One Battle After Another leads Adapted while Sinners dominates Original in the tightest screenplay race in years
The 2026 Oscar Screenplay Races: Where Things Stand
With the 98th Academy Awards less than a month away — the ceremony is set for March 15, 2026, hosted by Conan O’Brien on ABC — both screenplay categories have taken on a clarity unusual for Oscar season. Most forecasters agree on the likely winners in both Adapted and Original Screenplay, though the fields of nominees contain genuine surprises and a few stories worth examining on their own terms.
Adapted Screenplay: One Battle After Another vs. The Field
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another — an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland — is the near-universal frontrunner for Best Adapted Screenplay. It won the Critics Choice Award and the Golden Globe in the category. It has also won the WGA Scripter Award. Gold Derby currently assigns it an 88.1% probability of winning the Oscar. AwardsWatch founder Erik Anderson ranks it first in his final 2026 predictions, with Hamnet second, Bugonia third, Train Dreams fourth, and Frankenstein fifth. Interestingly, the traditional wild-card slots in Adapted Screenplay are occupied this year by films like Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery — which appeared on the BAFTA longlist but failed to place in Critics Choice — and No Other Choice, the French film that could potentially be a lone nomination for International Feature. The WGA’s strict eligibility rules have complicated the picture somewhat, as they do most years, eliminating some potential contenders that are not bound by WGA agreements.
Original Screenplay: Sinners and the Historic Case for Coogler
In Original Screenplay, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is the dominant force. The film — a supernatural Southern Gothic horror set in 1930s Mississippi that examines how Black art and culture are co-opted and exploited — received a record 16 Oscar nominations, the most of any film this year. Coogler’s screenplay is widely seen as his best writing to date. Gold Derby gives Sinners a 90.3% probability of winning Best Original Screenplay. Jordan Peele remains the only Black writer to have won this Oscar, for Get Out in 2018. If Coogler wins, it will be a historic moment. The remaining top-five predictions in Original Screenplay are largely consistent across tracking sites: Sentimental Value (the Norwegian drama by Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt), Marty Supreme (by Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie), It Was Just an Accident (by Iranian director Jafar Panahi and collaborators), and Sorry, Baby (by Eva Victor, who won the Spirit Award for the script).
The Fifth Slot Debate
The most contested position in Original Screenplay is the fifth spot. AwardsWatch lists Sorry, Baby at five in their final predictions, while Blue Moon — the Ethan Hawke film about lyricist Lorenz Hart — appears in several alternate forecasts. The Gold Derby consensus leans toward Sorry, Baby over Weapons, which earned a Producers Guild nomination but missed the Critics Choice field entirely.
The Broader Screenplay Landscape This Year
What makes 2026’s screenplay races notable is the diversity of the films in contention. Sinners is a genre film — horror — with a serious political subtext. Sentimental Value is a Norwegian family drama. It Was Just an Accident is an Iranian film. Marty Supreme is a Josh Safdie portrait of a table tennis prodigy. The breadth reflects an Academy that has, over the past decade, expanded both its membership and its sense of what constitutes Oscar-worthy writing. The Academy Awards official page lists all 2026 nominees across categories. One thing that is not in doubt: both screenplay races this year represent genuine artistic achievement across a wide range of styles and traditions. Whether the predictable frontrunners hold or an upset occurs on March 15 will be worth watching.