2023 Oscar Predictions: The Oscar Squad Assembles

We’re halfway through the festival season, so Awards Daily’s Oscar Squad decided it was time to take a pulse on the 2023 Oscar season thus far. As a reminder, the Oscar Squad is made up of full time editors and writers at Awards Daily, and some of them want you to know that they were forced to make these initial predictions against their wills having not seen all of the films in contention yet. But that’s how the cookie crumbles, my friends.

Surely, as the season matures, there will be seismic shifts in the Oscar Squad rankings, particularly since no one has broadly seen major potential contenders such as Babylon, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, or Avatar: The Way of Water. Looking at the Best Picture race, we could have one of the most populist Oscar races in recent memory with the Oscar Squad predicting The Fabelmans, Elvis, Top Gun: Maverick, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Avatar: The Way of Water all making into the top ten. That would certainly go a long way toward correcting the recent imbalance between the Academy’s Best Picture lineup and what people actually want to see, even when they couldn’t safely go to a theater.

At any rate, here are the Oscar Squad’s rankings in the 10 categories we cover. We’ll be publishing updated charts every two weeks for the next few months until critics and guilds season kicks the race into high gear.