The guilds are alive with the sound of battle — specifically One Battle After Another. The just-dropped list of Producers Guild Awards nominees completes this week’s Academy guild trifecta of the Screen Actors Guild Actor Awards and the Director’s Guild Awards. And Paul Thomas Anderson’s most expensive movie ever — and also his biggest commercial hit ever — charged into the fray with a record-setting seven SAG nominations as well as prominent DGA and PGA placement as well.
We all saw this coming, of course. Way back when the movie first started screening in September for L.A. and NYC audiences, the excitement in those guild-packed rooms was palpable. In fact, the One Battle rollout fully pulled focus from the various contenders jostling for attention at the concurrent Toronto International Film Festival, which the movie had sidestepped — along with the other major fall festivals — to chart its own course through awards season. Based on its table-running sprint through awards season since, don’t be surprised if select 2026 contenders decide to follow a similar playbook.
On this week’s Inside Track — the first of 2026! — we look at where we stand at the end of a busy guild week heading into Golden Globes weekend.
This Battle is done… right?
At this point, it’s hard to imagine any other Best Picture scenario than an Oppenheimer-style coronation for One Battle After Another on Oscar night. The movie has led the nominee field at almost all of the precursor ceremonies — from the Gothams to the guilds — and won every major Best Film statuette that’s been handed out so far, including the “Big Four” critics groups and the Critics Choice Awards. In other words, it’s the consummate consensus candidate: Even if individual voters personally believe that another movie — say Sinners or The Secret Agent — is the greater achievement, everyone can agree that PTA made a pretty great movie. And especially in a ranked ballot scenario like Best Picture, being the voting body’s second or third favorite movie is more powerful than being the first.
So yes, One Battle has the race all but sewn up. But here’s a fun alternate scenario to contemplate: when Sinners wins Best Drama at the Golden Globes this weekend — something that will be possible since Warner Bros. relocated One Battle to the Comedy/Musical races to avoid having the studio’s two juggernauts squaring off — what if a just large-enough Academy block of SAG, DGA, and PGA voters throws their first-place votes to Ryan Coogler’s acclaimed vampire movie and it ekes out an Oscar upset? The film remains the third-highest-grossing feature among the anticipated contenders — behind Wicked: For Good and Avatar: Fire and Ash — and Jordan and his costars are beloved on the circuit. Is it a long shot? Sure, but hey, we’re just seeking a pulse in the Best Picture race at this point.
By the way, quick note on Fire and Ash: our friends at the FYCit App report that James Cameron’s third Pandora adventure was the most-screened contender this past week as 20th Century Studios seeks to lock in that No. 10 slot. It’s currently ranked at No. 12 on the Gold Derby leaderboard, but the movie benefits from strong support among various craft guilds — it received four Academy shortlist mentions and was nominated by the costume designers and set decorators as well — that seems poised to help it make the cut, and $1 billion-plus (and counting) at the box office doesn’t hurt. Michael Mann will definitely have it on his ballot.
Best Picture
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Armed and ready
When the awards cycle began in earnest in September, oddsmakers regarded If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’s Rose Byrne and Weapons‘s Amy Madigan with fear and suspicion — and not just because both actresses were appearing in horror-laced stories. Surely those movies (and characters) were too weird, too unlikeable and too unpleasant to go the distance, the thinking went. Tell that to the audience at the New York Film Critics Circle ceremony, which heartily cheered when Byrne and Madigan accepted the group’s prizes for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively, capping their meteoric rises to the No. 1 spots on both of our leaderboards.
Best Actress
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Renate Reinsve
Sentimental Value
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Rose Byrne
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
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Chase Infiniti
One Battle After Another
Granted, critics — especially New York critics — don’t necessarily reflect the tastes of Academy voters. But there were some industry faces in the room during the ceremony that were also beaming when Byrne and Madigan delivered their speeches. And earlier in the day, Gold Derby attended a SAG-dominated FYC event that Warner Bros. hosted for its Weapons star where a member of the audience vocally praised Madigan as a “living legend.” The actress herself delighted all the jobbing actors in the room (we spotted Lou Diamond Phillips and Stephen Root in the audience) when she noted that she’d been in the game for a “long-ass time” and earnestly described the joy that comes with happening upon a breakout role like Aunt Gladys after years of putting in the work.
We caught up with Madigan briefly after the event and she confessed to feeling “exhausted” about the demands of the circuit — which has changed a lot since her last Best Supporting Actress nomination four decades ago for 1986’s Twice in a Lifetime. But she credited her husband — another living legend, Ed Harris — as well as their extended family with supporting her every step of the way. Byrne’s journey may not culminate in an Oscar night win thanks to the still-formidable force that is Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley. But Madigan seems poised for a legendary night.
