In less than six months, the film world will boast a new batch of Oscar winners. Yes, the awards-season buzz has started again.
Guessing which movies will follow in the footsteps of big 2026 recipients One Battle After Another, Sinners, Frankenstein and KPop Demon Hunters began as soon as the curtain fell on this year’s ceremony – beforehand, even. But when spring hits in Australia, and the major fall film festivals in Europe and North America with it, the next round of awards speculation and momentum kicks into another gear.
Some of the titles that are certain to garner the Academy’s attention – and no doubt earn some other awards as well – have already reached cinemas or popped up at Cannes. Plenty more just made their debuts at the Venice, Telluride or Toronto film festivals.
Here are 10 likely contenders this awards season, to either catch up with if you haven’t seen them yet or to look out for between now and Hollywood’s annual night of nights in March.
10 films set for Oscar nominations – quick links
The Odyssey
With Christopher Nolan’s stunning adaptation of Homer’s epic poem, the question isn’t ‘will it be nominated?’ but rather, ‘how many nods will it score?’
Just 12 months after Sinners set the all-time record for the 16 nominations, the most for a single film in one year, The Odyssey might just match that feat – especially with Anne Hathaway and Samantha Morton both expected to feature in the Best Supporting Actress field, and John Leguizamo possibly having Robert Pattinson for company in the Best Supporting Actor category.
All four stars, alongside likely Best Actor nominee Matt Damon, mirror The Odyssey at its best: hauntingly powerful and a can’t-look-away sight to behold in both its quieter and force-of-nature moments.
The Odyssey is currently screening in Australian cinemas.
The Invite
As two neighbouring couples endure an awkward dinner party that starts with acrimonious feelings, then evolves into surprise propositions and potentially life-changing decisions, The Invite delivers several masterclasses.
Behind the camera, Olivia Wilde directs this insightful, smart and delectably funny film with probing flair and impeccable comic timing. She might collect her first Best Director nomination as a result, becoming just the 10th female filmmaker to do so.
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In the Best Actress race, Wilde is likely to collect a nod for her on-screen efforts, too, as is Best Supporting Actress contender Penelope Cruz. And if their co-stars Seth Rogen and Edward Norton miss out on corresponding nominations, it won’t be a reflection of their talents, because this is as perfectly cast as ensemble comedies get.
The Invite is available to stream via video on demand.
Project Hail Mary
That Project Hail Mary shines so brightly, and so warmly as well, is no minor feat. Balancing a world-in-peril, competence-porn space quest with an alien-friendship buddy-comedy is a tricky task, even when a film stars three-time Oscar-contender Ryan Gosling and adapts a book by an author, in The Martian’s Andy Weir, whose last page-to-screen hit picked up six nominations.
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Embracing sincerity is one of the sci-fi delight’s key choices – and is as crucial as the visual spectacle brought by directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and aided by Australian Oscar-winning Dune: Part One cinematographer Greig Fraser and puppeteer James Ortiz.
Movies that release a year before the Academy hands out its trophies can fade from memory by the time that nominations roll around, but just like audiences, awards bodies shouldn’t forget this gem in a hurry.
Project Hail Mary is available to stream via Prime Video.
La Bola Negra
Winning Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo the Best Director prize at Cannes, then receiving the People’s Choice Award at Toronto, this sumptuous Spanish melodrama sets its story in the motion with the titular black ball – a method of declining a young man’s membership at a casino in 1932.
From there, based on an unfinished work by Federico Garcia Lorca, the filmmakers also known as Los Javis weave a deeply felt exploration of war, love, sexuality and prejudice across almost a century. In 1937 during the Spanish civil war, then 80 years later in 2017 Europe, the lives of two other gay men come into focus.
Another reason that Penelope Cruz might pick up a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination: La Bola Negra is as expansive in scope and emotion, and as impressively shot and intricately staged, as Christopher Nolan’s big awards frontrunner.
La Bola Negra opens in Australian cinemas on 15 October 2026.
Possible Love
The last time that Lee Chang-dong let eight years pass between films, the South Korean director unveiled his 2018 masterpiece Burning, the best feature of his career so far. Another eight years later, Possible Love is already a prize-winner at Venice and tipped to earn the filmmaker a Best Director Oscar nomination.
