The Odyssey Oscar predictions: category by category, for the best-reviewed film of Nolan's career
The Odyssey is the best-reviewed and highest-grossing film of Christopher Nolan's career. Here's how that converts into an Oscar campaign — the categories it can't lose, the ones Universal has a genuine strategy problem in, and the record it's chasing.
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opened on 17 July 2026 with a 98% Rotten Tomatoes score off more than 140 reviews and an 88 on Metacritic — both career bests, both ahead of Oppenheimer. The interesting question was never whether it gets nominated.
It was how many. Gold Derby put The Odyssey top of its 2027 leaderboard before anyone had seen it and has not moved it since. By 13 September 2026 the film had taken $601.2 million domestically and $1.684 billion worldwide, passing Jurassic World to become Universal's highest-grossing release ever, overtaking The Dark Knight Rises as Nolan's biggest, and installing itself as the highest-grossing R-rated film in history and IMAX's biggest title with more than $457 million. It sits twelfth on the all-time worldwide chart and third among non-franchise films.
The relevant dates: nominations voting runs 11–15 January 2027, nominations are announced on Thursday 21 January, and the 99th Academy Awards take place on Sunday 14 March 2027 at the Dolby Theatre, hosted by Conan O'Brien.
The record it's chasing
Sinners set a nominations record with 16 at the 2026 ceremony. Oppenheimer managed 13 and converted seven, including Picture, Director and Actor.
Gold Derby's arithmetic in August: six above-the-line nominations — picture, director, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay — plus a clean ten-for-ten in the crafts gets Nolan level with Sinners.
That is an unforgiving path. It requires the Academy to nominate a summer blockbuster in every technical category it's eligible in and to find room for two of its supporting performances, in a year where the film's own cast is competing against itself.
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Category by category
- Best Picture — the frontrunner by every measure, with prediction markets pricing it around 50–55% to win as of early September. The realistic challengers are Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Three (December 2026), Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine, Los Javis's La Bola Negra, Project Hail Mary and Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Digger.
- Best Director — Nolan won this for Oppenheimer at the 96th Academy Awards and appears on effectively every pundit's five. Villeneuve, McDonagh, David Fincher and Olivia Wilde are the names circling the other four slots.
- Best Actor — Matt Damon as Odysseus, which would be his fourth acting nomination after Good Will Hunting, Invictus and The Martian. He has never won an acting Oscar; his single statuette is for writing Good Will Hunting with Ben Affleck. Gold Derby's experts moved him up 19 points in late July to second, behind Tom Cruise for Digger.
- Best Supporting Actress — Universal's actual problem. Anne Hathaway plays Penelope with enough screen time to run lead, and hasn't been formally placed. If she goes supporting she blocks her own co-stars; if she goes lead, the path clears for Samantha Morton as Circe, who climbed 28% in a single August week to second in the category, and possibly Charlize Theron as Calypso.
- Best Supporting Actor — the most crowded category the film has. Tom Holland as Telemachus and Robert Pattinson as Antinous have both been in the conversation since release, and John Leguizamo as Eumaeus surged 35% in August to fourth, which would be his first nomination in a 35-year career.
- Best Adapted Screenplay — Nolan's script sat fourth at 88% in early August, level with La Bola Negra and behind Project Hail Mary and The Invite at 94%. The film's deviations from Homer have been the one consistent line of critical complaint, and this is the category where that shows up.
- The crafts — the safest ground. Hoyte van Hoytema leads most cinematography forecasts off an Oppenheimer win, Jennifer Lame is in the editing five, Ellen Mirojnick's costumes and the Luisa Abel–Gloria Pasqua Casey makeup and hair team both top Scott Feinberg's first Hollywood Reporter forecast. Sound, production design, visual effects and score are all live.
Where the certainty runs out
Two things temper the sweep narrative. The first is that Nolan's record with acting categories is thinner than Oppenheimer implies — across twenty-five years, his films have produced three acting wins, all for performances with one unambiguous showcase. The Odyssey distributes its screen time across sixteen-plus name actors, which is how you get a lot of nominations and no wins.
The second is that the acclaim isn't unanimous. Deadline reported in late July that Rotten Tomatoes was carrying a persistent seam of one- and half-star user reviews calling the film boring and long-winded, and that the Trojan horse sequence — filmed as an ugly, tide-swamped thing rather than a spectacle — was a recurring sticking point. None of that stops a nomination. It's the kind of thing that erodes a frontrunner between December and March.
Nolan himself has been busy making the season's most quotable analogy about something else entirely. On AI:
"Everybody knows the Greeks are inside," he told Deadline in 2026, calling it a glass Trojan horse.
Universal's chairman Donna Langley, meanwhile, went with the studio line, calling the film "a generational event that galvanizes moviegoing itself". For the record: it was shot on a 91-day schedule in Morocco, Greece, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, Western Sahara and Malta, for $250 million, entirely on IMAX 15-perf 65mm film using a newly built camera called the Keighley — the first feature ever made that way. Roughly 45 cinemas on Earth can project it as intended.
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