Who Should Win Best Picture?

Ten films are nominated for Best Picture at the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday. Two of them are actually competing. "One Battle After Another," Paul Thomas Anderson's screwball epic starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has 13 nominations and has won at the Golden Globes (Comedy or Musical), Critics Choice, BAFTA, DGA, PGA, and WGA. "Sinners," Ryan Coogler's horror film set in the Jim Crow South with Michael B. Jordan in dual roles, broke the all-time Oscar nomination record with 16 — surpassing the 14 held by All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land. The other eight nominees range from the $633 million juggernaut F1 to the $41 million Bugonia. None of them are winning Best Picture.

1. The Sweep Is the Sweep (Awards Trackers, Variety, AwardsDaily)

No film in history has won all the major precursors and lost Best Picture. One Battle After Another has won all of them.

The precursor record is undefeated. No film that has won at the Critics Choice, Golden Globes, BAFTA, ACE Eddies, DGA, PGA, and WGA — plus at least one SAG prize — has ever lost Best Picture. One Battle After Another has swept every one of those awards. Variety's final predictions give it the edge. History says this race is already over.

Paul Thomas Anderson has run the table in directing precursors. He won the DGA and the BAFTA for Best Director. At BAFTA, the film took home 6 awards total, dominating the ceremony. Anderson has never won an Oscar despite eight previous nominations across his career. This is his year by every available metric.

The film works on multiple levels despite modest box office. One Battle After Another earned $206 million worldwide against a $135 million budget — below its cost. But it holds a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics calling it Anderson's "most entertaining film yet." The Academy has shown it doesn't need a box office smash to crown a winner — last year's Anora proved that.

2. This Is Sinners' Moment (Cultural Critics, Essence, AwardsDaily)

Sixteen nominations. Record-breaking. And a chance to make Oscar history that the Academy has dodged for nearly a century.

Sinners holds the all-time nomination record, and records like that carry weight. Sixteen nominations surpasses every film in Oscar history. It won the ensemble prize at the Actor Awards, where Ryan Coogler became the first director to helm two ensemble winners after previously winning with Black Panther. The film earned a Metacritic score of 84 ("universal acclaim") and an A CinemaScore from audiences. This is not a critics-only darling — it played to everyone.

A Coogler win would be historic in a way the Academy can't ignore. No Black filmmaker has ever won Best Director in nearly 100 years of the Oscars. If Coogler wins, he would be the first. Zinzi Coogler, his wife and producer, would become only the third Black woman nominated for Best Picture and the first Filipino producer in the category. At BAFTA, Sinners became the most-nominated film by a Black director in British Academy history, and Coogler became the first Black filmmaker to win BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay.

And it made money. Sinners grossed $369 million worldwide. Michael B. Jordan is described as "among Hollywood's few consistent box office draws." In a year when the Academy is trying to prove the Oscars still matter to mainstream audiences, crowning a record-breaking, commercially successful, historically significant horror film would be a statement. Crowning another prestige drama would be business as usual.

3. Neither of Them Should Win (Film Critics, Slashfilm, W Magazine)

The two frontrunners are fine. But the Academy left better films off the ballot entirely.

The Palme d'Or winner barely showed up. "It Was Just an Accident" won the top prize at Cannes — the most prestigious award in international cinema — and received just two Oscar nominations, missing Best Picture and Best Director entirely. The Academy's track record with Palme d'Or winners is spotty at best, but ignoring the year's most acclaimed film at the world's top festival is a choice.

Wicked: For Good got zero nominations. Not snubbed in a category or two — completely shut out of Best Picture despite Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, and new Stephen Schwartz songs. Whether you think the sequel matched the original or not, a total shutout for one of the year's biggest cultural events is the kind of disconnect that fuels "are the Oscars irrelevant" arguments.

The indie breakouts got erased. Eva Victor's "Sorry, Baby" earned nominations at the Gotham Awards, Golden Globes, and Spirit Awards, plus a shout-out from Julia Roberts, but the Academy ignored it. Bong Joon Ho's "Mickey 17" got nothing despite his historic Parasite win. Park Chan-wook's "No Other Choice" was ignored. Adam Sandler's work in Noah Baumbach's "Jay Kelly" — which seemed primed to finally break his Oscar drought — picked up zero nominations.

The pattern is familiar. The Oscars have a long history of nominating the "right" films over the best ones. This year's Best Picture race is between two genuinely excellent movies. But the ballot itself — the ten films the Academy chose to recognize — tells you as much about what the Oscars value as the eventual winner does.

Where This Lands

The precursor math overwhelmingly favors One Battle After Another — no film in history has swept every major award and lost. But Sinners has something precursors can't fully capture: a record-setting 16 nominations, massive box office, and the chance to make the kind of history the Academy has avoided for nearly a century. If the Academy votes with its pattern-matching instinct, Anderson wins. If it votes with its conscience — and its audience — Coogler makes history. And somewhere outside the frame, a Palme d'Or winner and a half-dozen acclaimed films sit out the ceremony entirely, a reminder that the ten nominees on the ballot are the Academy's version of the year in film, not necessarily the year in film itself.