The Oscars may be Hollywood’s biggest night, but the road to that shindig starts on the other side of the country in merry old Gotham town. The Gotham Film & Media Institute has cleverly planted its flag as the award season’s first high-profile ceremony, bringing celebrities, industry leaders, and the film press corps to downtown Manhattan as November turns to December for the annual Gotham Film Awards.
The Gothams’ primacy was driven home at last year’s dinner when One Battle After Another‘s Regina Hall opened the show alongside co-stars Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti by remarking: “Teyana, Chase, and I are here to officially give awards season — and this amazing night — started.” That night closed, of course, with One Battle winning Best Feature, the first of many statuettes it would claim on its way to a Best Picture victory three months later.
Granted, just like the New York itself, the Gothams have their own idiosyncrasies, and those are well-reflected in its latest crop of nominations, which dropped on Tuesday. But even with the smattering of left-field picks that are unlikely to make the trip to the left coast’s big night — think very good, but also very audience-specific titles like Mouse and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma — this first list of nominations does offer some early guidance about which films will be invited to the Oscar party.
Jamón on the range
You Can See Everything may be the current Oscar darling among the media and Gen Z, but Olivia Wilde‘s The Invite could finish 2026 as A24‘s smartest investment. Acquired out of Sundance for upward of $10 million and released in theaters over the summer to upward of $60 million at the global box office, the star-studded dark comedy has been the distributor’s stealthy dark horse, pawing the ground expectantly as the label’s later calendar releases like Primetime, The Debut, Club Kid, and Everything figure out their own lanes.
For the record, all four of those films also scored some Gothams love… just not as much love as The Invite. Wilde’s film picked up four nominations — the most of any A24 title — and was part of a five-way tie for most-nominated movie overall. Comparatively, Primetime finished with three nods, while the other three only got two apiece.
The Invite also finished ahead of another buzzy Sundance title, Josephine, which scooped up both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award, the first movie since CODA to pull off that double victory. But Josephine has struggled to gain traction beyond Park City, and even though it made the Best Feature list at the Gothams (along with acting nods for Channing Tatum and its young star Mason Reeves), it’s still way, way down in our Best Picture odds compared to The Invite‘s Top 10 placement.
Best Picture
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Indeed, the secret sauce of The Invite lies in its potential Oscar spread in the above-the-line categories. Where titles like Primetime or Club Kid are most competitive in maybe one or two of those races, there’s a path for The Invite go six out of seven between Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and three out of the four acting races. Sorry Seth Rogen, but you won’t be thanking Sal Saperstein in this year’s absurdly stacked Best Actor category.
The movie’s Gothams haul included equivalent nods in three of those six categories — Best Feature, Best Adapted Screenplay for lauded screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, and Best Supporting Actress for Penélope Cruz. (Its fourth nomination was for the Audience Award — essentially the Gothams version of the divisive Cinematic and Box Office Achievement Award that the Golden Globes are still trying make happen.)
Right now our expert oddsmakers are expecting to see those results replicated on Oscar nominations morning, with the potential addition of Edward Norton for Best Supporting Actor and the likely additions of Wilde for Best Actress and Best Director. As we first told you back in July, the Booksmart and Don’t Worry Darling helmer could be the first performer-director to score Best Director and Best Actress nominations in the same year, which would also make her the first woman to direct herself to an Oscar acting nod. We can see everything — like history being made.
Best Director
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Christopher Nolan
The Odyssey
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Javier Ambrossi, Javier Calvo
La Bola Negra
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Martin McDonagh
Wild Horse Nine
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Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim
You Can See Everything
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Denis Villeneuve
Dune: Part Three
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Ryusuke Hamaguchi
All of a Sudden
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Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
Project Hail Mary
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Jesse Eisenberg
The Debut
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Alejandro G. Inarritu
Digger
Sudden Impact
Neon was the big winner at the 2025 Gothams, taking home three statuettes for Iranian auteur’s Jafar Panahi’s typically daring drama It Was Just an Accident — the boutique label’s sixth consecutive Palme d’Or champ. Not at all accidentally, that film was also Neon’s fourth Palme winner to score a nomination for either Best Feature or Best International Feature at the Gothams after 2021’s Titane, 2023’s Anatomy of a Fall, and 2024’s Anora with only 2022’s Triangle of Sadness breaking what would have been a five-year streak. (The Gothams didn’t have an international feature category when Neon scored its first Palme win for Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite in 2019.)
