2026 Oscars Best Actress Prediction: Which Performance Has The Best Chance To Win

Jessie Buckley is going to win the best actress Oscar for "Hamnet" at the 2026 Academy Awards. It really is that simple.

Allow us to expand on that, will you? Sometimes, Oscar races are a dead heat right up until the end ... and truthfully, the three other acting races feel completely up in the air as we approach the 98th ceremony. With that in mind, let's just reiterate this: it is almost impossible, barring any sort of spectacular upset, that anyone unseats Buckley for her starring role as Agnes, the long-suffering wife of playwright William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), in the achingly beautiful "Hamnet."

Still, Buckley faces some formidable competition, and the truth is that almost anyone else in this category would be a phenomenal winner. (Almost.) Rose Byrne is the clear "runner-up," so to speak, for her lead performance as a struggling mother of a chronically ill child in Mary Bronstein's bonkers "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You," and if Buckley hadn't blown away the competition as a woman who tragically loses one of her children to illness, Byrne would feel like a sure thing.

Elsewhere, we've got the genuinely fantastic Renate Reinsve for her latest collaboration with Joachim Trier, the raw family drama "Sentimental Value" — and we've also got Emma Stone for her latest collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos, the wonderfully bizarre conspiracy-theory satire "Bugonia." Kate Hudson is, with all due respect, also here for "Song Sung Blue," somehow. (Hudson should already have an Oscar for "Almost Famous" and Amanda Seyfried or Chase Infiniti should have gotten her spot for "The Testament of Ann Lee" or "One Battle After Another," but we digress.)

Amazingly, Buckley and Byrne — the two standouts — deliver very different performances about an all-too familiar topic: motherhood.

On a purely technical level, the reason we can so confidently predict Jessie Buckley's victory in the best actress category at the 2026 Academy Awards is simply because the Irish-born performer has won almost every single precursor award possible. Buckley — unlike Rose Byrne, who's celebrating her first nomination — received a previous nod in the best supporting actress category for her 2021 film "The Lost Daughter," but for "Hamnet," she's been on a massive winning streak. In the lead-up to the Oscars, Buckley won the Actor Award, a BAFTA, a Critics' Choice Award, and the Golden Globe, all for best actress (for the Globe, it was in the genre-specific drama category).

Still, it's really fascinating that both Buckley and Byrne's Oscar-nominated roles — which are honestly both deserving of the award for vastly different reasons — focus on the trials and tribulations of motherhood. In Chloé Zhao's "Hamnet," adapted from the novel by Maggie O'Farrell (who wrote the screenplay with Zhao, earning them an Oscar nod for best adapted screenplay), Buckley's Agnes, a woman of the woods who often clashes with her more erudite husband, is all but broken by the death of her son Hamnet (a darling Jacobi Jupe). In "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You," Byrne's Linda is drowning under the weight of her unseen daughter's difficult chronic illness, stretched to her breaking point as her husband remains out of town and their apartment becomes uninhabitable after a massive leak. 

These situations are so different, but Buckley and Byrne's performances will ring true to anyone who's felt weighed down by parenthood ... and they're both worth watching. So is there a real "upset" here? Potentially, but probably not.

Remember when everybody thought Glenn Close was a shoo-in for "The Wife" during the Academy Awards in February 2019, and then Olivia Colman shocked literally everybody by winning for "The Favourite" instead? That's almost exactly what it would feel like if Jessie Buckley, who, as discussed has won basically every major precursor, lost to Emma Stone for "Bugonia." (Hilariously, "The Favourite" and "Bugonia" are both Yorgos Lanthimos movies that feature Stone.) 

Unfortunately, Renate Reinsve doesn't seem like she could surge ahead of the pack and beat out both Buckley and Rose Byrne, and again, we're not even fully sure how Kate Hudson made it into this category. That leaves Stone, and at this point, Stone sort of feels like the legendary Pokémon Mewtwo when it comes to Oscars: nigh unbeatable. As of this writing, Stone is 37 with five acting nominations under her belt (and two for producing), and incredibly, she won two of those acting awards from the Academy — for 2016's "La La Land" and 2023's "Poor Things." We don't actually think Stone necessarily has the juice to win for her role as biotech CEO Michelle Fuller, who ends up kidnapped by the conspiracy-obsessed Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) in "Bugonia." Still, if anybody could topple Buckley at this point who isn't Byrne, it's Stone, an Oscars darling who keeps proving that she's one of our most audacious, fearless, and generationally talented performers.

This is, however, Buckley's award to lose ... and if you want a basically guaranteed point on your Oscars ballot, go ahead and check her name off. The 98th Academy Awards air on ABC and Hulu on March 15 at 7 p.m. EST.