Guardian writers have been making their pitches for best picture winner at the 98th Academy Awards in our Oscars hustings series.

Has Chase Infiniti been snubbed? Should Train Dreams win for best cinematography? Who’s the bigger monster, Frankenstein’s or Marty Mauser? Guardian film editor Catherine Shoard answers your 2026 Oscars questions.

Catherine has now finished answering your questions. Read the Q&A below.

Catherine:

Thanks very much for all these really well-informed and thoughtful questions! I’ll try and get through as many as possible

Why aren’t movies good anymore?

Question from coolius

Catherine:

1. Vicious circle of looming industry collapse fueling industry timidity.

2. Talent exodus to TV and streaming.

3. Combination of factors meaning that while blockbusters endure, funding has collapsed for the kind of low-to-mid-budget adult dramas which were still around 25 years ago, and which dominated awards conversations for the half century prior to that.

And some movies are still really good. This has not been an especially good year, in my opinion (hello 2023), but there have been good years recently, and there will be more to come. Plus, you might be looking in the wrong place.

When was the last time the Oscar for Best Picture awarded to the year’s best film, in your opinion?

Question from MarkFilmgoer

Catherine:

Parasite (2020) and Moonlight (2016) were good - but not the year’s best films. So perhaps 12 Years a Slave (2014).

How important are the red carpet campaigns?

Question from timwthornton

I’ve only recently realised that actors’ appearances on the various red carpets in the run up to the Oscars could make a difference to the way people vote, almost like an election campaign trail. Do you think it really does? Or do you reckon most voters try and block out the noise and concentrate on the quality of the films?

Catherine:

The Oscar campaign trail is today a very precise, well-monitored and potentially lucrative business – which is why slip-ups such as the failure to police the social media of Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón are so surprising/glaring/dramatic.

Red carpet is important for this, but not the most critical part of the campaign by any means, unless something really unusual happens on the carpet. Interviews are far more important – note the Chalamet ballet slip, which occurred in the softest of spaces – as well as general glad-handing.

Appearances need to be pitched precisely: modest yet confident, grateful, respectful, dignified and absolutely on-message about what the eminently rewardable elements of their performance/the film overall are.

Nowhere is this more crucial than at the awards ceremonies which precede the Oscars, which are basically auditions for the big night. If someone performs well there – on the carpet, in the room and, especially, on the podium – it really matters: Academy members want their ceremony to go well. If they don’t – or even if there’s a feeling they’ve been unfairly snubbed – that can also count for a lot.

This year, when it’s a really tight race between One Battle and Sinners for picture and director – and when three of the four acting awards are also hard to call – the two ceremonies that landed just before Oscars voting closed on 5 March take on special leverage. I’ll maybe go into why in another answer as I’m conscious this answer is now a bit long.

In music awards, such as the Brits, winners ALWAYS thank their fans. But film award winners never seem to. What’s going on there?

Question from Alex42

Catherine:

That’s a really interesting observation. The film awards are almost always voted for by industry peers, so to a large extent, the winners are thanking the people in the room, rather than those watching on TV. But the music industry also fosters a very different relationship between the “talent” and the “consumers” than the movie biz, and movie stars largely seek to insulate themselves from the people who buy the tickets.

Actors I think tend to have a bit of an allergy to the idea they have “fans”, because they see themselves as craftspeople, and so the idea that audiences are able to discern the real person beneath the performance slightly invalidates their whole sales pitch. They’re of course totally wrong and people mostly go and see movies because they are fans of the movie stars who star in them.

The obvious exception to this is Tom Cruise, who only ever seems to thank cinema-goers and who has only ever won an honorary Oscar.

Considering the state of the industry and looking at this year’s nominees (and success stories of recent years), do you feel that we’ve seen the end of ‘Oscar bait’ filmmaking?

Question from james__clayton

Catherine:

You would have thought the awards – and box office – failure of films such as Deliver Me From Nowhere, Christy, The Smashing Machine etc might make studios think twice about greenlighting Oscar-bait biopics. Personally I would love to see fewer of these, which feel to me an even more mucky reliance on existing IP than superhero movies. But they’re still churning them out – a Jon Bon Jovi one was announced only yesterday.

Which one of the major awards ceremonies do you think will go under first?

Question from gracepanda

Catherine:

None of them. In apparatus at least, most of them are basically glorified work dos – it’s just that most work dos aren’t televised, thank goodness. I agree with the commenter who cited the Globes – if you can come back from a place of such ignominy and discredit, and everyone to just carry on like it never happened, anything is survivable. They will all go to streaming though.

If it’s a One Battle/Sinners director/picture split, which way do you think it’ll go and why?

Question from benpaul

Catherine:

This is the million dollar question. The commonality between this year’s honest Oscar ballots - where anonymous voters reveal what they have picked - a lot of people seem to think that One Battle After Another and Paul Thomas Anderson will win both, but/because of that say that they will vote for Sinners and Ryan Coogler.

