Del Toro’s gothic vision and Anderson’s political epic divide the night between spectacle and substance
Frankenstein Leads Craft Categories as 2026 BAFTAs Deliver Split Verdict
Heading into Sunday’s 2026 British Academy Film Awards, the consensus narrative is of a night divided between the sustained dominance of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another in the major narrative categories and the technical sweep anticipated for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein in the craft awards. But the more revealing story may be what the final outcome signals about where the BAFTA voting body stands on questions of diversity, representation, and the films it is willing to honor.
Del Toro’s Frankenstein and the Technical Categories
Guillermo del Toro’s reimagining of Mary Shelley’s classic — with Jacob Elordi playing the creature and Oscar Isaac as the scientist — enters Sunday as the overwhelming favorite in three below-the-line categories: Best Costume Design at approximately 96 percent, Best Makeup and Hair at approximately 98 percent, and Best Production Design at approximately 94 percent, according to Gold Derby’s combined predictions. These are the categories where the film’s visual ambition — del Toro’s signature blend of gothic atmosphere, practical effects, and elaborate period design — would most naturally be recognized. The film itself carries nine Academy Award nominations and has been positioned as one of the year’s most distinctive cinematic visions.
For writers thinking about the relationship between screenplay and production design, Frankenstein raises a perennial craft question: how much does the visual world of a film exist on the page before a single frame is shot? Del Toro is known as a director whose screenwriting process is inseparable from his visual imagination, often filling notebooks with sketches and design elements before the script itself takes final form. The Writers Store and similar resources document how del Toro’s approach to adapting classic literary material differs from more conventional approaches. The Mary Shelley novel itself, available through Project Gutenberg, remains a remarkable exercise in narrative frame construction that serious adapters are advised to read.
The Screenplay Races: Where Sinners Pushes Back
The most contested terrain on Sunday involves the screenplay categories. Sinners enters as the predicted winner of Best Original Screenplay at approximately 56 percent, in a race against Sentimental Value at approximately 41 percent. The closeness of that contest makes it the most genuinely unpredictable major writing award of the season. A Sinners win would represent a significant recognition of Ryan Coogler’s writing — a screenplay that synthesizes blues history, vampire mythology, Jim Crow racial terror, and American cultural mythology into something that functions simultaneously as genre entertainment and historical elegy.
In Best Adapted Screenplay, One Battle After Another is the heavy favorite at approximately 83 percent, with Hamnet in second at approximately 16 percent. Anderson’s film — based on a novel about ex-revolutionaries navigating the aftermath of the 1960s left — has been the consistent front-runner in this category throughout the season. Hamnet‘s claim rests on the quality of its adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s celebrated novel, which required translating an intensely interior, grief-centered literary voice into cinematic terms.
The F1 Factor and Racing Drama
Not all of Sunday’s action involves the prestige drama categories. The racing film F1, starring Brad Pitt and directed by Joseph Kosinski, is predicted to win Best Film Editing at approximately 69 percent and Best Sound at approximately 95 percent. These are the categories where the film’s technical accomplishment — using real Formula One race footage and working directly with the sport’s governing body to achieve an authenticity rarely seen in racing films — would be most naturally recognized. The film’s screenplay is itself a craft object worthy of study: it must make the technical grammar of motorsport legible to non-enthusiast audiences while sustaining dramatic tension across events whose outcomes are in some cases already known.
The Animated and Children’s Categories
Zootopia 2 is predicted to dominate both Best Animated Feature (at approximately 86 percent) and Best Children’s and Family Film (at approximately 95 percent). With KPop Demon Hunters deemed ineligible by the BAFTA eligibility committee, the sequel to Disney’s 2016 social satire enters as a heavy favorite. In Best Visual Effects, Avatar: Fire and Ash leads at approximately 82 percent, with del Toro’s Frankenstein as the primary competition at approximately 16 percent.
The full prediction landscape is available at Gold Derby’s BAFTA predictions page. Whatever Sunday produces, the 2026 ceremony represents a particularly rich moment in the awards calendar — one where a genuinely diverse field of films has generated competition in nearly every category that is closer and more contested than in many recent years.