Oscars 2026: Best Picture Nominees Paint a Picture of a World on the Run
The 2026 Academy Award nominations for Best Picture have arrived, and they present a cinematic landscape that is both entertainingly frantic and defiantly political. This year's slate of films projects an image of a world turned upside down, where heroes are constantly dodging injustice, prejudice, and danger in frenzied flights toward salvation.
A Cinematic Principle of Abundance
During the Renaissance, artists embraced a principle known as copia, or abundance, believing that depicting the wealth of creation required richness, intricacy, and variety. Today's top directors seem to agree, as many of this year's Oscar nominees are epic in scale. "Sinners" has set an all-time record with 16 nominations, while "One Battle After Another" has 13, and "Marty Supreme" has nine. All these films run well over two hours, offering more bangs for your buck in response to cinema's box-office woes.
Genre-Bending Narratives and Political Undertones
These are overstuffed movies that careen through moods and genres—from sports flick to bildungsroman, or thriller to Western. "Sinners" is a fantasia about twin gangsters, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who open a juke joint in Mississippi in 1932. It incorporates elements of musical, horror, and the blues, tackling themes like the Ku Klux Klan and vampires.
In "One Battle After Another," Leonardo DiCaprio is chased relentlessly across cities, rooftops, and deserts in a parallel America where lawless militias hunt down immigrants. "Marty Supreme" is a madcap caper about a table-tennis hustler in the early 1950s, featuring two competing love stories and a gunfight over a stolen dog.
Uncompromising Political Statements
At a time when some showbiz bigwigs fear offending the powerful, these films pack politics into rollercoaster stories. They convey a sense that life is too mercurial and overwhelming to fit into neat formats or plots, and it is also unfair. While "wokeness" is said to be retreating and some media executives kowtow to the White House, these nominees are uncompromising, dressing argument in fantasy and period costume.
The new "Frankenstein"—which also has nine nominations—gives its mythic narrative a political edge, with the scientist depending on an arms dealer for funding and battlefields for corpses. America's discussion of race is vivid and irrepressible in these films, with segregation and exploitation stalking "Sinners" and a white-supremacist cabal as the ultimate villains in "One Battle After Another."
Standout Moments and Symbolism
In "Marty Supreme," the striving hero is Jewish, and the world is not his friend, peopled with corrupt cops, vicious hoodlums, and bullying tycoons. A standout sequence includes a brief but haunting flashback where a concentration-camp survivor recounts smothering his body in honey to feed fellow prisoners, implying the whole saga unfolds in the shadow of the Holocaust.
"Sinners" has its own daringly symbolic moment, where a blues song conjures up the spirits of black artists past and future, from West African musicians to hip-hop DJs. In "One Battle After Another," a hallucinatory car chase along a dipping road hints that its struggle is unending.
The Exception: "Hamnet"
An exception to all this frantic energy is "Hamnet" (eight nominations). Bucking the old rule about not working with children and animals, this film tells the story of William Shakespeare's marriage, the birth of his offspring, and the death of his son. Staged in a narrow, muddy world of timbered houses and inglenook fireplaces, it focuses on domestic joys and tragedy rather than Shakespeare's seismic career.
The real protagonist is his wife, here called Agnes and played by Jessie Buckley, a hot favourite for Best Actress. Her wails in childbirth and after her boy's demise are the film's most piercing sounds. The quietness of "Hamnet" distinguishes it in a noisy, frantic field of nominees.
Crowd-Pleasers That Take Risks
These crowd-pleasers that take artistic risks deserve their success, though they are largely dominated by men who do most of the frenetic running and fighting. The old-fashioned template for screen heroism seems as unkillable as those vampires in "Sinners." At this year's Oscars, while "Hamnet" offers quiet reflection, the rest of the nominees are filled with the sound of sirens and relentless motion.
