Just two weeks ago, the Best Actor Oscar race seemed fairly easy to call. Timothée Chalamet was in the lead for the Best Picture nominee “Marty Supreme.” He won the Critics’ Choice and the Golden Globe, led regional critics’ groups in wins, and had the most hype surrounding what many have called his career-best performance. It was widely assumed he would coast to victory easily, sweeping all four major precursors in the same vein as Jessie Buckley for “Hamnet.” However, that dream was shattered after Robert Aramayo’s shocking upset at the BAFTA awards for his performance in “I Swear.” Aramayo is eligible not for the 2026 Oscars but for the 2027 Oscars, so his win has the interesting effect of making all of this year’s Best Actor contenders look that much weaker without a BAFTA win. Hope was not lost for Chalamet to go into the Oscar ceremony as the clear favorite, since he was also widely predicted to win the Actor Award. Yet in perhaps the most energetic win of the night, Michael B. Jordan instead took home the trophy for his dual performance in “Sinners.”
The Best Actor race is now arguably our most competitive, due to the lack of clarity or consensus among awards bodies. Out of the five major Best Actor awards given out before the Oscars, four different actors won them. Now, every single potential winner in the Best Actor lineup would break most statistics in order to do so. Yet with the exception of Ethan Hawke—who is absolutely win-worthy for “Blue Moon,” to be clear (and if he were to win it would be not only shocking but a clear signifier that this race was indeed chaotic until the very end, with Hawke taking the edge due to years of great work and respect garnered from his peers in the industry)—every single contender in Best Actor has a case to be made to win the Oscar.
While he was nominated at every major awards body, Leonardo DiCaprio has not won a single major precursor this season, aside from the National Board of Review. Why would he win Best Actor? Well, the Best Picture winner typically wins a lead acting prize if its main actor is nominated. The only exceptions in recent memory are “Green Book,” “The Shape Of Water,” “Birdman,” and “12 Years A Slave” (Notice they’re all from the 2010’s). In a race so splintered, film strength absolutely comes into play, and “One Battle After Another” has almost completely swept this awards season. Though you could argue that it is telling that DiCaprio has failed to win a single prize at major awards bodies where Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece otherwise dominated, I would argue that it is entirely possible DiCaprio was second at BAFTA, considering how much “One Battle After Another” overperformed there. I do not think DiCaprio will win Best Actor, but if you are using Chalamet’s second place at BAFTA assumption to predict him for the Oscar, I think DiCaprio’s predictors are well within their rights to do the same.
Speaking of Timothée Chalamet, there are a few factors still in his favor that could help him prevail on March 15th. For one, he has the most precursors out of anyone in the lineup as the only actor with two televised wins. He also gives the most traditionally flashy performance; it is a transformation and a complete embodiment of a now-iconic cinema character. Though the BAFTA loss did sting, there is reason to believe he was second there, since the BAFTAs ultimately recognized the film in other categories, like Best Supporting Actress, and gave it a Best Film nomination in a lineup of five (it received more BAFTA nominations overall than it did at the Oscars). And if he were to lose to anyone, it is probably for the best that it was to Aramayo, who is not nominated for the Oscar. His Actor Award loss could be similarly explained as the voting body not wanting to make history and give him two consecutive wins in the same category after he won last year for “A Complete Unknown,” and the clear alternative was the lead of the film that ultimately went on to win Best Ensemble later that evening. Yet the fact that both industry awards rejected Chalamet despite his frontrunner status gives me pause; could it be that industry voters just did not respond to “Marty Supreme” as much as audiences and critics did?
The statistics slightly favor Chalamet to win with his package, as Sean Penn won the Oscar for “Mystic River” with the Golden Globe and the Critics’ Choice, while there are no other instances of any winner with a precursor package like the rest of the 2026 Best Actor lineup. In fact, only Chadwick Boseman (“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom“) and Russell Crowe (“A Beautiful Mind”) have lost the Oscar after winning the Critics Choice and the Golden Globe since the Critics Choice Awards began. However, I do fear that the momentum for “Marty Supreme” has died down, and that Chalamet will lose the Oscar to an actor whose film has more buzz at this crucial point, while voting is still underway.
It feels odd to say that Wagner Moura has a legitimate chance at the Best Actor Oscar when he missed nominations at both the Actor Awards and at BAFTA, the only two industry-voted precursors. But he snatched a decisive win at the Golden Globes over the only actor in this race with an industry award, has been everywhere on the Oscar campaign trail, and is benefiting from the late surge for Best Picture nominee “The Secret Agent,” which is still a legitimate threat to win Best International Feature against “Sentimental Value.” He has a lot of organic passion for this film, and the Oscars took to “The Secret Agent” about as much as the Golden Globes did and far more than the Actor Awards or the BAFTAs did. Additionally, had BAFTA voting been later, Moura could have absolutely received a nomination, given the film’s BAFTA Best Original Screenplay nomination.
There is so much fervor around “The Secret Agent,” and considering no challenger to Chalamet here has more than one precursor, the momentum and passion might be on his side. The excitement around “I’m Still Here” manifested in an upset in Best International Feature Film last year; could a similar level of buzz help Wagner Moura in a race far more fragmented than the one Fernanda Torres faced? I wouldn’t write it off. The Oscar voting body is also quite a bit more international than the Critics’ Choice and Actor Awards, which means we might have to consider Moura stronger than those precursors suggest.
And yet, there was something about Michael B. Jordan winning the Actor Award last Sunday that made the Best Actor race feel over. It obviously is not: four out of the five Best Actor nominees have a compelling case to win the Oscar. But beyond being the only actor in the category with an industry win, or leading a film that would certainly win Best Picture if “One Battle After Another” did not exist, or portraying not one but two of 2025’s most memorable characters, Jordan feels like our next Oscar winner because of the moment that his Actor Award win became. Viola Davis could not contain her excitement after reading his name, and the entire room seemed to erupt with joy at his win. It felt reminiscent of Michelle Yeoh’s triumph at the same ceremony three years ago, though she won the Golden Globe and was the lead of that year’s Best Picture winner.
Jordan can still lose; after all, lead actors have never won the Oscar after just a single Actor Award. However, even if you say that he, Chalamet, and Moura are all on similar playing fields for the Oscar because they have won precursors, lead acting Oscars tend to go to the performer from the stronger film in a race, and with DiCaprio out of the running, that film is undeniably “Sinners,” which favors Jordan.
The stars seem to be aligning in Jordan’s favor, though not knowing which performer in the lineup would be BAFTA’s preference obviously skews things quite a bit. We can only make an educated guess as to who the runner-up to Aramayo was. At the end of the day, if an actor other than Moura wins the Oscar, we can argue he would have won the BAFTA without Aramayo. And if Moura wins the Oscar, we can argue he could have been the runner-up to Aramayo had BAFTA voting happened later. Alas, until then, to predict this highly competitive race, we can only work with hypotheses, assumptions, narratives, and the precursors that have been won to date.
Who do you think is winning Best Actor at the Oscars? Please let us know in the comments section below and on our X account, click here here for the most recent tally of awards season winners, here for Next Best Picture’s precursor tracker, and here for our current Oscar predictions.