Consider the streak broken again; while Neon secured its seventh straight Palme win with Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord this past June, the film was passed over by the Gotham juries, and not just in the feature categories. The Romanian auteur missed out on a Best Director nod, and neither Renate Reisnve nor Sebastian Stan found purchase in the non-gendered lead performer category.
Despite the accolades it earned on the Croisette, Fjord has notably encountered more divisive reactions as it played other festivals, and has received a muted reception among audiences since it opened in limited release. And that’s directly impacted the movie’s odds; Fjord has fallen to No. 17 on our experts-only Best Picture leaderboard, and Reinsve and Stan have slipped out of the Top 5 contenders for Best Actress and Best Actor to land at No. 7 and No. 11, respectively.
Best Actress
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Inde Navarrette
Obsession
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Virginie Efira
All of a Sudden
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Ruth Madeley
Being Heumann
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Sandra Hüller
Fatherland
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Jeon Do-yeon
Possible Love
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But Neon does have a Cannes winner that seems to have won the Gothams voters’ hearts; Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s continent-spanning three-hour emotional epic All of a Sudden is one of the other films in that five-way tie for most-nominated status, earning nods for Best International Feature, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Performance for Tao Okamoto, who shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes with co-star, Virginie Efira.
Interestingly, Efira didn’t make the cut for Best Lead Performance, but the French actress does hold the No. 5 spot among Best Actress contenders with our experts. Neon made sure to have her stateside when All of a Sudden played the New York Film Festival, and she’ll be spending plenty of time in L.A. as well. Even when she’s not physically present, the company is keeping her in the public eye via events like a screening series of her past films at Manhattan’s Metrograph theater in November.
That’s when she’ll also be joined on the awards circuit by Okamoto and Hamaguchi, both of whom are decamping from Japan for an extended U.S. trip. Okamoto remains comfortably within the Top 5 contenders for Best Supporting Actress, but more face time with voters certainly won’t hurt.
Best Supporting Actress
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Samantha Morton
The Odyssey
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Anne Hathaway
The Odyssey
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Penelope Cruz
La Bola Negra
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Amanda Seyfried
You Can See Everything
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Tao Okamoto
All of a Sudden
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Kate O’Flynn
Tender Loving Care
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Sandra Hüller
Project Hail Mary
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Mariana Di Girolamo
Wild Horse Nine
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Despite Accident‘s success with the Gothams last year, the film didn’t fare as well with Academy voters, as Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent instead emerging as Neon’s strongest Cannes-to-Oscar contender. A similar dynamic could play out this year if All of a Sudden gains steam outside of the acting categories as Fjord continues to cool; the film is currently sitting at No. 11 among Best Picture contenders and Hamaguchi ranks at No. 7 on the Best Director leaderboard — both categories where he scored previous nominations for his 2021 breakthrough, Drive My Car.
By the way, Neon can boast to having two of the five most-nominated movies at the Gothams; the label is also distributing Clarissa, another Cannes title that received four nods, including Best Lead Performance for previous Oscar nominee Sophie Okonedo. And James Gray’s Paper Tiger is also in the mix with two nominations, including Best Feature and Best Supporting Performance for Adam Driver. Since the crime drama relaunched at NYFF last month, Neon has kept the director and cast booked and busy with multiple festival appearances and FYC events for voters moderated by the likes of Rian Johnson and Stephen Colbert.
In fact, Paper Tiger is the closing night attraction at the Denver Film Festival, where Gold Derby is spending the weekend. Nothing like a Rocky Mountain High to get an awards bounce.
Age of Innocence
With the ink still drying on Skydance Media’s acquisition of Warner Bros. and all of its assets, the newly combined company hosted its first glitzy HBO premiere on Monday night in New York for the launch of The Gilded Age‘s fourth season.
