The Best Picture Showdown Between ‘One Battle After Another’ and ‘Sinners’ Brings Some Legitimate Heat To Oscars 2026

Photos: Everett Collection ; Illustration: Dillen Phelps

It’s funny: There has never been any real evidence of Oscar races for Best Picture boiling down to two movies. How could there be? The Academy doesn’t release vote totals for their results, so even when there’s a supposedly shocking upset, we don’t actually know if we’re looking at a last-minute squeaker that could have easily gone the other way, or if actually, the voters always liked Crash better and were never especially close to giving Brokeback Mountain the big prize. Sometimes the perceived closeness is such that even presenters get legitimately confused about who’s winning what, as in the La La Land/Moonlight fiasco of 2017 (which ultimately worked out great for both movies; one won Best Picture, and the other didn’t have to deal with the smoke that would come from winning Best Picture). Sometimes the perceived two-movie rivalry is extraordinarily half-assed, as when L.A. Confidential was positioned, however unlikely, as a potential spoiler for Titanic. (Actual spoiler: This did not come to pass.)

That said, this year’s Oscar race sure feels like a two-movie contest, and an unusually close one at that. Maybe it shouldn’t: One Battle After Another received almost universally rapturous reviews back in September sans any festival-specific hype, did decent business at the box office, and has now won the guild-related precursors that typically foretell Oscar glory: producers, directors, writers, and editors have all honored it, and while it missed the SAG-issued ensemble award (not necessarily a reliable Best Picture predictor, but certainly an indication of what the large actors’ branch of the Academy is thinking), it did scoop up an award for Sean Penn. Seems almost like a done deal.

Ah, but that Best Ensemble prize went to Sinners, the other major Best Picture contender. While One Battle was a decent-sized hit, Sinners was a bona fide cultural phenomenon, the biggest-grossing non-sequel, non-IP movie to come out of Hollywood in years, and set a record with 16 Oscar nominations across the various categories, indicating widespread support for this critically beloved big-audience hit. The movie with the most nominations often wins—though not always, as La La Land and plenty of others have proven. So while One Battle still seems like the guild-approved favorite, Sinners also seems impossible to count out in any number of categories. We can feel pretty sure that Coogler and Anderson will both go home with Oscars – they’re nominated in different screenplay categories, and both expected to win – but the actual Best Picture remains a mystery.

Photo: ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Naturally if pointlessly, this has created some rancor among fans. Sinners, being a vastly more popular movie with the public, has reached the kind of critical mass previously hit by Taylor Swift, where its most ardent admirers no longer consider its awards success a matter of subjective taste but a referendum on social ills; when I suggested on a social media website some weeks ago that it was actually fine for Variety’s film critics to not include Sinners on their ten-best lists (not least because Variety gave the movie a thoughtfully positive review), I was told by a bunch of strangers that this was, in fact, a racist opinion (Variety’s and mine, despite my personal placement of Sinners on my own ten-best list). Later, when I mentioned how much I liked Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance in One Battle After Another (which, to be clear, is highly unlikely to win the Oscar!), I was told again that this was stepping on the toes of the Sinners moment and deserved winner Michael B. Jordan (whose potential win I described as exciting). This is social-media silliness and not a big deal – I’m an adult in 2026, I know what Twitter is like, I know what fans are like – but it definitely indicates a rooting interest in Sinners that I haven’t seen for a Best Picture candidate in ages. It makes the younger-contingent aversion to the sex of Anora seem downright mild.

It probably doesn’t help that One Battle After Another is also a movie with a racial component, written and directed by a white guy; Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t really known for movies about race and has less credibility in that area than Ryan Coogler. So while he collaborated closely with several Black actresses on this film, including newcomer Chase Infiniti, actress-musicians Teyana Taylor and Junglepussy, and veteran Regina Hall, there has been some controversy over whether his portraits of Black female revolutionaries amount to window dressing, or fully developed characters. I’d argue that’s a common ground shared by One Battle and Sinners: Not necessarily the depiction of a universal Black experience, but in how they fill out their cast with characters who feel like they live outside of the frame, and whose concerns the movies in question take seriously, even when it doesn’t directly affect their primary plots.

Both movies also echo across time in beguiling ways: Sinners takes place largely in the 1930s, but ricochets into the early ’90s for a stunning and emotional mid-credits coda, while One Battle After Another is cagier about its specific time and place. Does it start now and jump forward 17 years, further into a fascist dystopia? Or is its present intended to be something like ours, pointedly placing its first glimpse of immigrant detention camps before the Trump years? Or is it somewhere in the middle, starting in the 2010s and jumping past 2025 and 2026, but only by a few years? In both cases, the movies feel startlingly contemporary without referring to any actual events from history books or headlines.

Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection

For a lot of movie fans, this should be an anti-Alien vs. Predator situation: Whoever wins, we win. Either of these movies can stand with Anora and Oppenheimer and Parasite as recent winners that feel representative of the best of the industry, regardless of which one (if either) is your personal favorite. Ironically, both contenders hail from Warner Bros. – and double-ironically, their success as part of the studio’s banner 2025 helped make possible the impending sale to Paramount that will likely doom the prospects of more independent-minded films like this from being made. Paramount was bragging about greenlighting Rush Hour 4 directed by an accused sex pest at the behest of another accused sex pest; can you picture that company letting Ryan Coogler or Paul Thomas Anderson cook? Can you picture those filmmakers excited at the prospect?

So maybe Oscar-watchers should feel rancorous about the coming awards – but not for the reasons they think. This is one battle preceding another: a friendly contest between top-tier filmmakers who are both likely to win an Oscar (for writing, but still!), celebrating two big-budget films of rare ambition at a time when streamers and indies threaten to eat big studios’ lunch. The real battle will be afterwards, when making these types of movies at a major studio gets harder, despite the financial and awards success. The Oscars are supposed to be a motivating factor, an incentive to encourage studios to keep making real movies. Hopefully the one-two punch of One Battle After Another and Sinners (which collectively might take a dozen of the night’s awards) will be enough to keep at least some studios fighting for great films.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.

Stream Sinners on HBO Max