Off to the Races

Will Inde Navarette campaign as Lead or Supporting Actress? Is The Odyssey DOA? Does Tom Cruise want this too badly to be “win competitive”? Can Sumerian get close to Oscar gold on their first time out with Josephine? Will Project Hail Mary earn Ryan Gosling a Best Actor nod if it gets into Best Picture? Does Sandra Hüller come along too? What is the frontrunner? 

These are some of the questions you’ll find on r/oscarrace, a subreddit dedicated to the relentless prediction of future Academy Awards ceremonies. The forum attracts more than 100,000 weekly visitors. Every day, users debate category placement, campaign strategies, precursor awards, studio priorities, and hypothetical outcomes for films that in many cases they have not yet seen so much as a trailer or promotional still. By the time The Odyssey arrived in theaters, these users had already spent months debating whether it’s the Best Picture frontrunner or not. 

The subreddit reads like old IMDb message boards if they were hosted on a server farm housed in the seventh circle of hell. Opinions are shouted into the void and invalidated moments later. Predictions for the 2027 Oscars arrived on the forums before One Battle After Another reached audiences, and the 2028 ceremony can already be forecast on the adjacent AwardsExpert app. For what it’s worth, I’m predicting The Odyssey this year and Tom Ford’s Cry to Heaven next year.

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as artistically bankrupt (much of it is), but there is something fascinating about watching anonymous users discuss cinema with the same intensity usually reserved for box scores and fantasy leagues. In an era where movies are supposedly dying, thousands of people have turned film culture into a sport. 

None of this is entirely new. Long before Reddit, Oscar obsessives gathered on forums like GoldDerby, Oscar Watch, and the aforementioned IMDb, declaring predictions and tracking precursor awards with the dedication of political pundits or sports gamblers. Infamously, film critics David Sims, Emily St. James, Richard Lawson, and Katie Rich were all a part of these communities before becoming bonafide voices.

The Academy Awards have invited this kind of speculation ever since they began being broadcast on black-and-white television, alongside campaign trails paved in variety and talk shows. But in the nearly hundred-year history of the ceremony, only recently has this specific type of fandom become a cottage industry with its own reliably exploitable clientele. 

What has changed is the scale and speed. In fact, it never ends. Discourse no longer arrives in the weeks before nominations are announced. The race begins before filming wraps. 

This evolution is not organic, either. Studios actively encourage audiences to think this way. Awards campaigns have become year-round marketing operations with influencers and critics alike encouraged to discuss films as contenders first and art second. And once campaigning became a competition, it was only a matter of time before there were scorekeepers. 

But is it a problem that spectatorship is beginning to eclipse the thing being watched? Working at a cinema means being a fly on the wall during many postfilm conversations, and the tone of those conversations has certainly been changing. This is not entirely the fault of Oscar prediction culture. Many would say the awards themselves have become increasingly predictable. The same studios appear year after year, leading to many arguments this year over what exactly will be the show horse for frequent nominee Focus Features, whose campaign strategies are deployed with practice and precision. Categories like Best Actor and Best Actress have calcified into recognizable patterns. 

The appeal of prediction communities is that they manufacture drama where the institution itself often struggles to provide it. It has been a long time since Barbra Streisand (Funny Girl) and Katharine Hepburn (The Lion in Winter) led a dead-heat race that culminated in a tie with two statues for Best Actress handed out in 1969. The same year, Midnight Cowboy became the first queer film to win Best Picture, and the last one to do so until 2016’s Moonlight. 

There are narratives to be found in the coming race. Christopher Nolan (The Odyssey) could do what only William Wyler and David Lean have done before and win Best Picture for back-to-back films. Martin McDonagh (Wild Horse Nine) still lacks a competitive Oscar beyond a short film prize won more than 20 years ago. Olivia Wilde (The Invite) could emerge as a genuine contender if her film continues to connect with audiences, and eventually voters, although it remains to be seen whether she’ll emerge as a greater contender for Best Actress or Best Director. 

