The 2026 Awards Journal is Here

Hands are being shaken, podcasts are being recorded, red carpets are being unfurled… It can only mean one thing: awards season is back. And with it is the latest issue of the Awards Journal, your essential guide to the 2026 races. To help you navigate the field, we’ve sampled every morsel of Oscar bait – from play-the-hits music biopics to actor showcasing character studies – and have compiled newly expanded prediction pages in seven major categories. Which sad dad is most likely to prevail in Best Supporting Actor? Which unravelling mother will clinch the Best Actress trophy? We’ve armed you with the tools you need to confidently fill in your ballot page, which can be found at the back of the magazine.

This edition also includes interviews with the people behind the three Best Picture frontrunners: of-the-moment political thriller One Battle After Another, Jim Crow vampire horror Sinners and stirring Shakespeare drama Hamnet. As the Academy Awards prepares to hand out its inaugural casting Oscar, I spoke to One Battle’s talent-spotting hopeful Cassandra Kulukundis about the near decade she spent going to school plays and watching martial-arts tournaments to find actress Chase Infiniti, whom her co-star Leonardo DiCaprio deems ‘the heart and soul of the movie’.

Similarly poised to make history is Sinners’ cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the first woman to shoot a film on 65mm IMAX, who tells Leigh Singer about setting her fears aside and learning to operate the medium’s cumbersome cameras. Plus, Hamnet’s writer-director Chloé Zhao and lead Jessie Buckley explain to Hannah Strong how somatic dreaming helped them shape the film’s devastating central performance.

Awards season is invariably about narratives, the most popular of which tend to mirror the current cultural mood. One theme that has arisen this year is authoritarianism. It has been dissected in a number of international films, from Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident, a revenge thriller criticising Iran’s oppressive regime, to Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, a period piece that grapples with the nation’s violent colonial past under British rule. Speaking with some of these films’ directors, Guy Lodge explores how, by and large, they display decades-old tyranny to obliquely reflect present-day atrocities.

For politics of the entertainment variety, look no further than our bold cover, designed by Klara Gryglicka. It depicts the journey all of the artists featured in this magazine embarked on to get where they are today, following a path from obscurity to success. We’re documenting every step of their careers over on curzon.com/journal, where you’ll find interviews with other Oscar and BAFTA contenders (among them Jay Kelly’s Noah Baumbach, Wicked: For Good’s Jon M Chu and Die My Love’s Lynne Ramsay), as well as reviews, think pieces and articles. So watch the films, pick your favourites and let’s have ourselves another exciting awards season.