Oscar Nominees Odds: What Kalshi's 2027 Best Picture Board Is Really Saying
Every August, awards pundits publish early Best Picture predictions and argue about them for five months. Kalshi's Oscar nomination market skips the argument: 47 films, each with a live price on whether it makes the 10-film field on January 21, 2027, and more than 545,000 contracts traded so far, including about 6,800 in the past day. The top of the board is settled business. The interesting part is the seam in the middle, where the market is still deciding which three or four films claim the last seats, and one price the market treats as settled but pays almost nothing in the winner market next door.
The Quick Answer
Kalshi traders price The Odyssey at 98 cents to be nominated for Best Picture at the 2027 Oscars, with Project Hail Mary around 87 cents and Dune: Part Three around 84. The board carries 47 films for exactly 10 slots, and the last few seats are a live fight between films priced between 40 and 65 cents. The full board, the 10-slot math, and the film the market prices as a near-certain nominee but a 3-cent winner are all below.
The Market
| Venue | Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated exchange (18+; availability varies by state, as of August 2026) |
| The Event | KXOSCARNOMPIC-27: one YES/NO contract per film, "Will [film] be nominated for Best Picture?" at the 99th Academy Awards |
| What Settles It | The official nomination announcement, expected January 21, 2027, per each market's settlement rules; the listed expiration runs to December 31, 2027 |
| Structure | Up to 10 contracts settle YES, because the Academy fixed Best Picture at exactly 10 nominees starting with the 2022 ceremony |
| Activity | 545,000+ contracts traded lifetime, about 6,800 in the past 24 hours, roughly 273,000 contracts of open interest (as of August 12, 2026) |
That structure note is the whole key to reading this page. On a winner board, prices compete for one payout and should add up to about a dollar. Here, 10 contracts will pay, so the board should add up to about $10, and every film is its own independent yes-or-no question.
The Board: The 15 Prices That Matter
Prices are the last trade in cents, with the current bid and ask, as of August 12, 2026. A handful of films (Elsinore, Josephine, Artificial, Club Kid, Being Heumann) show higher last trades than some rows here but sit on very wide quotes, so their prices are unreliable; the worked example below shows why they are excluded.
| Film | Last trade | Bid / Ask | Implied probability |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Odyssey | 98¢ | 95 / 98 | ~98% |
| Project Hail Mary | 87¢ | 84 / 90 | ~87% |
| Dune: Part Three | 84¢ | 79 / 84 | ~84% |
| The Black Ball | 72¢ | 70 / 72 | ~72% |
| Wild Horse Nine | 71¢ | 70 / 72 | ~71% |
| Fjord | 65¢ | 62 / 65 | ~65% |
| Digger | 62¢ | 60 / 62 | ~62% |
| The Debut | 60¢ | 51 / 60 | ~60% |
| Obsession | 48¢ | 48 / 49 | ~48% |
| Behemoth | 43¢ | 43 / 51 | ~43% |
| The Invite | 42¢ | 40 / 42 | ~42% |
| Ink | 37¢ | 35 / 41 | ~37% |
| Primetime | 33¢ | 29 / 33 | ~33% |
| The Social Reckoning | 24¢ | 22 / 24 | ~24% |
| Paper Tiger | 19¢ | 18 / 27 | ~19% |
The rest of the board runs from the mid-teens down to the penny bids, and some of the names down there are famous ones: the Michael Jackson biopic Michael trades at 9 cents despite the name recognition, Greta Gerwig's Narnia film sits at 2 cents, and Avengers: Doomsday last traded at 17 cents on a very wide quote. Those pennies carry a specific message: big does not mean nominated.
The Settled Seats: Three Films The Market Has Already Filled
The Odyssey at 98 cents is about as close to settled as an unannounced nomination gets. Christopher Nolan's Universal epic, with Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway and Lupita Nyong'o, follows a film that won Best Picture outright, and traders see no version of January where it misses the field. Note what that 98 cents is not saying: on Kalshi's Best Picture winner market, the same film trades at 53 cents. Priced for a seat, coin flip for the crown.
Project Hail Mary at 87 cents is the busier story, and the market's favorite toy right now: it is the most traded film on the board at over 111,000 lifetime contracts, including roughly 4,600 of the past day's 6,800. The Ryan Gosling sci-fi film opened in March to a $140.9 million worldwide weekend and reviews that ranged from "first great blockbuster of 2026" to "tonally and thematically a bit of a mess." An 87-cent price on a March crowd-pleaser is a bet that the expanded 10-film field keeps doing what it was built to do, which is seat exactly this kind of movie.
Dune: Part Three at 84 cents has not even released yet. Traders are pricing a pattern: the first two Dune films both earned Best Picture nominations, and Denis Villeneuve finishing the trilogy is treated as a near-automatic third.
The Cannes Block: Where The Festival Hardware Went
The next tier belongs to films that already collected trophies. Fjord, at 65 cents, won Cristian Mungiu the Palme d'Or at Cannes in May, and recent history explains the price: Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall and Anora all converted Palme wins into Best Picture nominations, and two of them went on to win the whole thing. At 72 cents, The Black Ball, whose directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi won the Cannes Best Director prize, brings Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close to a Spanish-language drama, a profile Academy voters have rewarded repeatedly since Parasite.