Best Supporting Actress
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Teyana Taylor
One Battle After Another
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Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas
Sentimental Value
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Ariana Grande
Wicked: For Good
Going global
We’ll have more to say on this as Oscar voting commences next week, but it hasn’t gone unnoticed that the DGA, PGA and SAG results — plus the BAFTAS as well — are lacking a certain international flavor. Of those three guilds, only the PGA recognized a foreign-language film amongst its nominees — Joachim Trier’s Cannes-winning Sentimental Value. But other global favorites like Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent were completely shut out of the guild prizes even as they were nominated — and won — at various precursor ceremonies.
Longtime Oscar watches will tell you this isn’t a new phenomenon; after all, the guilds are Hollywood-based unions and have a tendency to recognize U.S.-based or U.S.-adjacent talent. Even when the cast of Parasite made history in 2020 for being the first non-English language feature to win SAG’s Best Ensemble award, none of the individual actors were nominated in their respective categories. (Parasite was also nominated by the DGA and PGA, but lost both statuettes to 1917 — the film it eventually beat for Best Picture.) Still, it’s a track record that’s going to come under increased scrutiny as the Academy voting body grows increasingly international and those votes impact the final nominees.
The category that’s arguably most impacted by the guilds’s tilt away from global cinema is Best Director, where Panahi (No. 4), Trier (No. 5) and Filho (No. 9) are all being eyed as Top 5 finishers. With Anderson, Coogler and Chloé Zhao predicted as mortal locks that leaves a mere two spots for international auteurs to leapfrog over New York’s own Josh Safdie or Hollywood’s own Guillermo del Toro. Panahi’s exalted status within the international film community — combined with his potentially perilous plans to return to Iran, where he’s facing another prison sentence — give him the strongest chances of making the cut. Otherwise prepare to say “Hello” to first-name nominee, Safdie, or “Welcome back” to previous winner del Toro.
Best Director
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Paul Thomas Anderson
One Battle After Another
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Jafar Panahi
It Was Just an Accident
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Josh Safdie
Marty Supreme
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Joachim Trier
Sentimental Value
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Guillermo del Toro
Frankenstein
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Kleber Mendonca Filho
The Secret Agent
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James Cameron
Avatar: Fire and Ash
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The little films that didn’t
Now that we’ve got a bigger-picture sense of where the guilds are going, it’s time to bid farewell to the smaller contenders that had big(ish) groups of people rooting for them. I’ll start by mourning my No. 1 film of 2025, The Testament of Ann Lee, Mona Fastvold’s bold creative gamble that rolled a snake eyes with all of the guilds, up to and including SAG, which omitted Amanda Seyfried from Best Actress contention, strongly suggesting her race has reached the finish line. Searchlight’s other hopefuls are in the weeds as well; Brendan Fraser’s Rental Family failed to find a berth with any organization besides the BAFTAs and Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? is definitely off.
Zooming out to other studios, A24’s campaigns for Eddington and Materialists ended before they really began; Prime Video worked Hedda and After the Hunt (which just barely qualifies as small given its reported $70 million budget) hard at the festivals, but the guilds and other big precursors largely gave them the cold shoulder; and first-time distributor Black Bear learned how hard it is to make a movie like Christie happen, even with Sydney Sweeney remaining eternally in the public eye.
But there’s at least one small film still chugging along: Netflix’s Train Dreams. The Clint Bentley-directed picture scored a PGA nomination to accompany its Best Film nomination at the CCAs, the Gothams and the Indie Spirits, which gives hope to the oddsmakers who still have it ranked at No. 8 on our Best Picture leaderboard. But Bentley isn’t including among the DGA nominees and star Joel Edgerton was blanked by SAG voters for Best Actor, which puts his dark-horse Oscar hopes in some jeopardy. The Australian actor is sitting at No. 6 in our odds and would only make the cut if either Blue Moon’s Ethan Hawke — who made the Actor Awards cut — or The Secret Agent’s Wagner Moura — who didn’t — fall short.
Best Actor
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Timothée Chalamet
Marty Supreme
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Leonardo DiCaprio
One Battle After Another
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Michael B. Jordan
Sinners
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Wagner Moura
The Secret Agent
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Joel Edgerton
Train Dreams
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Dwayne Johnson
The Smashing Machine
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Brendan Fraser
Rental Family
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Nevertheless, there is palpable love for Train Dreams. Gold Derby joined a full house of captivated guild and Academy voters at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theater on Thursday to watch the Wordless Music Orchestra, led by Train Dreams composer Bryce Dessner, accompany the film in an immersive live-to-screen performance. Even if Best Director is out of reach, we can see Bentley rebounding later this month with a WGA nod for adapted screenplay with collaborator Greg Kwedar, which should propel them to the same category at the Oscars (they’re currently No. 4 in our odds), while Dessner, who moonlights as a guitarist and songwriter for the National, has a strong shot at a Best Song bid with cowriter Nick Cave for the title track (they’re sitting at No. 5).
Clint Bentley and Bryce DessnerGonzalo Marroquin/Getty Images for Netflix
— Additional reporting by Marcus Errico