First Predictions: Best Costume Design!

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...

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2026 Cannes Winners + Oscar Submission Speculation

by Nathaniel R

FJORD wins the coveted Palme d'Or. Will Oscars nominations follow for Cristian Mungiu, Renate Reinsve, and Sebastian Stan? ?

Will the 2026 Cannes Festival have lasting impact on this cinematic year? With the oft-reported absence of major Hollywood outings at the 79th festival, the best we might hope for (for those of us on the other side of the ocean) is a similar or muted echo to last year when the four non-English features that dominated the Cannes conversation (It Was Just An Accident, Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, Sirāt) proved to have incredible staying power, wowing audiences from their May 2025 premieres all the way through the culmination of awards season on Oscar night in March of 2026. Not all of the award-winning films from a year ago held strong the whole film year, of course; Sound of Falling, The President's Cake, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, award-winning in May, struggled to make a big impact several months later with quieter distribution and media reactions.  Now that the 2026 edition of the festival has wrapped Fjord, Fatherland, The Black Ball, Minotaur, A Man of His Time, All of a Sudden, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, as well as all of the non-winning films will now face the broader audience endurance test as they make their way through international markets. Will we see any of the 2026 Cannes titles in the mix come Oscar season, still building large devout fanbases? Not every film that wins big at Cannes "plays" elsewhere and some which come up empty-handed on the Croisette become awards players in other contexts (like Oscar or equivalent awards in their home countries).

The winners from the 79th Annual Cannes Film Festival and some commentary after the jump... 

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Cannes: Paweł Pawlikowski is Palmę-ready with "Fatherland"

by Elisa Giudici

Pawel Pawlikowski has always been a filmmaker of absence. Empty space, withheld emotion, silence so heavy it seems architectural: his cinema has long depended less on what characters say than on what lingers unresolved between them. Fatherland may be the purest expression of that sensibility, a film reduced to such an essential form that it almost appears to vanish while unfolding, only to return afterward with quiet, devastating force.

At first, it can seem unexpectedly modest by the standards of, say, Cold War. Fatherland is less sweeping, less immediately transporting. But the images begin resurfacing hours later. A corridor swallowed by shadow, a pause stretched slightly too long. A father and daughter speaking with perfect intelligence while emotionally disintegrating in front of one another. Pawlikowski has refined his cinema here into something severe and distilled, and the result is extraordinary...

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What's next for key players from Oscar season?

by Nathaniel R

Elle Fanning and Michelle Pfeiffer in the forthcoming series MARGOT'S GOT MONEY TROUBLE

Let's gently segueway now to a new year in film. When Cláudio reminded us that  Timothée Chalamet has high profile projects coming up in the wake of two consecutive years of 'close-but-no-cigar' Best Actor runs, it got me to thinking about what's next for each of this year's nominees. We're skipping anything we already covered in the  first 2026 previews we did (Dune Part Three, Digger, The Odyssey, The Weight, etc) So herewith 20 enticing projects from film, tv, and stage featuring one or more of the players who were just up for Oscar gold. Will they return to the Oscar stage and, if so, how soon? The projects are listed in rough ascending order of current interest though that could obviously change once we see stills, trailers, or hear more buzz...

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We Can't Wait: 2026 Cinema. (Part Three: Q-Z)

by Nathaniel R

the great animation studio Laika is back with "WILDWOOD"

ICYMI In Part One: A-F we began our look forward to 2026 movies with legacy sequels, a new Almodovar, and multiple films from a few actresses of note. We continued the anticipation with  Part Two: G-P in which we got excited about French legends, queer cinema, possible all-quadrant blockbusters, and more traditional Oscar fare like a period epic from an favored auteur and a movie chronicling the literal making of a Best Picture winner. 

Let's wrap things up with another twenty films we're hoping give us exactly what we crave in a dark theater. This grouping includes a friendly neighborhood webslinger, campy drag queens, 13th century werewolves, and one last Anne Hathaway (four films this year) who is aiming for "Entertainer of the Year" dominance...

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