The 2026 Oscar Nominations and What Should Have Been Picked

Wes Anderson (“The Phoenician Scheme”)

Ryan Coogler (“Sinners”)

Kleber Mendonça Filho (“The Secret Agent”)

Josh Safdie (“Marty Supreme”)

First, the legally required boilerplate: by definition, the best movie of the year is the one that’s directed the best. Last year, I made the case for separating the two honors for the pleasure of spreading the love and the prizes between two different films, two different filmmakers. This heretical policy gets some support from yet another rigid convention, that of credits, which separates directors from screenwriters. Still, this year, most of my favorite films are the works of hyphenates—directors who also wrote, or co-wrote, the scripts—and so it takes some analytical work and poetic appreciation to isolate the art of directing in the year’s best films.

Ryan Coogler, as the creator of “Sinners,” is, in an overarching way, the year’s best director. On the other hand, “The Mastermind” is a different kind of movie, intimately scaled even in its action scenes, low on digital effects, and high on long takes in close settings. Throughout, its director, Kelly Reichardt, transforms scenes of the sort that are so often filmed in a neutral style, yielding a mere record of the scripted action, into finely calibrated and mercurially complex interactions—even for a single character alone on a ladder or handling a box filled with paintings. In so doing, she embodies the idea of direction as immediate on-set creation achieved through the basic tools of cinema, an idea that is here exalted and revitalized.

Acting: Performance by an actor in a leading role

Michael B. Jordan (“Sinners”)

Timothée Chalamet (“Marty Supreme”)

Wagner Moura (“The Secret Agent”)

Josh O’Connor (“The Mastermind”)

Denzel Washington (“Highest 2 Lowest”)

The acting categories are, in a way, painful to write about, on the premise that there are basically no bad actors, only bad directors. The question is often asked: But don’t actors have agency? Avoiding the temptation to answer, “No, usually just an agent,” I’d say that, if a given performance seriously elicits that question, then the serious answer must be “Either too much or too little.” That usually happens when an actor appears overly controlled or insufficiently guided—either sealed tight or unhinged. With great performances, the results prove the merits of the film’s making—and the balance of the director-actor relationship.

Just different enough and just enough alike: such are Michael B. Jordan’s two performances as the twins in “Sinners,” which show a delicate calibration of the physical and mental force in each character. He’s responsive to far more than the events at hand, always attuned to the characters’ pasts, to the dangerously pressurized world around them, and to their visions of the future. It’s an extraordinary demonstration of thought in action—and it’s this expressive factor that puts it a cut above that of Josh O’Connor in “The Mastermind.” There, the physical finesse and the slow burns of comedy and tragedy are built into Kelly Reichardt’s discerning direction, but the character’s wider spectrum of experience is filtered out of the script (the price of refinement), which keeps O’Connor’s performance within narrower confines than Jordan’s in “Sinners.”

Denzel Washington is, in real life, at the top of the movie industry exactly as his character in “Highest 2 Lowest” is at the summit of the music business, and he infuses the role with an imaginative sense of swagger and command, which makes the tottering of the character’s empire all the more poignant. (It also adds an element of ambiguity, even ambivalence, to the movie’s fresh-start ending.) Yet, strangely, the starriest performance this year is also, by definition, a more elusive one—that of Wagner Moura, in “The Secret Agent,” playing a man on the run who is forced to change his identity in order to keep a step ahead of the dictatorial Brazilian authorities. In effect, the role is that of an actor, and Moura’s charisma and that of his character converge. This creates both enormous empathy and (because, wherever he is, he stands out) enormous danger. The spotlight that comes from within is too strong to be dimmed. Moura fills the frame and bursts from it just as his character bursts out of his immediate milieu into history.

It pains me not to have a sixth slot for Ethan Hawke, for his self-transformative and self-effacing incarnation of the lyricist Lorenz Hart, in “Blue Moon.” He seems not to play the role but to channel Hart. On the other hand, despite the resistance I’ve felt to the prodigious Timothée Chalamet’s gee-whiz performances to date, his turn in “Marty Supreme” is astonishing and inspired, because it sublimates the habitual overeagerness of his style into substance. Chalamet has been aptly ambitious beneath his theatre-kid charm, and this is the first movie where he conveys the hunger of adult concerns, however callow and reckless the character he plays may be. Still, the action never slows down enough to allow the protagonist—or the actor—a moment for reflection.

Acting: Performance by an actress in a leading role

Tessa Thompson (“Hedda”)