Those two prices frame the market's working theory of this Oscar season: festival validation in hand beats unseen prestige. The Black Ball trades a tick above Wild Horse Nine, Martin McDonagh's November release, and Fjord sits only six cents behind it, even though McDonagh's last two features both earned Best Picture nominations. Wild Horse Nine at 71 cents is priced on pedigree alone; the Cannes films are priced on evidence.
The Seam: Where The Last Slots Get Decided
Add up the top eight prices and the market has filled about six of the 10 seats. The race is everything between 40 and 65 cents, and it is where the day-to-day movement on this board actually happens.
Digger, at 62 cents, is Alejandro G. Iñárritu's satirical black comedy with Tom Cruise, the director of Best Picture winner Birdman handing a role to a star the Academy has never given a competitive Oscar. The price I keep coming back to, though, is Obsession at 48 cents: a horror film from Curry Barker that has already traded over 51,000 contracts, third most on the board, with a tight 48/49 quote that says traders have real conviction on both sides. Horror almost never cracks Best Picture, and a coin-flip price on one suggests this season's field may not look like a normal season's field. Around them, The Debut (60¢ on a softer 51/60 quote), Behemoth (43¢) and The Invite (42¢) fill out the bubble, with the Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson film Paper Tiger (19¢) and Sundance winner Josephine (last traded 33¢ against a 13-cent bid) lurking as the prices most likely to jump on a strong fall festival showing.
This is the part of the board worth rechecking weekly. The top tier will not move until something breaks; the seam moves on every festival premiere and trailer drop between now and January.
A Worked Example: The 10-Slot Math
Here is the first check I run on any nomination board, and it only needs addition. Ten films make the field, so if you sum the implied probabilities across every film, an efficient board lands near $10.00. Take the 37 films on this board with reasonably tight quotes and the bid-ask midpoints add up to roughly $10.40, and that is before the widest-quoted longshots contribute anything. The board is running slightly hot: collectively, the YES prices claim about 10.4 nominations when only 10 exist.
The excluded markets matter just as much. Elsinore shows a 37-cent bid against an 86-cent ask. Its midpoint, around 62 cents, is not information; it is the average of two people shouting different numbers across an empty room. The last trade, 42 cents, is closer to reality but stale. On any lightly traded board, entertainment or weather, the discipline is the same: trust tight quotes, discount wide ones, and never read a midpoint as a probability without checking the spread behind it. The same sum-the-board check works on any fixed-slot market, and it is the fastest way to spot when a board's prices have drifted away from what the structure allows.
Nominee Price Vs. Winner Price: Two Different Questions
The nomination board and the winner board are siblings, and reading them together is where the picture sharpens. Here is the promised payoff on Project Hail Mary: 87 cents to be nominated, 3 cents to win. The market is saying, in numbers, "this movie gets a seat at the table and no speech." The Odyssey runs 98 and 53. The Black Ball, 72 and 18. A film's gap between its two prices is the market's read on whether it is a contender or a guest.
That two-board structure is worth learning because Kalshi uses it everywhere. The same pattern shows up on 2028 presidential nominee boards, where "wins the nomination" and "wins the presidency" are separate markets, and on casting markets like the next James Bond board, where a single announcement settles everything at once. Read the cheaper question first. Nominations, shortlists and fields resolve months before winners, and their prices carry most of the information.
The Same Read, Back In Our Lane
A nomination board rewards the same habit as a Sunday of NFL sides: read the price, check the spread behind it, and act only when the two agree. In sports, dozens of books quote the same question, which turns that disagreement into a findable edge, and it is the edge our analysts work daily in their free expert picks, no account required. OddsShopper Pro compares prices across every major sportsbook to surface the numbers worth betting; it comes with a free week to try, and code OSCARNOM20 takes 20% off your first payment of OS Pro or OS Core if you stay.
FAQ
When are the 2027 Oscar nominations announced? January 21, 2027, with the 99th Academy Awards ceremony following on March 14, 2027. The nomination contracts settle on the official announcement, not the ceremony.
How many films get nominated for Best Picture? Exactly 10, a fixed number since the 2022 ceremony. That fixed field is what makes the sum-the-board check in the worked example possible.
What does an 87-cent nomination price mean? Each contract pays $1 if the film makes the Best Picture field and nothing if it misses, so 87 cents reads as roughly an 87% working probability, with the caveat that wide bid-ask spreads make thin markets much less precise.
Can more than one contract on this board pay out? Yes, up to 10 of them, one per nominated film. That is the core difference from the winner market, where only one contract can settle YES.
The Fine Print
Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange; you must be 18 or older to trade, availability varies by state, and every price in this article is a snapshot from August 12, 2026 that will have moved by the time you read it. Contract terms are defined by each market's official rules on Kalshi, which control over any summary here. Nothing on this page is a recommendation to buy or sell any contract; it is a reading of what the prices currently say.
