By Bryan Alkemeyer

The Academy Awards® are less than two weeks away! As usual, CreativeFuture is here to help you get ready.

The 98th Oscars® ceremony will take place on Sunday, March 15, 2026, at 4 pm PT (7 pm ET) at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, CA. Viewers can watch the show live on ABC or Hulu. The list of nominees was released on January 22, 2026.

On March 15, one film from the past year will win the first-ever Academy Award® for Casting. The nominees are Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, and Sinners.

The last time the Academy created a new award was in 2002, when it presented the first Oscar® for an Animated Feature, one of our favorite categories. The first one went to Shrek.

The next new award will be unveiled at the 100th Oscars® ceremony in 2028. The category is Stunt Design, and WE CANNOT WAIT!

Here is everything else you need to know to be ready for the Oscars® 2026!

The Host

Returning to host is Emmy-winning® comedian Conan O’Brien. Although he is best known for the first of his late-night talk shows, Late Night with Conan O’Brien (1993-2009), he also wrote for The Simpsons during its fourth and fifth seasons (1992-1993), after working as a writer on Saturday Night Live (1987-1991).

O’Brien earned his first Emmy® on that top-tier sketch show (1989), where he subsequently appeared as an extra alongside Tom Hanks (1990). O’Brien’s second Emmy® came from the iconic Late Night with Conan O’Brien (2007); his next two, from the talk show Conan (2012, 2018). The 2012 Emmy® was an Interactive Media award for the show’s companion app.

By the time O’Brien hosted the Oscars® in 2025, a fifth Emmy® already adorned his mantle – figuratively speaking, because we don’t actually know where he keeps it! But over the past year, the star comedian added another for the same show, Conan O’Brien Must Go (2024-). In each episode, O’Brien travels to a new country to meet followers of his ongoing podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend (2018-).

In a recent interview with iHollywoodTV, O’Brien shared what he ate just before taking the stage at the 2025 Oscars®: veal parmigiana, spaghetti carbonara, and meatballs, topped off with a glass of cream. You can hear about this slightly bizarre pre-game meal around the six-minute mark!

Apparently having learned a lesson, O’Brien has planned quite a different meal for 2026: a bento box with raw fish and edamame. Quite different! … but how, one wonders, might it affect his comedy? The world will find out on March 15!

Award Nominees

Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s vampire fable about race relations during the Jim Crow era, has already made history as the most-nominated film in Oscar® history. The previous record was set by Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, which earned 14 nominations for the 1951 awards.

Since then, two films have tied this count: James Cameron’s Titanic in 1998 and Damien Chazelle’s La La Land in 2017. Surpassing them this year, Sinners earned SIXTEEN!

Best Picture Nominees

The 16 nominations for Sinners include one for Best Picture, but a great deal of suspense remains in the competition. As Scott Feinberg of The Hollywood Reporter reminded readers, the Best Picture Oscar® has rarely gone to the most nominated film: It has happened just six times since 2010.

While audiences loved Sinners – it grossed over $368 million and won the Golden Globe® for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement – the film faces fierce Oscars® competition from other highly acclaimed films.

After Sinners, the most nominated films are One Battle After Another (13 nominations), Sentimental Value (10 nominations), Frankenstein (9 nominations), Marty Supreme (9 nominations), and Hamnet (7 nominations). They are all Best Picture contenders, alongside Bugonia, F1, The Secret Agent, and Train Dreams, which each earned four nominations.

Since CreativeFuture CEO Ruth Vitale worked in the indie film world for more than three decades, we cannot resist giving a shoutout to the smaller studios represented at the Oscars® in 2026.

Wonderfully, three of the Best Picture nominees are indie films: Marty Supreme (A24), The Secret Agent (Neon), and Sentimental Value (Neon). Neon’s Anora won Best Picture in 2025.

Directing Nominees

In the competition for the Directing Oscar®, Ryan Coogler (Sinners) is competing against fellow cinematic geniuses: Paul Thomas Anderson (One Battle After Another), Joachim Trier (Sentimental Value), Josh Safdie (Marty Supreme), and Chloé Zhao (Hamnet).

