The Brief

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another arrive at Sunday’s 98th Academy Awards locked in the tightest Best Picture race in years — Coogler’s vampire drama carrying a record 16 nominations and a lead in anonymous voter surveys, Anderson’s political thriller armed with the most complete precursor sweep in modern Oscar history. Michael B. Jordan and Jessie Buckley enter as favourites in the lead acting categories, while the supporting races remain genuinely unsettled.

The Report

The Best Picture contest at this year’s Oscars has collapsed into a two-film race so dominant that identifying a clear third-place contender has become its own parlour game. Sinners, Coogler’s Jim Crow-era horror set across a single night in the Mississippi Delta, holds 16 nominations — surpassing the 14 earned by All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land to set an all-time Academy record. One Battle After Another, Anderson’s Reagan-era adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, trails with 13. The two films compete head-to-head in a record 11 categories.

The statistical case for Anderson’s film is formidable. One Battle After Another swept the Critics Choice, Golden Globes, BAFTA, Directors Guild, Producers Guild, Writers Guild, and ACE Eddie Awards while collecting a SAG prize for Sean Penn. No film in Oscar history has assembled that particular combination of precursor wins and gone on to lose Best Picture.

Yet the raw voter data tells a different story. Vanity Fair’s interactive ballot survey showed Sinners leading 43 percent to 31 percent among responding voters. A recurring pattern emerged in Variety’s conversations with ballot-sharing Academy members: voters who expected Anderson’s film to win reported voting for Coogler’s. “One Battle After Another is going to win best picture, but I voted for Sinners,” one anonymous voter said — a formulation that appeared, with minor variations, across at least six separate conversations.

The disconnect matters because Best Picture is the only Oscar category decided by ranked-choice voting. Voters rank all ten nominees; if no film clears 50 percent on first-choice ballots, the lowest-ranked film is eliminated and its votes redistributed until one crosses the threshold. A film with more passionate first-choice support can prevail over one with broader but shallower backing — or lose to it, depending on where eliminated films’ voters placed their second choices.

Both campaigns are Warner Bros. productions, each receiving between $14 million and $16 million in awards spending. The studio holds 30 total nominations, tying its own record. Whatever happens Sunday, the envelope will carry a Warner Bros. logo.

In the acting categories, Michael B. Jordan leads Best Actor at 56.9 percent on Gold Derby’s final predictions after his SAG Award win upended Timothée Chalamet’s season-long frontrunner status — though Ben Zauzmer’s mathematical model puts just 0.9 percentage points between them. Jessie Buckley is all but certain to win Best Actress for Hamnet, having swept the Golden Globe, Critics Choice, BAFTA, and SAG — the tenth actress to claim all four, and the previous nine all won the Oscar. Best Supporting Actor remains genuinely open among five nominees, with precursor wins split between Penn, Stellan Skarsgård, and no clear consensus. Best Supporting Actress is a three-way contest between Wunmi Mosaku, Amy Madigan, and Teyana Taylor, each holding one major precursor win.

A Coogler victory for Best Director would make him the first Black filmmaker to win the award in the Academy’s 97-year history. He is only the seventh Black director ever nominated. Anderson, meanwhile, carries the narrative of the greatest working filmmaker never to have won.

The ceremony airs Sunday, March 15, on ABC, with Conan O’Brien returning as host for the second consecutive year. Twenty-four categories will be presented, including the inaugural Best Casting award — the first new category added since Best Animated Feature in 2001.

The Angle

The most revealing detail in this race is not who voters chose but the sentence structure they used to describe it. “One Battle is going to win, but I voted for Sinners” is a statement about two different things: a prediction market in which voters feel they have no individual agency, and a ballot on which they exercised it. The gap between what people expect to happen and what they actually did when it was their turn is the entire contest in miniature — and it is the gap in which ranked-choice voting operates. Anderson’s precursor record says the institutions have decided. The ballots suggest the individuals haven’t followed. Sunday will tell us which of those forces the Academy actually is.