The 2026 Oscar nominations are officially out, narrowing the field for who could take home hardware at the 98th Academy Awards. The show will air live from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood at 7 p.m. ET on Sunday, March 15. If Best Picture is the Academy’s headline, Best Original Screenplay is its conscience. This is the Writers Branch at full strength—rewarding architecture, voice, and intention, the invisible math that makes a movie feel inevitable. Over decades, this category has crowned the scripts that define an era’s taste: the ones with a point of view sharp enough to survive the noise. Let’s break down the best screenplay nominations for the 2026 Oscars.
Check out our coverage of other Oscar nominations here:
2026 Oscars Best Original Screenplay Nominees
Ryan Coogler (Sinners)
Joachim Trier & Eskil Vogt (Sentimental Value)
Josh Safdie & Ronald Bronstein (Marty Supreme)
Jafar Panahi (It Was Just an Accident)
Richard Linklater (Blue Moon)
There’s a season-long tell here: writing has been treated like a marquee battlefield, not a supporting credit. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Golden Globes screenplay win for One Battle After Another didn’t just reward a script—it underlined a mood. Voters have been signaling that the page matters, that authorship matters, that the blueprint is part of the spectacle.
That context is especially potent for Sinners. In a Best Picture slate that can feel crowded by sheer volume—big canvases, prestige machinery, international heat—screenplay becomes the cleanest recognition lane. Coogler’s nomination reads like the Academy finding the craft beneath the scale: pressure built with discipline, scenes that turn, a narrative engine that keeps its bearings even when the movie is operating at full wattage.
Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident puts trauma and paranoia center stage, unrelenting until the credits roll. Its masterful storytelling earns the 65-year-old his first Oscar nomination. The rest of the lineup is a calibrated spread of what original can mean at the highest level. Sentimental Value is the surgical entry—behavioral specificity, emotional sequencing, and the kind of restraint that takes nerve. Marty Supreme is velocity with control, character expressed through escalation and rhythm, the Safdie/Bronstein signature sharpened into a screenplay argument. Blue Moon is Linklater in his most classical register, where dialogue is choreography and subtext does the heavy lifting without announcing itself.
If this list is the field, the question isn’t whether these scripts are impressive. It’s what the Academy wants to reward right now: the one that detonates in the room, or the one that lingers like a bruise.
Prediction: Ryan Coogler (Sinners)
This category loves a script that feels like a movie, not a manuscript. Coogler’s lane is clean: authorial voice, muscular scene construction, and a narrative engine that plays on a big stage without turning into soft-focus “importance.” In a crowded Best Picture year, Original Screenplay is also the Academy’s favorite way to make a major statement without having to crown the whole film. If Sinners is in the conversation everywhere, this is the ballot where the craft gets honored directly, and where a filmmaker’s command of tone and consequence reads the loudest.
Coogler’s case is already backed by hardware—Sinners has picked up major screenplay wins at the Critics Choice Awards and the National Board of Review, plus additional critics-group writing prizes, which is exactly the kind of across-the-board momentum that usually converts in this category.
The one that can steal it is Trier & Vogt, Sentimental Value, because the Writers Branch can’t resist emotional precision when it’s this controlled. That’s the pure writing win—behavior, subtext, inevitability, character-driven diamonds utterly pulverized. But if the industry’s temperature is “screenwriting is the headline this year,” the Oscar often goes to the script that married ambition to reach. That’s Sinners.
Those are the 2026 Oscars Best Screenplay nominations! Stay tuned for more coverage over the next few months until the 98th Academy Awards arrive.
