Klara, Alicja, Karolinaand Antoni, all 17, discuss the Oscars for acting
From the left: Klara Hammudeh, Antoni Popczyński, Alicja Melaniuk and Karolina Orfinger
14 April 2026
Oscars 2026. Four acting races, four strong opinions – and four correct predictions
On Oscar night, Klara Hammudeh, Alicja Melaniuk, Karolina Orfinger and Antoni Popczyński from Harbingers’ Film & Book Club gathered in the studio to discuss four of the Academy Awards’ most closely watched categories: Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress.
What began as a debate over frontrunners, controversies and career narratives quickly became something more revealing – a conversation not only about who would win, but about what the Academy is really rewarding when it chooses a performance.
Across the discussion, the panel returned to a recurring tension between individual performance and the wider context surrounding it.
In the Best Actor race, that meant weighing Timothée Chalamet’s long campaign and star persona against Michael B. Jordan’s commanding dual role in Sinners. In Best Actress, the conversation was more decisive, with Jessie Buckley’s performance in Hamnet emerging as the clearest point of agreement: emotionally devastating, technically controlled, and impossible to ignore.
Similar contrasts shaped the supporting categories, where Sean Penn’s disturbing intensity in One Battle After Another and Amy Madigan’s unsettling turn in Weapons stood out as examples of performances that transformed their films from within.
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When the awards were finally announced, the group found that all four of their final predictions had been correct. Yet the real value of the discussion lay less in prediction than in interpretation.
The panel asked the same underlying question: should an Oscar honour a single role in isolation, or also reflect a wider story about an actor’s career, public image, and cultural moment?
The results of the 2026 Oscars night did not fully settle that question. Instead, they confirmed how much of the Oscars’ meaning lies in the debate around the winners as much as in the winners themselves.