Zhao previously won a Directing Oscar® for Nomadland, which also won Best Picture in 2021.

Writing Nominees

The competition for Best Original Script pits Sinners against two other Best Picture nominees. They are Sentimental Value, a family drama about an accomplished film director, and Marty Supreme, a sports epic about a madly-driven table tennis prodigy.

The remaining Original Script contenders are Blue Moon and It Was Just an Accident.

Blue Moon, directed by Richard Linklater, is a piece of Broadway historical fiction about Richard Rodgers’ fateful transition from collaborating with lyricist Lorenz Hart (“My Funny Valentine”) to collaborating with Oscar Hammerstein II (The Sound of Music and many other famous musicals).

It Was Just an Accident, directed by Jafar Panahi, follows a former inmate from an Iranian prison who fears he has crossed paths with the jailer who once tormented him. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Among the nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay, all five are also Best Picture contenders. The nominees are One Battle After Another, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Bugonia, and Train Dreams.

One Battle After Another is inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990). The novel centers on the relationship between a single father and his teenage daughter, Prairie, whose name reflects her parents’ past as California hippies.

Frankenstein, of course, is a film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic, which probably needs no introduction – but here is an encyclopedia article anyway. As a former literature professor, I want everyone to know: An Arctic expedition IS part of the original story!

Hamnet, yet another literary adaptation, is named after William Shakespeare’s son, who died a few years before Shakespeare wrote the tragedy Hamlet (first published in 1603). The film script adapts Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, winner of the National Books Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2020.

Bugonia is the third Best Picture Oscar®-nominated film from director Yorgos Lanthimos. The others are The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023). To create the script for Bugonia, screenwriter Will Tracy (Succession, The Menu) updated and otherwise revised Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! (2003). Both films follow a conspiracy theorist as he attempts to expose extraterrestrials who have infiltrated human society.

Finally, Train Dreams adapts Denis Johnson’s book of the same name. It is a Western about a logger grappling with the consequences of rapid industrialization and urbanization in the early 20th century.

Acting Nominees

Sinners looms large in the acting awards, although One Battle After Another and Sentimental Value both have more acting nominees.

Sinners earned a Leading Actor nomination for Michael B. Jordan, who played the twin brothers Smoke and Stack. The film also earned Supporting Actor/Actress nominations for Delroy Lindo as Delta Slim and Wunmi Mosaku as Annie. All three are first-time Oscar® nominees.

But Jordan faces strong competition from Timothée Chalamet (Marty Supreme), Leonardo DiCaprio (One Battle After Another), Ethan Hawke (Blue Moon), and Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent).

Lindo vies against not only Jacob Elordi as Frankenstein’s monster (Frankenstein) but also Benicio Del Toro (One Battle After Another), Sean Penn (One Battle After Another), and Stellan Skarsgård (Sentimental Value).

Mosaku is up against Elle Fanning (Sentimental Value), Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (Sentimental Value), Teyana Taylor (One Battle After Another), and Amy Madigan (Weapons), who gave a chilling performance as a witch called Aunt Gladys.

As for the Leading Actress competition, the nominees are Jessie Buckley (Hamnet), Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), Kate Hudson (Song Sung Blue), Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value), and Emma Stone (Bugonia). Stone won Best Leading Actress Oscars® for La La Land in 2017 and Poor Things in 2024.

Variety is forecasting victory for Buckley as the wife of William Shakespeare. But we never risk making predictions about awards, any more than we try to predict the weather.

Let’s Enjoy the Show!

We are as eager as anyone to find out who this year’s winners will be. But whenever we watch an awards show, we like to remember that each nomination is an honor and achievement. Hundreds of films are made every year, but relatively few earn recognition at the Oscars® ceremony.

For example, 201 features were eligible to receive Best Picture nominations. That means the 10 Best Picture nominees represent the TOP 5% of films from the past year!

There will be only one winner in each of the 24 award categories. But remember – many highly skilled and talented professionals collaborate to create the films we love, continually breathing new life into our fantastic entertainment industry.

Therefore, let’s congratulate all the nominees and wish them the best of luck!