The Film Experience

by Nathaniel R

Jacqueline Durran's work on WUTHERING HEIGHTS was the first gauntlet thrown for the 99th Oscars Best Costume Design race. © Warner Bros Pictures

Dearest (im)patient readers. The time has come. Let's dive into our April Foolish first round Oscar predictions of the year. We'll put up one category (or more) per day until it's complete. To kick us off, the sartorial wonders of Best Costume Design. Last season my medals went to the juke joint 30s fashions of Sinners, the colliding cultures of midcentury NYC in Marty Supreme, and the retrofuturism of Fantastic Four: First Steps... but Oscar felt differently giving the statue to the gonzo insectoid / color fetishism of Frankenstein. We can only hope the 2026 film year has as many stellar options. And if you stop to think about it, the year has already started with something of a bang...

Shirley Kurata returns with costumes for I LOVE BOOSTERS © A24

Consider that we've already seen Shirley Kurata's gonzo creativity displayed in I Love Boosters, Molly Rogers legacy sequel efforts for The Devil Wears Prada 2, Marci Rodgers 1980s recreations for Michael, Bina Daigeler's costume design as plot point on Mother Mary, and of course two Oscar favourites doing their inimitable things: Jacqueline Durran with bold colors and textile efforts for Wuthering Heights and Sandy Powell's rust-colored satin twist on the Frankenstein myth for The Bride! Obviously it will be difficult for any of these films to get nominated since none were universally acclaimed and opened quite early for the short-term memories of some voters. Still Powell and Durran are beloved enough in the Costuming branch that you can't count them out easily.

Are there any other living Oscar titans like Durran and Powell in the mix for 2026/2027?

Not mahy actually. Four time winners Colleen Atwood and Milena Canonero, three time winner Jenny Beavan, and two time winner Ruth E Carter are all sitting this year out (from our understanding). So the Academy will have to look to less heavily awarded designers. Which is not a bad thing from our 'spread the wealth' perspective.

Trish Summerville on costumes for THE ADVENTURES OF CLIFF BOOTH © Netflix

If voters are feeling nostlagic there's plenty to choose from including Jacqueline West's work on Dune Part Three (she's yet to win the gold after five nominations), a remake of Sense & Sensibility designed by Grace Snell (Pillion), and the 70s era sequel to Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood called The Adventures of Cliff Booth with the under-rewarded Trish Summerville taking over the costumes. Danny Glicker returns to the 1970s activists in San Francisco milieu which brought him his only nomination (Milk) for the disability-rights drama Being Heumann, and Amy Roth (niece of Oscar-winning costume legend Ann Roth) is recreating a universally familiar story with the biopic/making of drama I Play Rocky about Sly Stallone's efforts to get Rocky (1976) made. Finally, we hope Catherine George (Die My Love, Mickey 17) has a fresh take on the well-trodden material of Ebeneezer: A Christmas Carol.

More mysterious options at this point-- in terms of what they might eventually look like -- are Linda Muir's (Nosferatu) work on Robert Eggers Werwulf which is set in the 13th century English countryside, Oscar-winner Michael O'Connor's (Duchess) work on Joel Coen's period drama Jack of Spades which is a "gothic mystery" set in Scotland. A possible heavyweight in this category is Cry to Heaven, an adaptation of the Anne Rice novel about castrati in 18th century Italy. We've heard that fashion designer turned film director Tom Ford (Noctural Animals, A Single Man) is doing the costumes for his own picture this time around.

And that's not all. If The Odyssey and The Black Ball are the across-the-board contenders pundits assume they are, the costumes could well be nominated alongside other visual and aural crafts.

See the four-tiered prediction chart here with the first predictions, possible spoilers, wild cards, and yet more possibilities. As we update the charts the Index of Predictions will grow.