remember Marcia Gay Harden winning an Oscar for Pollock? What a thrill that was.

In its sole year of existence, the Casting Oscar category overlapped entirely with the Best Picture lineup, which may be bad news for Clarissa: Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Nigerian update of Mrs. Dalloway could prove too minor-key and reflective to crack the Oscar ten. But still — what a feat of casting! As in Virginia Woolf’s novel, the film’s present-day action is confined to a single day, interrupted by flashbacks to a languid summer vacation three decades past. Which means that five major characters all had to be cast twice: once while flush with the energy and optimism of youth, once as comfortable, compromised, and middle-aged. Sophie Okonedo and Queen Charlotte’s India Amarteifio play the title character, whose political idealism has curdled into middle-class ennui. David Oyelowo and Ted Lasso’s Toheeb Jimoh play one potential love interest; Ayo Edebiri and Old’s Nikki Amuka-Bird another. Even in cases in which the physical resemblance is not exact (Jimoh is a fair bit bigger than Oyelowo), the energy is the same. Credit to casting director Nina Gold: As the film jumps between present and past, we really do feel like we’re watching the same people across time. It’s an achievement of age-related casting exceeded only by the Netflix show Dark, which remains the gold standard in this field, and it underscores the mood of bittersweet longing that pervades the film. As Clarissa remarks, their glorious futures have long since passed.

That Mike Leigh has only ever been nominated for Best Picture once in his career — for 1996’s Secrets & Lies — is one thing. But with the Best Picture field being expanded since 2009, the Oscar voters have somehow failed to nominate any of Leigh’s late-career films, from the wise and humane Another Year to the politically attuned Peterloo to the sharply funny Hard Truths. Leigh is saying that Tender Loving Care will be his final film, and while the Oscars don’t always send their aging masters out in style, the opportunity is ripe for them to give Leigh a fraction of the recognition he deserves. His depiction of a pair of dedicated, lovelorn social workers (Kate O’Flynn and Alice Bailey Johnson) and O’Flynn’s patient, worried parents (Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson) has a lot to say about how people offer and accept help in this world and the burdens that come with caring for people, both familiar and strange. I’d expect Tender Loving Care to be a contender in the Best Original Screenplay category, where Leigh actually has gotten his due, nominated five times (he’s tied with Ingmar Bergman for third-most nominations in that category; only Federico Fellini and Woody Allen have done better). But it’s long past time for Leigh to return to the Best Picture race, and I hope the film’s distributor, Bleecker Street, can get him there.

One of the more dispiriting trends of the last 20 years of Oscars history has been the way the craft categories have narrowed in scope and are now almost entirely occupied by Best Picture nominees. It wasn’t that long ago that Oscars voters cast much wider nets when it came to voting for the year’s best achievements in costumes or editing or original scores. You used to get really fun one-off nominations like Interview With the Vampire for Production Design or The Prestige for Cinematography. The current trend leaves movies like 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple out in the cold, despite the wonders that director Nia DaCosta and producer Danny Boyle achieved in depicting the sights and sounds and colors and textures of this corner of postapocalyptic Britain. The titular Bone Temple alone ought to earn production designers Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh at least a nomination. My plea to studios: Campaign your early-in-the-year movies, even if they don’t stand a chance in Best Picture. (Note: We would also accept a 28 Years Later nomination in Costumes, Cinematography, Makeup/Hairstyling, or Film Editing.)

For a lot of smaller movies, consideration by Oscars voters starts with consideration by critics groups. Would Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car have gotten a Best Picture nomination in 2021 without the major critics organizations in New York and Los Angeles putting their weight behind it? Critics groups can also elevate work by up-and-coming directors since they all have some version of a Best Debut Feature award. This year, the biggest contenders for those awards are likely Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid (the year’s festival darling) and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms (one of the year’s big financial success stories). These are good movies but unsurprising choices. And in a year that’s been rich with debut features, I am desperately hoping that movies like Maddie’s Secret and Is God Is don’t get overlooked. John Early’s Maddie’s Secret is a smart, deeply committed high-wire act of hyperspecific genre filmmaking that’s also one of the funniest movies of the year. Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is is a boldly styled, energetically paced revenge film. Both make you excited to see what these talented filmmakers will do next.

Reviews are still embargoed for this Alejandro Iñárritu–Tom Cruise team-up, so I’ll tread lightly. (Though social-media reactions are allowed, and they have not been particularly kind.) Upon watching the movie, it is immediately apparent why Warner Bros. did not want to take Digger to the festivals, and I find myself sympathizing with its decision to shroud the film in as much mystery as it can muster. That extends to the score, which was left out of the trailers in favor of a remix of Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House.” I will refrain from offering any critical judgements on the Digger score; instead, I will offer a few value-neutral descriptions. Unique, it certainly is. Full of squorches and squelches. Do I detect subtle notes of tuba? Reactions have been so polarized that I’m unsure whether Digger has the juice to compete anywhere outside of Best Actor, but I would personally be delighted if the music managed to sneak in here, too. Even more delightful: The guy behind it is a British musician named Cosmo Sheldrake. Get your mouth around that on nomination morning.

Recently, it has become popular for Oscars campaigns to bring a charming prop with them on the trail. Anatomy of a Fall brought Messi the dog everywhere. The director of Godzilla Minus One carried around a tiny plastic Godzilla. I bring this is up because there is an animatronic cat in Digger that — at the risk of issuing a critical opinion — totally steals the show. (I’m not spoiling anything; it’s in the trailer.) Now, I’m not sure exactly how heavy a technical lift this next request is, but whatever, I promise it will be worth it: Send that robotic cat out on the trail. This thing is a winner! Let the Academy members pet it, and the movie’s flagging Oscar fortunes may be looking up again.

ADVERTISER CONTENT

Now that the 2026 Emmys have wrapped up, and the Venice, Telluride and Toronto film festivals have unleashed their offerings into the world, Gold Rush is turning its focus to Oscar season. And with that shift comes a different columnist, as Joe Reid hands the newsletter reins over to Nate Jones. (If you miss Joe, fear not — he’ll be issuing updates on the Movies Fantasy League all season long.) You can expect to read this column every Friday in the run-up to the 99th Academy Awards on March 14. As usual, we’ll cover not just who’s up and who’s down, but also the surprises and quirks of the 2027 Oscar season — the dark horses, the behind-the-scenes rumors, and the unlucky contender doomed to become this year’s Oscar Villain.