Patience has been a virtue then – not only while waiting out the gap between Lee’s recent projects (particularly after making the first five of his seven features within a comparably speedy 13 years), but for viewers watching his films unfold at his trademark unhurried pace.
Earning comparisons to Palme d’Or- and four-time Academy Award-winner Parasite, Possible Love delivers a slow-burn class-clash drama about two very different married couples.
Possible Love opens in Australian cinemas on 22 October 2026, and streams via Netflix from 6 November 2027.
Wild Horse Nine
Thanks to Venice, John Malkovich already has one Best Actor award for black comedy Wild Horse Nine. At the Oscars, it might be third time’s a charm, after the actor’s nods in 1984 and 1993 saw him go home empty handed.
Playing a CIA officer sent to Easter Island, Malkovich is paired with Sam Rockwell as his protege and and Steve Buscemi as his bureau chief – instantly making this film one of the year’s most delicious comic prospects. Written and directed by The Banshees of Inisherin filmmaker Martin McDonagh, Wild Horse Nine promises layered, whip-smart banter and chalk-and-cheese characters.
Also helping Malkovich’s chances, McDonagh has directed seven other actors to Academy Award nominations for his past two films alone, including wins for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’s Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell.
Wild Horse Nine opens the Adelaide Film Festival on 14 October and releases in Australian cinemas on 5 November 2026.
The Debut
In his initial two films as a director – the Julianne Moore-led When You Finish Saving the World and Oscar-winner A Real Pain – Jesse Eisenberg contemplated pain: asking what pain is valid, and grappling with individual woes when the world is filled with so much devastation.
Next up is a musical-comedy about making a community-theatre musical – so, in its own way, another exploration of how nothing feels small when it’s happening to you.
The moment that The Debut premiered at Telluride, Still Alice Best Actress-winner Moore was anointed this year’s Oscar frontrunner for her performance as a suburban housewife taking to the stage for the first time, with Paul Giamatti a likely Best Supporting Actor contender.
The Debut opens in Australian cinemas on 26 December 2026.
Elsinore
Actors portraying actors is a long-proven awards shortcut and it might not just be to the benefit of The Debut’s Julianne Moore.
Led by Australian theatre and film director Simon Stone, Elsinore’s Andrew Scott plays a Scot – Scottish star Ian Charleson – as the real-life Chariots of Fire talent gives his final performances in a National Theatre season of Hamlet. Taking over from Daniel Day-Lewis, Charleson’s run as the Prince of Denmark ended less than two months before his death in January 1990 due to AIDS-related causes.
If Scott wins the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in the biopic, which just took home Toronto’s International People’s Choice Award, he’ll be the first out gay man to do so in the awards’ 99-year history.
Elsinore opens in Australian cinemas on 28 January 2027.
Fjord
Fjord is the second Palme d’Or-winner for the Romanian writer and director Cristian Mungiu, following on from 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Here, he again crafts a weighty drama that’s impossible to shake after viewing.
When the Gheorghiu family move to Norway from Romania – to matriarch Lisbet’s country of birth from her husband Mihai’s homeland – their conservative Christian beliefs swiftly draw attention across their new small-town community, sparking moral debates and courtroom showdowns.
Starring two recent Oscar nominees in Sentimental Value’s Renate Reinsve and The Apprentice’s Sebastian Stan (here securing his first role in his native language), Fjord is expertly engineered to press buttons while reflecting today’s fraught times. Like La Bola Negra and Possible Love this year, it should keep earning awards attention well beyond Best International Feature categories.
Fjord opens in Australian cinemas on 28 January 2027.
You Can See Everything
The formula for the most-anticipated documentary of the year is as simple as this: Nathan for You and The Rehearsal’s Nathan Fielder, co-directing with Ren Faire’s Lance Oppenheim, while spending time with Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the 34 days before starting her prison sentence for defrauding the investors in her health technology company.
In Fielder’s two hit docu-comedy series so far, and also in purely fictional fellow small-screen standout The Curse, the Canadian comedian and filmmaker has interrogated the blurred line between reality and performance. Turning the lens towards Holmes, who was played so entrancingly in miniseries The Dropout by Amanda Seyfried, that trend continues with You Can See Everything.
Saying that Fielder’s work has to be seen to be believed is always an understatement, and he keeps demonstrating why again and again.
You Can See Everything doesn’t yet have an Australian release date.