And that’s one of the reasons I think Sinners will get both awards. The preferential vote system definitely favours it for best picture, and I think Coogler will also take best director. Yes, the Academy owes PTA an Oscar, but it will give him one anyway for adapted screenplay this year - and he’s still young(ish); his time will come.

I’m not the biggest fan of either film, but what Coogler did with Sinners was probably more ambitious (I’m in the camp which thinks it’s a bit of a genre soup and he should have stuck to one, but hey). No black person has ever won best director, and it would be embarrassing if again they were overlooked when their movie took best picture (per Steve McQueen and Barry Jenkins).

That Sinners heads into the Oscars with more nominations than any film ever also indicates broad love for it, but it’s what happened at the Actors Awards and the Baftas which I think tips it.

(NB, the Oscars’ new rule that you have to have watched all the movies in the category before you’re able to vote in it means lots of them will have voted late in the day.)

At the Actors Awards – formerly the SAGs – four days before voting closed, Sinners took best ensemble (as well as actor for Jordan) - which makes it the second time Coogler has won that for his cast. Actors make up the biggest branch of the Academy votership (1,311 out of 10,136) and they’re behind that movie.

At the Baftas, meanwhile, both Coogler and Wunmi Mosaka (who won supporting actress) made some of the best speeches of the night, really outlining why the movie was important. Plus, weirdly, the N-word incident may play its part, in particular the dignity and professionalism of Delroy Lindo and Michael B Jordan. Lindo especially feels like someone the Academy will want to reward - certainly more so than Sean Penn, who didn’t bother to show up to the Baftas (where he won), and who has won a lot before.

Jordan will also probably win over Chalamet, not because of the ballet faux pas, which broke too late to count, but because Chalamet is still too young and still too Marmite (plus Jordan is great).

Anyway - I don’t see the split happening. But if it does, I reckon PTA for director and Sinners for picture.

And it is very strange and ironic that the Baftas prove their continued relevancy in the Oscars race through the ripples of their worst controversy in years.

Do you actually enjoy the Oscars?

Question from Tintenfische

Catherine:

Sure! Even if you’re not especially gunning for any of the nominees, it’s a live, dramatic event in which carefully controlled people and immaculately curated personas are thrust into a live event broadcast around the world. The potential for slip up or incendiary statement or wild embarrassment or something happening that is genuinely moving, is, as recent ceremonies have shown, enormous – and from the POV of someone who works for a newspaper, that’s great. And even if you’re not a fan of ie. Conan O’Brien, the whole thing is a lot slicker than, say, the Baftas, which are often genuinely embarrassing to watch. Obviously the bad thing if you’re in London is that they happen in the middle of the night, which can be … challenging.

Why should we care?

Question from longist

Why should we care about US culture? Why should we care about wealthy people slapping each other on the back? Why should we care what anyone attending wears? Why should we care when film doesn’t have the same cultural impact as in the past?

Catherine:

You don’t have to care. But rightly or wrongly, cinema - and the wider movie industry - does affect how we see the world. The interplay of that internationally is never not revealing, I think.

Do you think controversial statements by nominees during Oscar campaign can hurt their chances of winning?

Question from Nomad84e

Catherine:

1,000,000%

Is the Academy allowed to take into account in nominations an artist’s body of work in the past year, or can they only look at work in each specific film?

Question from oystercard

Catherine:

They only ever judge it in that context, in my experience.

Will people currently illegally locked up in ICE prisons and processing facilities be able to watch the Oscars?

Question from MMMRCOMAC

Quite. I did find it interesting that Harvey Weinstein, in his Hollywood Reporter interview yesterday, said how much he loved The Ballad of Wallis Island, and how much he wished he was repping its Oscar campaign. Bet they’re thrilled - not only an endorsement from Hollywood’s most widely-reviled, but also a diss at their marketing team.

Why should we be remotely interested in the Oscars when most of the good new films never get shown outside film festivals? Why should we keep promoting American cultural imperialism?

Question from geoffgarside

Catherine:

I think that’s a bit unfair - and a bit overgenerous to film festivals: I’ve seen a lot of rubbish at them. I do think the measures that the Academy and - in fact especially - Bafta - have taken to diversify and surface new international talent are quite admirable. This can be perhaps evidenced by the drop off in viewers to the Oscars telecast over the past 30 odd years. 55m people watched the ceremony in the US in 1998, when Titanic won, partly because they felt invested. In 2021, nine million people watched. That wasn’t just because of Covid or social media. It’s because while a lot of people in the film industry cared whether Nomadland won, nobody else did.

Catherine:

Thanks so much for all these questions - they’re really great and will hopefully inform our coverage going forward! Hope those of you interested in the Oscars enjoy the ceremony and our coverage on Sunday / Monday. And for those dismayed by the current crop of nominees / potential contenders: don’t lose faith! Loads of promising films coming soon! And this list doesn’t even include a Simon Rich-scripted Sam Altman movie directed by Luca Guadagnino! Or the new Andrew Haigh! Duh!