Is it too late to reschedule the Oscars for August? Heading into its second weekend in movie theaters, The Odyssey has devoured our collective pop culture consciousness just like that hungry Cyclops devoured Matt Damon’s soldiers. Christopher Nolan’s Imax-sized epic isn’t just a box office behemoth, it’s also 2026’s first major awards monster achieving front-runner status in virtually every above the line and below the line category, up to and including Best Original Song. Leave it to Nolan to spoil Taylor Swift’s honeymoon by crashing that party.
So yes, there’s a strong temptation to just hand the director his plethora of statuettes now instead of going through the motions of awards season. But let’s not forget that we have an entire cycle of film festivals where an Odyssey slayer could potentially premiere, and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three is still lurking out there as a December surprise.
More importantly, Academy voters still have to settle the four feature races where The Odyssey simply can’t win… largely because the film isn’t eligible to compete. That Nolan-free quartet would be Best Original Screenplay, Best International Feature, Best Animated Feature, and Best Documentary Feature. (The number swells to seven when you include the three short film categories, but for the purposes of this discussion, we’re going to put those to the side.)
So with no Odyssey in the mix, what’s the current state of play in those four categories? Here’s a mid-year snapshot of the contenders that voters have seen — or will see — before filling out their ballots.
Wild horses
While Nolan certainly put his own stamp on The Odyssey, storytelling credit has to go to Homer, as well as celebrated scholar Emily Wilson, whose 2017 translation of the Ancient Greece’s most famous epic poem provided the building blocks for the writer-director’s script. Accordingly, the filmmaker — who has yet to claim a screenwriting statuette across his storied career — is currently topping Gold Derby’s experts-only Best Adapted Screenplay leaderboard in a virtual dead heat with Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s big screen version of Andy Weir’s sci-fi novel, Project Hail Mary.
This would be Nolan’s second nomination in this category after his Oppenheimer nod in 2023, and his fourth overall writing nod after Best Original Screenplay bids in 2002 and 2011 for Memento and Inception, respectively. At this point, his most formidable competition is Rashida Jones and Will McCormack’s spiky script for The Invite, a film that’s as small-scale and intimate as The Odyssey is big and brawny. That Olivia Wilde-directed movie is also the very definition of an actor’s showcase, and easily translates to multiple viewings on the Academy screening platform whereas voters will likely feel obligated to go on their own odyssey to catch Nolan’s movie on the big screen where it plays best.
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Over on The Odyssey-less Best Original Screenplay side of the screenwriting equation, Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine is enjoying a significant lead even despite the fact that no one will lay eyes on the film until the 2026 Venice Film Festival kicks off on Sept. 2.
Chalk that up to the Irish playwright’s remarkable consistency in this category; three out of his four previous films — 2008’s In Bruges, 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and 2022’s The Banshees of Inisherin — have scored Best Original Screenplay nods, although, like Nolan, he has yet to win. Based on an extended clip of Wild Horse Nine that Gold Derby saw at CinemaCon, McDonagh’s dark sense of humor remains in full force… and he may have written John Malkovich a role that finally nets the Hollywood veteran an overdue Best Actor statuette.
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Our expert oddsmakers currently have a three-way tie for second place with Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, and Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes-winning Fjord all sharing that spot. In fifth place — but really third place — is Curry Barker’s Obsession, the horror yarn that moviegoers were obsessed with before The Odyssey came along. To date, two horror films have won this category, Jordan Peele’s Get Out in 2018 and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners earlier this year, and genre-laced contenders like The Shape of Water and The Substance also scored nominations between those bookends.
The rise of YouTube creators in the feature filmmaking space has provided as one of 2026’s dominant movie industry narratives, and voters are going to feel compelled to recognize the coming sea change. With that in mind, a Best Original Screenplay nod for Obsession — as well as a Best Actress nomination for its breakout star, Inde Navarrette — increasingly seems as inevitable as Thanos once did.
