Snubs, shocks, surprises, Australians: as certain as speeches going over time and teary moments aplenty, all four are a feature when the global film and TV industry shifts into awards mode each year. For more than three decades, from the Oscars held in 1993 recognising 1992’s movies onwards, not a single Academy Awards ceremony has passed without an Aussie in the running.
Five local talents have joined the nominee list for Hollywood’s night of nights this month, following in a long line of Australians who’ve achieved the same feat. This year marks 92 years since the first Aussie in contention, in fact, when New South Wales-born May Robinson was nominated for Best Actress for her role Lady for a Day.
Here’s a rundown of Australia’s 2026 Oscar hopefuls, how they’ve been faring at other international accolades such as the BAFTAs, Golden Globes and Film Independent Spirit Awards, and which fellow local names and projects have been making their presence known across the 2025–26 awards season.
Australians and awards season – quick links
Rose Byrne
Some 32 years after making her film debut in Dallas Doll, Rose Byrne is now a Best Actress Oscar nominee. If the Sydney-born star wins for her tour-de-force performance as an overburdened mother in the unforgettable If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – if she can overcome fierce competition from Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley, also for exploring the depths of motherhood – then she’ll be the first Aussie to take home the category since Cate Blanchett won in 2014 for Blue Jasmine.
ScreenHub: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You review
At the Golden Globes, both Byrne and Buckley nabbed trophies, thanks to the ceremony’s split-genre quirk; Byrne won for Best Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, Buckley for Best Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama.
When the two went head to head at the BAFTAs, Actor Awards (former the Screen Actors Guild, or SAG, Awards) and Critics’ Choice Awards, however, Buckley did the honours.
Byrne’s winning run for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You started over a year ago, at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival, where she took home the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance. At the Film Independent Spirit Awards, which also doesn’t separate actors by gender, she topped the same category.
At the Gotham Awards, both Byrne and Buckley missed out in the same field, with Sopé Dìrísù winning for My Father’s Shadow.
Jacob Elordi
After Guy Pearce earned his first-ever Oscar nomination in 2025 for The Brutalist, Brisbane-born Jacob Elordi has achieved the same feat in 2026 for portraying The Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s excellent adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
ScreenHub: Frankenstein review
Haunting in both its power and its vulnerability, his performance has already seen the Wuthering Heights and Euphoria star pick up a Critics’ Choice Award.
Elordi lost out to Sentimental Value’s Stellan Skarsgård at the Golden Globes, Sinners’ Wunmi Mosaku at the gender-neutral Gothams, and One Battle After Another’s Sean Penn at the Actor Awards and BAFTAs (where he was previously nominated in 2024 for Saltburn).
He’s also in the running for a Satellite Award, with winners to be announced at the end of March, after the Oscars.
Courtesy of his other astonishing performance of 2025, in Australian TV miniseries The Narrow Road to the Great North, Elordi was a two-time Golden Globe nominee this year – but with Stephen Graham also up for Best Male Actor in a Limited Series, Anthology Series, or Motion Picture Made for Television for Adolescence, the Australian went home empty-handed.
Elordi is nominated in the same field at the Satellites.
Nick Cave
Like Rose Byrne and Jacob Elordi, Nick Cave became a first-time Oscar nominee in 2026. Although the iconic musician’s film efforts date back to the 1980s, and he’s previously collected César and Lumiere nominations for documentary The Velvet Queen, Satellite nominations for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Lawless, and World Soundtrack Award nominations for The Proposition and Far From Men, Train Dreams is the first movie to put him in Academy Award contention.
For the Joel Edgerton-starring feature’s titular song, Cave was also nominated for a Critics Choice Award and Golden Globe. KPop Demon Hunters’ Golden won both, and will likely do the same at the Oscars. Cave is still in the running for a Satellite Award as well.
Only two previous Australians have picked up a Best Original Song Academy Award nomination before Cave. John Farrar was the first, for Grease’s Hopelessly Devoted to You, then Peter Allen won for the theme to Arthur.
Fiona Crombie
When Australian screenwriter and playwright Tony McNamara teamed up with Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos for 2018’s The Favourite, he had another Aussie for company in Adelaide-born production designer Fiona Crombie. The pair had previously worked together on Sydney Theatre Company’s The Great, and both received Oscar nominations for The Favourite. Both also won BAFTAs.
ScreenHub: Hamnet review
Now, Crombie has a second shot at an Academy Award, this time for deeply moving page-to-screen adaptation Hamnet. Australians have long fared well in the field, winning six Oscars (John Truscott for Camelot, Ken Muggleston for Oliver!, Luciana Arrighi for Howards End, Catherine Martin for Moulin Rouge!, Catherine Martin and Beverley Dunn for The Great Gatsby, and Colin Gibson and Lisa Thompson for Mad Max: Fury Road) from 13 previous nominations.
At this year’s BAFTAs, Crombie was also vying for a prize again, although Frankenstein’s Tamara Deverell and Shane Vieau won out. For Hamnet, Crombie was similarly nominated at the Critics’ Choice Awards and British Film Designers Guild Awards, also losing at each to Frankenstein.
At the latter, though, she won in the fantasy category for her work on Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17. Crombie missed out for both movies at the Art Directors Guild, but is nominated for Hamnet at the upcoming Satellite Awards.
