The Best Actor Race Has Nine Real Contenders and Five Slots

Two of the biggest swings in the Best Actor race have not screened for anyone outside their studios.

There are five slots in the Best Actor category. There are currently nine men with a legitimate claim to one, and two of the biggest swings in the Best Actor race have not been screened for a single person outside their studios.

That is the actual condition of this race. Not a frontrunner and a chasing pack, but a pileup of movie stars at the exact stage of their careers where an Oscar starts to feel overdue. Matt Damon, Tom Cruise, Robert Pattinson, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, John Malkovich, Andrew Scott. Timothee Chalamet is closing out Dune in December. Anthony Ippolito just walked in off a TIFF premiere.

Nobody in this category is safe, and the pundit leaderboards have been rearranging themselves daily for two weeks, because the evidence keeps arriving in pieces.

The Best Actor Contenders We Have Seen

Damon has been the steadiest name in the Best Actor race since July. He plays Odysseus in Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey, and the performance has the full checklist attached to it: the physical transformation, the combat work, the late emotional turn. He has three acting nominations and a screenwriting Oscar from 1998, and no acting trophy. Cillian Murphy won this category for a Nolan film in 2024, which is the comparison everyone reaches for first.

Cruise is the complicated one. The reviews for Digger landed this week, and the film sits at 52 percent on Rotten Tomatoes across nearly 80 reviews ahead of its October 2 release. Alejandro G. Inarritu directs, with Cruise as an oil magnate who causes an ecological catastrophe and appoints himself the solution. Critics who liked it called it the biggest risk of his career. Critics who did not called the film around him bloated. A nomination would be his first for acting since Magnolia, 26 years ago, and it would come barely a year after the Academy handed him an honorary Oscar, which is the institutional way of saying it was never going to get around to it the normal way.

Malkovich, Scott and Pattinson in the Best Actor Race

Malkovich is the one the market likes most right now. Martin McDonagh‘s Wild Horse Nine pairs him with Sam Rockwell as a double act in a melancholy 1970s caper, and it left Venice with the strongest notices of his late career. He has two nominations, for Places in the Heart in 1984 and In the Line of Fire in 1993, and both were supporting. A nomination here would be his first ever in lead, at 72, 42 years after the first one.

Andrew Scott has the performance critics have been least equivocal about in the entire Best Actor race. He plays Ian Charleson in Simon Stone’s Elsinore, the British actor who performed Hamlet at the National Theatre in 1989 while dying of AIDS, and died the following year. Olivia Colman is alongside him. Scott has never been nominated for an Oscar, which is its own kind of oversight.

Pattinson is the wild card, because he may be in this race twice. He plays Chris Hansen in Primetime, an uncomfortably close look at To Catch a Predator in its mid-2000s peak, and he also steals scenes as a villain in The Odyssey. If both land, he becomes the first performer nominated in lead and supporting in the same year since Scarlett Johansson in 2020. He has never been nominated at all. Complicating his own campaign, the loudest praise coming out of Primetime is not for him but for Skyler Gisondo, who plays one of the show’s decoys and carries the film’s conscience.

The Best Actor Contenders Nobody Has Seen

Here is why every projection in the Best Actor race should be held loosely.

Brad Pitt is reprising Cliff Booth, the role that won him his only acting Oscar, in The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, which opens in IMAX on November 25 before arriving on Netflix on December 23. Quentin Tarantino wrote it and did not direct it. David Fincher did. As of a few weeks ago, people inside Netflix had not seen it, and reshoots were still happening in Los Angeles in August. Reprising an Oscar-winning performance almost never works, and the most recent attempt at it was a catastrophe. But Fincher is not Todd Phillips, and Al Pacino got nominated twice for Michael Corleone.

Then there is Dune: Part Three in December, with Chalamet finishing a trilogy that has already been nominated for best picture twice. Nobody has seen it. Pattinson is in it too, in villain mode, which means one December release could scramble two campaigns at once.

Gosling is the quiet one. Project Hail Mary came out in spring, made a great deal of money, and voters have had months to like it. He has three nominations and no wins. Historically that combination, a well-liked star carrying a popular film released early, either builds all year or evaporates by January.

And Ippolito is the newest name in the field, off I Play Rocky, where he plays Sylvester Stallone during the making of the film nobody wanted to make. The reception out of Toronto was warm, and the story attached to his casting is the kind awards coverage cannot resist. He is also a first-time contender competing against six men with a combined 18 acting nominations.

Why the Best Actor Race Keeps Moving

Awards races usually settle in stages. A festival hardens a consensus, a release confirms it, and the field narrows from twelve names to six by Thanksgiving.

The Best Actor race cannot narrow yet, because the calendar will not let it. Digger is about to land. Cliff Booth arrives in November with no advance word at all. Dune closes out December. Every one of those three can eliminate somebody or create someone, and until they land, the only honest position is that the top of this category is unresolved.

That is unusual, and it is worth saying plainly rather than pretending otherwise. Most years by late September the conversation has a shape. This year it has a guest list.

Where the Market Stands

The prediction market on Best Actor has been more active than a category this far from the ceremony usually is, and the way it has moved tells you exactly where the information is thin.

Malkovich has separated from the field since the middle of September and now holds a clear lead. Damon has been the most stable name on the board for two months, sitting narrowly behind without ever spiking. Scott has gained ground almost every session since Venice and is the only name with sustained upward pressure.

Cruise is the collapse. He led this market through most of the spring and summer, at points priced higher than the rest of the category combined, and has given nearly all of it back since the first reactions to Digger arrived. The decline steepened this week rather than flattening.

The names nobody has seen are priced accordingly, which is to say barely at all. Pitt and Gosling are both sitting in the low single digits despite being two of the most obvious contenders on paper. Chalamet is in the same territory. Ippolito spiked briefly in late September and gave it straight back. That is the market admitting it has nothing to price.

The whole board is moving daily, and it will keep moving through December. Anyone telling you the Best Actor race is settled has not looked at it since Venice.

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Joanthan P. Moustakas

Jonathan P. Moustakas founded The Cinema Group in 2020 during the challenges of the pandemic, after losing the vital ability to find community in theaters and escape through the captivating magic of cinema. Feeling profoundly cut off from the vibrant film community he cherished, he sought to create a welcoming home for dedicated cinema fans while providing engaging, daily curated content that resonates with their passions. Years later, The Cinema Group has blossomed from a small collective of loyal fans into a thriving brand that reaches millions of audiences every month across a diverse array of platforms and mediums.

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