The 98th Academy Awards will take place at 7 p.m. on March 15. There are four notable precursors for the Oscars, including the Actor Awards (formerly known as SAG awards), which took place this past Sunday. The other three are the Critics Choice Awards, the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs, which have also crowned their winners for the season. The only thing left to do is to sit around and twiddle our thumbs, and try to make sense of the various and contradicting directions these precursors point in.
Here’s the skinny on what these awards mean: The Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards are both voted for by critics, who do not vote for the Oscars. The BAFTAs and the Actor Awards are voted for by industry professionals, who will surely overlap with the members of the Academy. The difference between these voting bodies is that the BAFTAs have a body of about 10,000 that leans international, and the Actor Awards have a body of about 118,000 that leans American and the Oscars have about 10,000 members who lean American but also have a sizable international wing. For obvious reasons, no one award will predict the Oscars, but combinations of the four will give some clues as to who will take home the golden statue in a few weeks. The BAFTAs and Actor Awards are especially important because of the voter overlap.
This year’s Actor Awards were hosted by Kristen Bell, as they were last year. Some of her bits included a musical number about how actors should change their names to sound cooler and a plan to run an actor table tennis tournament, with the winner, Jacobi Jupe of Hamnet, taking home an stylized clay model of Timothée Chalamet (an homage to Marty Supreme). Perhaps the only other notable ceremonial moment included a very long rambling by Woody Harrelson as he introduced Harrison Ford for the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Fluff aside, the Actor Awards solidified some awards races and shook up others. Jessie Buckley has completed her precursor sweep for Hamnet; the Best Actress Oscar is all but engraved. Sean Penn (One Battle After Another) started slow, picking up Best Supporting Actor nominations everywhere but few wins, including at both the Critics Choice Awards and the Golden Globes. In spite of his utter lack of campaigning, he’s pulled away with it at the end, securing both the BAFTA and the Actor. An Oscar win is highly likely (and in my view, deserved).
Throughout this whole awards season, One Battle After Another has been highly favored to win Best Picture. Sinners’ Best Cast win at the Actor Awards made this slightly less certain, but I wouldn’t bet against One Battle After Another yet — it has secured the Producer’s Guild and Director’s Guild Awards, with Writer’s Guild Award pending but nearly certain, a trifecta that has only lost Best Picture in one instance. I bet against the trifecta last year with Anora and lost.
The toss ups are Best Supporting Actress and Best Lead Actor, and I haven’t a clue about either of these races. Amy Madigan (Weapons) won the Critics Choice Award and the Actor Award for Best Supporting Actress, so that’s where the odds are, but this win just wouldn’t make sense to me. It was a lauded performance, but her main competitors are Wunmi Mosaku, who won the BAFTA for Sinners, and Teyana Taylor, who won the Golden Globe Award for One Battle After Another, two much more awarded and discussed films. In contested races, one of the palm-reading techniques is to predict the actor with the stronger film. (See: Frances McDormand’s win for Nomadland, or Mikey Madison’s for Anora.)
If not Madigan, the signs point to Mosaku, but I also pause here because the BAFTAs sometimes show a preference for their fellow Brits. Her film was also released in April, which hurts her because of recency bias, yet it feels like Sinners is still dominating awards discussions. If Taylor was not in the Best Picture frontrunner, I’d be ready to call time on her campaign, but I just feel like the passion is there for her film and perhaps her performance. My gut tells me she ekes out the win, but none of the three would surprise me.
Even worse, the signs for Best Actor point to nowhere. It seemed like Chalamet’s time when he won the Critics Choice and the Golden Globe in a row, but now he has yet to demonstrate if there is any industry support for his turn as Marty Mauser at all. To confuse things even more, Robert Aramayo (I Swear) won the BAFTA, and he’s not even nominated for the Oscar!
Michael B. Jordan snagged the Actor Award for Sinners, so I tepidly deem him the frontrunner. It’s hard to go off of one industry award with less critical awards to bolster it, especially when that industry award is the Actor, which has a remarkably large voting body. It makes sense to me that Jordan could take this one with Sinners’ box office and mass appeal without getting the Oscar in the end, but still, the Actor is more important than anything the other nominees have. Chalamet has demonstrated critical support: What if he was the number two at both the BAFTAs and the Actors? The Oscar could be his. But momentum could take Jordan over the line. And if any of the other nominees were the true runner up, which we can’t know, the award could be theirs too. We will find out on March 15.
Happy watching!
Chloe Asack is a member of the Class of 2026 in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a staff writer for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at casack@cornellsun.com.