And Barker has a legitimate path towards winning, one that thankfully doesn’t require busting out a One Wish Willow.
Going global
Despite its global locations and international cast, The Odyssey remains a Hollywood-backed production, which means Universal can’t sneak it into the still-coalescing Best International Feature race. Interestingly, at a time when the major American studios are rethinking their festival strategy — neither of last year’s front-runners, Sinners and One Battle After Another completely bypassed the circuit — this particular category still remains dependent on film festival playdates.
In fact, those bookings have only become more important in the wake of a recent rules change that allows international features to qualify for the race by winning the top prize at one of six major international festivals, including Berlin’s Golden Bear, Busan’s Best Film Award, Cannes’s Palme d’Or, Sundance’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, Toronto’s Platform Award, and Venice’s Golden Lion. That replaces a previous rule only allowing contenders that were officially chosen by their country of production.
So far, the three international films that would qualify this year based under that new rule are Fjord, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes; Yellow Letters, which won the Golden Bear at Berlin; and Shame and Money, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Of that trio, the Neon-acquired Fjord is predicted to be that distributor’s latest Cannes prize-holder to end up competing for both Best Picture and Best International Feature, joining a group that includes Parasite, The Secret Agent, and Sentimental Value. (The latter two didn’t win the Palme, but did pick up other statuettes at the festival’s 2025 edition.)
Best Picture
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Last year, the distributor famously nabbed four of the five spots in Best International Feature with its various Cannes offerings, with It Was Just an Accident and Sirāt joining The Secret Agent and the eventual winner, Sentimental Value. Besides Fjord, Neon’s 2026 Cannes slate included Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, Na Hong-Jin’s Hope, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Sheep in the Box, and Arthur Harari’s The Unknown.
Since those movies went Palme-less on the Croissette — although All of a Sudden won a joint Best Actress prize for its two stars, Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto — they’ll have to be submitted as official Best International Feature selections by their various countries of production or win one of the remaining top festival prizes. But that latter route is unlikely given that none of them were selected for the official competition slate at either Venice or Toronto. That leaves Busan, which has yet to announce its lineup ahead of the festival’s Oct. 6 start.
Coming up, the Venice-to-Telluride-to-Toronto-to-New York corridor should inject some fresh contenders into the race, including another offering from Kore-eda, Look Back, as well as new films from global auteurs like Nanni Moretti, Florian Zeller, and Ferit Karahan. Get ready to log some serious air miles… from the comfort of your movie theater seat.
Toy time
No Nolan, no problem. Best Animated Feature boasts its very own Odyssey-style front-runner in the form of Toy Story 5, the latest installment in Pixar’s much-loved and much-lauded flagship franchise. The third and fourth entries both won this category in 2011 and 2020, respectively, and Toy Story 3 also joined the very short list of feature-length cartoons that picked up Best Picture nominations: Beauty and the Beast and Up.
Launching in theaters on June 19, Toy Story 5 currently holds bragging rights to being 2026’s highest grossing movie in the U.S., and is sneaking up on Michael and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie internationally. Besides all that money in its toy box, the movie’s Oscar ambitions are aided by the paucity of animated contenders that have graced screens so far this year — think Hoppers, Goat, and the aforementioned Super Mario sequel.
At one point, it looked like Illumination’s Minions & Monsters might have given it some competition by going all-in on the movie’s Golden Age of Hollywood homages. That’s a lane that Oscar voters love — just ask The Artist — and the gimmick powered the seventh installment in the studio’s Despicable Me series to franchise-best reviews. But moviegoers seemed less interested in Charlie Chaplin jokes and Minions & Monsters has since proven to be a rare banana peel slip at the box office for those little mischief makers. There’s an outside chance that the film could still become the franchise’s second Best Animated Feature nominee after 2013’s Despicable Me 2, but that nod would be its only win.