In a post on the neighboring subreddit r/TheBigPicture, a discussion forum centered around the popular film podcast of the same name, a user shared a Variety headline from awards columnist Clayton Davis: “Will the Oscars be obsessed with Obsession?” The top comment, from user ChristopherBaloney, reads: “No! No Oscars talk in June! I just woke up from this nightmare 3 months ago! How dare you.”

The sentiment was overwhelmingly shared. Comment after comment lamented the arrival of another awards season before the previous one had fully faded from memory. Outside of the prediction bubble, online Oscar discourse is viewed as exhausting, cynical, and detached from the reasons people watch movies in the first place. Yet many of these same users spend hours on r/BoxOffice, tracking opening weekends, forecasting domestic totals, debating profit margins, and monitoring audience scores with the same intensity Oscar obsessives devote to precursor awards. The language and attitude is different, but the behavior is remarkably similar. 

During last year’s season, an official account from GoldDerby was banned from r/oscarrace by popular user demand after spamming speculative articles from their site, exploiting Reddit’s Contributor Program, which allows users to profit off the site’s “karma” upvote-downvote system. Similarly, a dark corner of the community has become increasingly hard to ignore when factoring Kalshi odds into their predictions. Oscar pools where friends and coworkers each throw in a few bucks are nothing new, but one user cited in a now-deleted post that he had already wagered upward of several thousand dollars that Tom Cruise would lose this year. Thankfully, the community responded with disgust and not encouragement. 

A closer look at Kalshi reveals staggering amounts already put down on the incoming race. Over 1.3 million dollars are already in the pot for Best Picture, with the lowest-volume category at 2.5k for Best Documentary Feature with the top two options being Nuisance Bear and Once Upon a Time in Harlem. It seems that these gamblers are going solely off of the Sundance Film Festival and no other metric at this point in the race. In the more traditional timeline of predicting the Oscars, one would wait to see what the L.A. and New York film critic circles and Cinema Eye give the prize to before calling their shots.

There is something worse happening than the enshitification of a few forums, the leeching in of prop bets and a few overeager users. The way we’re talking about the Oscars is ruining the way we talk about films. 

When Project Hail Mary became the first box-office smash of the new year, arriving just five days after One Battle After Another took the top prize after an especially long and grueling campaign trail, it was met with immediate articles declaring it has Oscar potential. But worse than that, the Oscar trail for Lord & Miller’s new-age sci-fi hit began as far back as November 2025 when Deadline’s Justin Kroll let out word that he’d seen a film with “major buzz.” 

It’s no coincidence that a staff writer for one Hollywood’s essential trade magazines is an instrumental part of Amazon’s quest to beat Netflix to Oscar gold, the same way Apple did with CODA. Many high-level critics are invited to advance screenings, even more advance than the usual press screenings ahead of the review cycle for any given film. The Atlantic’s David Sims has confirmed on multiple occasions to being invited to far-advance screenings from A24 over the past few years, often asked for feedback and encouraged to help build hype for the films. 

These critic endorsements, social media reactions, podcasts, and forums all aim to further cement a change in how we digest films from the moment the credits roll. When a studio’s Oscar campaign is successful, the conversations held on sidewalks outside of cinemas discuss nomination potential and narrative to fuel campaigns more than they discuss the film itself and the reaction viewers had to it. Theo Ageloupoulis, a Greek film director who had his most prolific period in the 1970s, once said that cinema is a conversation, and that it is only complete when you contribute your part. When moviegoers become more concerned with awards than the experience, the conversation goes unfinished. 

Maybe Oscar prediction culture is not an aberration at all. Maybe it is merely the latest expression of a broader impulse. Movies are no longer just watched: They are tracked, quantified, projected, ranked, optimized, and transformed into ongoing competitive narratives. The internet rarely allows culture to exist as an experience—it must first become a game. Oscar race communities simply happen to be the version of that game most obsessed with prestige.

Kenna Wong Ghaill

First published in The Ardent magazine's August 2026 issue.

Edited by Matt Miller and Meghan O'Dell.