Guido Wolter
In the Oscars’ 98-year history so far, no other film has ever received as many nominations as the historic 16 nods notched up by Ryan Coogler’s spectacular vampire film Sinners. Among them is recognition for Australian-German dual citizen Guido Wolter, a visual effects supervisor at Adelaide-based Rising Sun Pictures, for Best Achievement in Visual Effects.
ScreenHub: Sinners review
Wolter was also nominated at the Critics’ Choice Awards, where Sinners lost the category to Avatar: Fire and Ash. He remains a chance to take home the field at the Satellite Awards.
At the Oscars, it is likely that Avatar: Fire and Ash will also win, after picking up the BAFTA too. That said, as in many of the fields that it is nominated in, such as Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, don’t count Sinners out.
Joel Edgerton
As perceptive as it is lyrical, the sublime Train Dreams is a four-time Oscar nominee. Alongside Nick Cave’s recognition for Best Original Song, it also received nods for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Cinematography. It really should have a fifth, for lead Joel Edgerton and his career-best performance, in what would’ve been his first Academy Award nomination.
Edgerton was a contender at the Golden Globes, however, earning his second nomination for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama after first doing the same in 2017 for Loving. That’s his exact same fate at the Critics’ Choice Awards, too, and at the Satellite Awards as well. (The Secret Agent’s Wagner Moura won the Golden Globe, and Marty Supreme’s Timothée Chalamet won the Critics’ Choice Award.)
At the BAFTAs, Edgerton didn’t make the final five nominees, with I Swear’s Robert Aramayo winning, but he was named on the ten-person Best Actor longlist. And at the Film Independent Spirit Awards, he lost out to fellow Aussie Rose Byrne, and also missed out when Train Dreams won Best Feature – because The Plague, which he both produced and starred in, was in the running for the same category as well.
Russell Crowe
Out of the ten stars on the BAFTA longlist for Best Actor, two hail from Down Under. As Joel Edgerton did, Russell Crowe also fell short of a nomination for his complex portrayal of Hermann Göring in historical drama Nuremberg.
Crowe already has one BAFTA win to his name for A Beautiful Mind, plus two prior nominations for The Insider and Gladiator. He also won the Oscar for the latter.
Nuremberg hasn’t been a major awards contender, with Crowe’s only nods for the film coming from the AARP Movies for Grownups Awards (losing Best Ensemble to One Battle After Another) and the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts International Awards (losing, as Joel Edgerton also did, to Timothée Chalamet for Marty Supreme).
Sarah Snook
While some of the many awards ceremonies that take place between November and March each year focus solely on film, others also include television nominees. Australia’s big contender this year: Succession’s two-time Emmy winner, two-time Golden Globe winner and two-time Actor Award winner Sarah Snook.
For Australian-made thriller series All Her Fault, her first post-Shiv Roy TV role, Snook won Best Actress in a Limited Series or Movie Made for Television at the Critics’ Choice Awards. She was also nominated at the Golden Globes and the Actor Awards, with Michelle Williams winning at each for Dying for Sex.
At the Satellite Awards, she’s up for the Best Actress in a Miniseries, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television field. Whatever the outcome, the past year has been big awards-wise for Snook anyway, after the Adelaide-born star won a Tony for Best Actress in a Play for The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Shabana Azeez
The success of The Pitt, Noah Wyle’s return to medical dramas more than a decade and a half after ER ended, has demonstrated the perennial appeal of the genre at its best and of its lead in scrubs. The hit series has also turned Australian talent Shabana Azeez into a US star.
For her efforts as Dr Victoria Javadi, Azeez earned a 2026 Actor Award along with her fellow cast members when the show was rewarded for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series – one of The Pitt’s many wins for its debut season, including for Best Drama Series at the Emmys, Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice Awards.
At home, Javadi also nabbed a 2026 AACTA Award for Best Short Film for I’m the Most Racist Person I Know with Leela Varghese, one of her directors on Lesbian Space Princess, plus producer/editor Suriyna Sivashanker.
Shannon Murphy
Already a BAFTA Best Director nominee for her stellar debut feature Babyteeth, the Australian stage-to-screen gem that collected nine AACTAs, Australian filmmaker Shannon Murphy has again been receiving global applause for helming episodes of TV’s Dying for Sex.
At the Directors Guild of America Awards, she won Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Limited & Anthology Series over the teams from Black Rabbit, Black Mirror, The Beast in Me and Zero Day.
A two-time Emmy nominee in 2025 as both a director and executive producer of the limited series, Murphy is also a 2026 Producers Guild of America Award nominee for Outstanding Producer of Limited or Anthology Series Television, plus a 2025 Gotham TV Awards nominee for Breakthrough Limited Series (Adolescence won both).
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
As much as he does for his work in Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi deserves the attention that he’s getting for Justin Kurzel-directed miniseries The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The series itself, an adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s book of the same name, has been earning international love as well.
When the Satellite Awards take place, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is in the running for Best Miniseries and Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television, up against Adolescence, Cassandra, Dying for Sex, Toxic Town and Mr Scorsese.
And at the American Society of Cinematographers Awards on March 8, US time, the series is also up for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography in Limited or Anthology Series, or Motion Picture Made for Television, with Australian Sam Chiplin nominated.
