How to Watch All of 2026's Oscar Nominated Movies
If we take the Sundance Film Festival as our starting point—where a number of this year’s nominees premiered last January and a few of next year’s might be premiering as you read this—we are now 12 months into this year’s Oscars race.
As of the 22nd January, we finally have our nominees, and they’re about as wide-ranging as any group in the awards’ history.
For the next few weeks, all involved will be asked to glam it up for a gauntlet of precursor ceremonies (including the DGA, SAG and BAFTA) before the Oscars are awarded on March 15th. By that point, we’ll have a clearer idea of who’s out in front, but for now, at least, a lot of the biggies still feel up for grabs—with One Battle After Another, Sinners and Hamnet in what looks like a dead heat for the big prize.
For anyone who still has a few blind spots, there’s still plenty of time to catch up on the movies you might have missed from this year’s crop. Directly below, you'll find a longer list of nominees, and under those, discover more about the Best Picture nominees in detail, as well as how to find them on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
2026 Oscar-nominated Movies
Adapted from a popular 2003 South Korean cult classic called Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia stars Emma Stone in the story of a wealthy tech CEO who’s abducted by two brothers who think she’s an alien.
The movie, if you haven’t guessed already, is the latest absurdist gem from Yorgos Lanthimos, a Greek Weird Wave legend who has in recent years become an unlikely Academy darling. This is Lanthimos’ third film to be nominated for Best Picture, after The Favourite and Poor Things, so make sure to check it out if you’re a fan of his work and also appreciate stories with a darker, sci-fi edge—like Black Mirror.
Ever since its earliest public screenings back in June, there’s been constant chatter about a potential Best Picture nomination for Joseph Kosinski’s F1 at the Oscars. Still, its eventual inclusion over movies like Avatar: Fire and Ash and It Was Just an Accident has come as a bit of a shock.
F1 stars Brad Pitt as a veteran racecar driver who agrees to help fine-tune an up-and-coming track star while also taking on a few more laps himself. If you’re curious about the vibe, the movie is the director’s follow-up to Top Gun: Maverick and actually offers some similar thrills—to put it briefly: if that earlier movie put you in the cockpit, this one puts you behind the wheel.
After premiering to a warm but not spectacular reception in Venice, few would have predicted that Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein would still be so relevant this deep into awards season. In the end, the director’s Netflix-backed passion project (Shelley’s book and James Whale’s original movie have always been his key artistic inspirations) ended up with nine nominations—though Elordi’s dark horse position in Best Supporting actor looks like it's only chance of a win outside the crafts.
We shall know in future not to underestimate Del Toro’s popularity with the Academy—lest we forget, his The Shape of Water managed to beat Dunkirk, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread and Get Out to best picture in 2018.
At the time of writing, no marketing team has been putting in the awards work quite like the team behind Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet—a movie that is currently attempting (and possibly succeeding) to beat the ‘grief porn’ allegations one expertly curated Instagram post at a time.
The film stars Jessie Buckley (a favourite to win after her nomination for The Lost Daughter) and Paul Mescal (a nominee for Aftersun who just missed the cut this time out) as Agnes and William Shakespeare in a historically loose but emotionally resonant story about grief and loss. There will be no shortage of critical furore if it wins, but if audience awards are anything to go by, everyone else seems to love it.
2025 was the year when the Safdie brothers (the directors behind Good Time and Uncut Gems) split up—at least temporarily. Benny went and made The Smashing Machine, which picked up a nomination in Makeup and Hairstyling but probably expected more, and Josh made Marty Supreme, which fared a whole lot better with both audiences and the Academy.
The 50s-set story is loosely based on Marty Reisman, a real-life NYC table tennis hustler. He’s played by Best Actor favourite Timothée Chalamet in a movie that, like much of the brothers’ best work, is cool, stylish and compellingly stressful.
It’s a major blot on the last quarter-century of the Academy’s history that Paul Thomas Anderson has yet to win one of these things. The director is as L.A. as they come, a literal child of Hollywood who has been nominated 14 times already and lost every one of them, the first (for Boogie Nights) coming when he was 27-years-old. With ten movies and counting in the bag (including a few all-timers like There Will Be Blood and The Master), he’s essentially never missed. Has any director ever been this “overdue” before?
Anderson’s latest, One Battle After Another, is a rip-roaring movie about a hapless and ageing revolutionary (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) attempting to save his daughter from an old and menacing foe (Sean Penn). It won pretty much every major critical award at the end of the year and currently looks to have the edge in most major categories… for now.
Ten years after deciding to diversify its voting body, and seven years after Parasite happened, we’ve reached a point where it’s not so surprising to see a selection of International films vying for the biggest prizes at the Oscars. That said, the 2026 Best Picture nominations for The Secret Agent (Brazil) and Sentimental Value (Norway)—alongside English language movies from Del Toro (Mexico), Lanthimos (Greece) and Zhao (China)—have set another high watermark.
After winning at the Golden Globes, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent now looks to be the favourite in a particularly competitive Best International Film category. Set in Recife in the 1970s, it’s an ode to the great conspiracy movies of that era (Parallax View and All the President’s Men) in the same way that Filho’s earlier movie, Bacarau, was an ode to the work of John Carpenter. It’s also a gorgeous period piece that fans of Roma, in particular, will love.
Last week, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners made history by becoming the first film to receive 16 Oscar nominations, beating the previous record holder by two—not bad for a Jim Crow era-set vampire movie containing a scene in which Hailee Steinfeld spits into Michael B. Jordan’s mouth.
If you’re yet to see it, try to imagine Coogler’s formidable directorial style (Black Panther, Creed) but through the lens of stylish horror films like Near Dark and From Dusk Till Dawn. At the time of writing, it’s still an outside bet for the biggies—but that momentum is growing.
Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams premiered at the Sundance Film Festival a year ago and has been steadily winning over fans ever since with its cinematic sweep (reminiscent of Terrence Malick films like The Tree of Life) and its thoughtful and heartfelt depictions of early 20th-century life.
Starring Joel Edgerton (Warrior) in a career-best performance, Bentley’s film has now ridden that wave of word-of-mouth all the way to the Oscars. It looks like it might only make up the numbers in the four categories it’s been recognised in, but I suspect it’ll be roundly applauded for making it this far, all the same.