Without a KPop Demon Hunters-style summertime streaming sensation pulling focus from Woody and Buzz, Toy Story 5 will continue to lead the field heading into the fall. But some challengers are on the horizon, most notably a pair of new stop-motion productions hailing from past nominees.
First up, Aardman is releasing a new entry in its Shaun the Sheep franchise, The Beast of Mossy Bottom, on Sept. 18. Both of the previous entries — 2015’s Shaun the Sheep Movie and 2019’s Farmageddon — received Best Animated Feature nods, and the studio itself took home them statuette at the 2006 Oscars for its much-loved Wallace & Gromit feature, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. No better way to celebrate a Porcelain Anniversary than by winning an Oscar.
And then Oct. 23 brings Wildwood, the first feature from Laika in seven years. So far, the studio has a perfect 6-for-6 track record when it comes to Best Animated Feature nominations, but keeps falling short of the top prize, losing to a Mouse House production each time. Could Wildwood be the studio’s Lucky Number Slevin Seven? Stay tuned, true believers.
Doc talk
At this point in the Best Documentary Feature race, the field is wide open enough that Universal could almost claim front-runner status by dropping a feature-length documentary about the making of The Odyssey into theaters. Barring that, the studio’s specialty sibling, Focus Features, could still bring some nominations NBCUniversal’s way courtesy of The A.I. Doc and Lorne, the two highest-profile (albeit low-grossing) doc releases so far this year. Other notable non-fiction releases include Tony Benna’s moving and wryly funny Andre is an Idiot and Ross McElwee’s devastating Remake, a sequel of sorts to his pioneering 1986 breakthough, Sherman’s March.
As with Best International Feature, film festivals are vital in providing more clarity — not to mention more contenders — for this category, which operates by its own distinct rules. Last week, Gold Derby attended the New York premiere of the baseball documentary, Diamond Diplomacy, at the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts festival where director Yuriko Gamo Romer — who previously won a Student Academy Award for her 1998 non-fiction short, Occidental Encounters — presented her long-gestating film to an appreciative audience.
Acquired by Strand Releasing last year, the film is traveling the festival circuit as it determines its release and awards strategy. “I would love to have Diamond Diplomacy recognized,” Romer told us. “It is a hope and dream by all of us filmmakers. The reality is that it requires a lot of work and it seems a lot of money, too. We will work first toward Oscar eligibility and keep our fingers crossed about being short-listed, and nominated.”
And Gold Derby recently returned from the second year of the River Valley Film Festival — a truly grassroots indie film event in Williamsport, Pa. — where we saw the timely doc Crime & Parody win the Jury Documentary Feature prize. A three-years-in-the-making passion project from first-time filmmaker Will Thwaites, the movie’s premise sounds like a headline from The Onion, which is only appropriate given that the satirical newspaper plays a role in the story. But Crime & Parody moves beyond the “parody” portion of the title as it unfolds, touching on themes involving law enforcement overreach and freedom of expression that certainly speak to the present moment.
Crime & Parody doesn’t currently have a distributor onboard, but RVFF winners have found their way into general release before. Last year’s inaugural winner of the festival’s Jury Documentary Feature prize, The Pantone Guy, was later acquired by Picturehouse and released as The King of Color ahead of Oscar season, although it didn’t make the shortlist of nominees. (Note: Gold Derby served on the RVFF’s freshman year jury.)
Asked whether he’s thinking ahead to an awards run beyond the festival circuit, Thwaites tells Gold Derby that his main goal right now is audience turnout. “If awards help bring audiences out to see the film, amazing,” he notes. “But if Crime & Parody just keeps playing for passionate audiences who really engage with the story, we’ll be over the moon.
“The audiences that come out and see documentaries [at festivals] are really passionate,” the director adds. “They laugh at the funny parts, lean in during the serious parts, and they’re excited to engage with the film after the credits roll. I think more and more audiences are craving authenticity and most documentaries have that in spades, so there does seem to be a renewed interest in non-fiction films.”
And that’s no joke.
