You take two weeks off and suddenly the awards season is in full swing.

A lot happened since we last checked in with The Voting Booth. Groups like Critics Choice and the National Society of Film Critics named their early-season winners, while guilds with Academy crossover like SAG, DGA, PGA, the Casting Society and the American Society of Cinematographers unveiled their own nominations. After months of rumblings and speculation, this made the awards race (though still far from settled) a bit more tangible — and way more exciting.

These developments made a lot of changes to TheWrap’s Awards Tracker, which gives you the latest state of the race based on decades of awards season data. Finally, we know with a bit more certainty what frontrunners are well on their way to the Academy Awards — and what underdogs still have time to rise.

Critics Choice Screams for Horror

Take Jacob Elordi, for example. For months, I’ve chatted with other Academy fanatics, asking what they made of the Best Supporting Actor race. In many cases, it seemed that Benicio del Toro, Paul Mescal, Sean Penn, and Stellan Skarsgård were considered locks (or close to it), with a handful of candidates fighting for that fifth slot.

Then Elordi wins Best Supporting Actor at Critics Choice, giving him, historically, a 100% chance (that’s right) of getting nominated. Not only has every Best Supporting Actor winner in Critics Choice history gotten an Oscar nomination to match, but the last nine have also won the Academy Award. 

You see a similar story with Amy Madigan in Best Supporting Actress. Once she was considered a long shot, and now she has a 95% chance of getting nominated and a 70% chance of winning after Critics Choice.

I hesitate to call anything a certainty, especially when the data is based on a critics group that almost entirely lacks Academy members (shoutout to my former professor Leonard Maltin, who votes in both). But these stats speak volumes.
 

New Challengers Emerge

You can find stories like this throughout the Awards Tracker. Warner Bros. now owns the top slot in five of the eight categories. Wunmi Mosaku and Miles Caton both got massive boosts at the Actor Awards. Emma Stone has a 90% chance of getting her fifth acting nomination at the Oscars, while Chase Infiniti and Rose Byrne have the same odds of getting their first.

One of the biggest developments came Friday, when both "F1" and "Weapons" became surprise nominees at the Producers Guild Awards.  This allowed both to jump forward with about a 20% chance of getting nominated for Best Picture, placing them in the top 10 on the Awards Tracker. "Weapons" would give Warner Bros. three of the 10 Best Picture slots, if you're keeping track.

I can't say for sure that these will actually yield Best Picture nominations. If you read further down, you'll see a big stipulation that comes with guild awards. Still, it's thrilling to see some new challengers emerge this late in the season.

Get Ready for Updates

We have some more big updates coming to the Awards Tracker. This Sunday, every category will shift when we learn who won the Golden Globes. Be sure to check out TheWrap's coverage over the weekend for your live results at the Globes.

Next week, I’m adding new notes to the Awards Tracker that dig deeper into the key races. How many actors have been nominated for playing twins? How often do Golden Globes winners take home an Oscar? What percentage of international nominees in Best Picture miss out on a PGA nom? Keep checking back with the Awards Tracker to find out. 

Of course, we will also have the actual Oscar nominations soon — allowing the Tracker to predict who’s going to win the awards.

So welcome back to the awards race. Things are really starting to heat up.

Nomination Roundup: Where did the International Features go?

Before you get too settled on your predictions, let’s talk about the big asterisk that comes with guild nominations.

I wrote in TheWrap’s latest awards magazine that 2026 could be the first year with three international features in the Best Picture lineup. From 2019 to 2022, we saw one non-English language feature nominated for Best Picture every year. Since then, we’ve had two per year in the Best Picture lineup. This year, “It Was Just an Accident,” “The Secret Agent” and “Sentimental Value” are all in play.

Since the Academy added a ton of international members (a move that started in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign), these nominations started happening across categories. Jonathan Glazer (“The Zone of Interest”) and Justine Triet (“Anatomy of a Fall”) got Best Director nominations in 2024. Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”) got a Best Actress nod in 2025. Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe (“Drive My Car”) got a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination in 2022.

But none of these people got the same nominations at their respective guilds.

An Asterisk for the Actor Awards

Which brings us to this week’s nominations. The PGA only nominated one international feature (“Sentimental Value”) for the top prize. The DGA had no international presence in its main category, leaving out names like Jafar Panahi and Joachim Trier.

Most glaringly, the newly-named Actor Awards nominated a grand total of 0 performances from international features. Not Wagner Moura, who won Best Actor at Cannes. Not Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who have been picking up nominations left and right. Not Elle Fanning and Stellan Skarsgård, staples of American screens. 

The guilds have been known, this decade, to toss nominations to international features here and there, but not nearly at the same rate as the Oscars. While the Academy Awards evolved into a ceremony that celebrates world cinema, groups like SAG largely remain stuck on American shores. 

In doing so, they have become less accurate as Oscar predictors. People like Penélope Cruz (“Parallel Mothers”) get Oscar nods without any other major nominations. Ruben Östlund gets in the Best Director lineup without DGA, Golden Globes, BAFTA or Critics Choice support. "Anomalies” become the norm.

What Comes Next?

I suppose the guilds can continue down this path. They don’t have to fully line up with Academy trends. It’s their right.

But awards shows do lose a bit of power when headlines start to revolve around snubs (and make no mistake, these were snubs) rather than celebration. The conversation I heard the most after the Actor Awards nominations were announced was not congratulatory — it was “Did ‘Sentimental Value’ really not get anything?” That should be alarming to SAG.

As the Academy continues to give long-deserved recognition to world cinema, these shows risk looking like dinosaurs if they don’t catch up.