A presumed frontrunner that skipped the festivals, a wide-open field chasing it, and December heavyweights still to come. Our ranked Best Picture predictions for the 2027 Oscars, updated through the season.
Awards season has officially begun, and this year it has an unusual shape. There is a film out front, a presumed frontrunner that most of the industry has already pencilled in. But it arrived back in the summer and never set foot on the fall festival circuit, which left Venice, Telluride and Toronto to sort out a chasing pack with no clear leader of its own. The result is a race with a favourite at the top and chaos everywhere behind it, and that makes for one of the more open and interesting seasons in years.
The film everyone is measuring against is The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan's enormous take on Homer. It opened in July to strong first reactions, with Matt Damon already tipped for a Best Actor run as Odysseus, and it carries the kind of scale and prestige that turned Oppenheimer into a juggernaut. Arriving early and skipping the festivals is a power move only a film this confident can make, and for now it sits at the front of nearly every forecast, including ours.
Behind The Odyssey, the fall festivals delivered a deep and unsettled field.
The biggest story out of the circuit is Fjord, the drama starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It is distributed by Neon, the company behind a remarkable recent run of Palme winners that went on to major Oscar success, and that pedigree alone makes it a threat in both Best Picture and International Feature. A Palme d'Or and a smart distributor is the exact formula that has powered some of the biggest awards upsets of the last few years, and Fjord has both.
Then there is La Bola Negra, the Spanish film from Los Javis starring Penélope Cruz, which took the People's Choice Award at Toronto. That prize is one of the most reliable predictors in the whole season, having launched a long line of eventual Best Picture nominees and winners, so its win instantly vaulted the film into the top tier of the conversation.
From the English-language side, Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine emerged from Venice as a strong contender, with John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, and the possibility of another Best Picture bid for McDonagh after The Banshees of Inisherin. Jesse Eisenberg's The Debut, starring Julianne Moore, closed the BFI London Film Festival and put itself firmly in the mix. And You Can See Everything, the Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, has become the rare non-fiction film generating serious Best Picture talk.
The field runs deeper still. Mike Leigh returned with Tender Loving Care, a film some suspect may be his last. Andrew Haigh followed All of Us Strangers with A Long Winter. Simon Stone's Elsinore is a showcase for Andrew Scott, Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky casts Anthony Ippolito as a young Sylvester Stallone, and Siân Heder made Being Heumann, her first film since CODA. Helen Mirren is drawing notices for A Talent for Murder. In a year without a settled second place, several of these will break through.
Two more films refuse to fit neatly anywhere. Project Hail Mary, the Ryan Gosling science-fiction event movie, was one of the year's biggest crowd-pleasers and has stayed in the awards conversation on the strength of its craft, its scale and its box office. It is more likely to dominate the technical categories than to win the top prize, but in a wide-open year, a film people actually loved is never a safe one to count out.
And the biggest release of the year has not even opened. Dune: Part Three lands on December 18, the conclusion to a saga that has already proven it can turn blockbuster scale into real awards attention, and Zendaya is reportedly set to campaign in the Best Lead Actress category for her role. December is always when the heavyweights arrive, but in a race this undecided behind its frontrunner, those late films carry more weight than usual.
With the caveat that this will shift as the season's final films arrive, here is how we see the Best Picture race right now:
This is the real story of the 2027 race. There is a clear favourite, and then there is everything else, a field so open that a Palme d'Or winner, a Toronto crowd favourite, a documentary and a late December blockbuster are all still fighting for the same handful of slots. A season with a leader but no sure thing is a season where surprises are still possible, and where the films arriving over the next two months get to decide the outcome rather than simply confirm it. The race is on, and the ending is still unwritten.
Filmoiselle is following the 2027 awards season from now through the ceremony, and this piece will be updated as the race develops. Predictions reflect the state of the race as of late October 2026.