You could tell that the synergy is still being worked out though; before the screening, an unseen announcer introduced exec Casey Bloys as the CCO of Skydance’s Direct-to-Consumer arm, but when Bloys took the stage to give his remarks, he emphasized continuity by labeling himself as “Casey Bloys from HBO.” You know, the must-have premium cable channel responsible for The Pitt and DTF St. Louis, shows that powered it to a second-place finish behind Apple TV at the Primetime Emmys last month.
Gilded Age creator Julian Fellowes also specifically called out the networks’ exec team in his brief speech, pointedly referring to Bloys as “our protector, our gladiator, and our defender.” With some post-merger shake-ups already in the rearview and more looming on the horizon, the unexpressed hope in the room was that HBO will still remain HBO — and not TV — by this time next year.
Bloys’s protection of the pricey period drama has paid off, though. While The Gilded Age got off to a slow start in terms of audience and award appreciation — something that Fellowes himself acknowledged to us — the show hit a creative high in its third year and received a personal best eight Emmy nominations. It’s also cultivated a dedicated fanbase, some of whom donned their own Gilded Age costumes to attend the premiere and after-party held in the Plaza Hotel’s cavernous Grand Ballroom. That audience laughed, applauded, and gasped with every fresh development in the Season 4 premiere.
The entire Gilded Age cast — minus Christine Baranski, who had a commitment across the pond — was also in the theater, and mingled with partygoers like Peter Gallagher and Dennis Haysbert at the Plaza afterward. Not surprisingly, Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector — aka Opera Mommy and Train Daddy — were particularly in demand; at one point we spotted Coon’s husband, Tracy Letts, looking for her in the crush of the crowd.
Days later, many of the cast made the trip to the West Coast for an L.A. premiere and party held at Beverly Hills’s famed Greystone Mansion. Alongside Taissa Farmiga and Ben Ahlers, that crowd was packed with influencers — some of whom were already part of the fanbase and others that were seeing the series for the first time. HBO is clearly hoping that both camps flood social media with pre-premiere content to give the Season 4 premiere a ratings boost, not to mention a boost in visibility with awards voters.
On that front, Coon and her co-stars will have to wait until next summer to find out whether they’re invited back to the Emmy party. But they are hoping for Season 4 to find a berth in first quarter ceremonies like the Golden Globes and the SAG Actor Awards, where they haven’t historically been recognized apart from a Best Ensemble nod with the latter group for Season 2.
TV Drama Actress
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Keri Russell
The Diplomat
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Chase Infiniti
The Testaments
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Carrie Coon
The Gilded Age
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Michelle Pfeiffer
The Madison
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Emma D’Arcy
House of the Dragon
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Gold Derby oddsmakers are predicting an overdue Globes honor for Coon, who is sitting at No. 5 among Best TV Drama Actress contenders after her corresponding Emmy nomination in September. (It doesn’t hurt that the actress is also working the film side of the awards circuit for her starring role in Guy Nattiv’s well-reviewed festival staple, The Liberation.) The show itself, meanwhile, is an on the bubble contender for Best TV Drama, landing at No. 8 behind HBO’s freshman series, Lanterns.
Coon and The Gilded Age have even better odds among SAG voters, landing at No. 2 and No. 4 on the Best TV Drama Actress and Best TV Drama Ensemble leaderboards, respectively. If they win, let’s see if they thank HBO — or Skydance Direct-to-Consumer.
TV Drama Actress
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Keri Russell
The Diplomat
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Carrie Coon
The Gilded Age
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Katherine LaNasa
The Pitt
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Allison Janney
The Diplomat
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Chase Infiniti
The Testaments
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Michelle Pfeiffer
The Madison
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Emma D’Arcy
House of the Dragon
— Additional reporting by Marcus James Dixon
Note: Golden Globes producer Dick Clark Productions is owned by Penske Media Eldridge, a joint venture between Eldridge and Penske Media Corporation, which owns Gold Derby.
