Resolution:
This market resolves YES if any of the nominees for Best Picture at the 2026 Oscars have a <20% probability on Kalshi on the day prior to the announcement OR they are missing from that market. Resolves NO otherwise.
Context:
Last year, 9 of the nominees were not "surprising" by this metric ("Nickel Boys" was trading around ~50%, and the other 8 were higher). However, "I'm Still Here" was missing (only 9 options resolved YES), and thus an equivalent market would have resolved YES for the 2025 nominees.
I think this is a fairly reasonable threshold for "surprising"—Kalshi tries to include all the most likely options, and "I'm Still Here" would almost certainly have traded far below 20% (and this year, the market is even more comprehensive).
But note that my definition is a higher bar than just "the 10 most likely movies"—e.g., last year "Sing Sing" was trading slightly higher than "Nickel Boys" and didn't make it, but that by itself doesn't make "Nickel Boys" a sufficiently surprising nomination (the market considered it quite likely).
At the time of market creation, potential nominees that would qualify as "surprising" include "No Other Choice" (~17%), "Avatar: Fire and Ash" (~12%), & "Jay Kelly" (~12%), but not "Wicked: For Good" (~38%) (this is not the list that will be used for resolution, it's just an example).
Most likely, movies will be well above or well below 20%, so it's unlikely we have edge cases on what exactly gets counted. If we get a close call, I will do my best to take an "average market price" (in terms of trades that occurred) for the day prior to announcement (I haven't looked into the Kalshi data yet so I won't pre-define exactly how that works—bettors beware—but I'll do my best to follow standard practices).
The 98th Academy Awards will honor movies released in 2025. This market may close before the announcements.
OSCARS 2026 DASHBOARD
1,000🏅 Top traders
| # | Trader | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ1,379 | |
| 2 | Ṁ810 | |
| 3 | Ṁ221 | |
| 4 | Ṁ33 | |
| 5 | Ṁ32 |
People are also trading
@Ziddletwix F1 went up well above 20 since last week, would have bought a bunch of YES if not for F1 going up there lol
@traders The noms will be announced tomorrow. Glancing at the current Kalshi prices:
The top 10 favorites & F1 > 20% -> "not suprising"
Weapons, No Other Choice, Wicked: For Good, Blue Moon, & etc < 20% -> "surprising"
This is not a final ruling—it's possible that when I checked the price was a temporary blip, and the average price for today is different. But unless someone challenges it & it seems like the price history was near the cutoff (so I'm forced to download the trades to check), I expect this will be the bar (there are 11 non-surprising movies, and the rest would be surprising).
@Panfilo "top 10 favorites & F1" is 11 movies. i didn't list them out, but there are currently 10 movies that are >50% to be nominated.
on kalshi, be careful about assuming the top 10 are the top 10 listed—often kalshi doesn't display some movies at 99% until you've clicked "more" a million times
clarifying that hamnet is listed on kalshi. but to be clear, this won't resolve YES because of some weird quirk that some option had been trading at 99% but gets pulled or has a single trade at 1% on the previous day or etc. the conventional wisdom has 10 "favorites" that have been trading high on kalshi for a while. those will be included as "non-surprising", no matter what.
(so there won't be a case where a conventional pick resolves this YES bc it lacked a kalshi market. for this to resolve YES, it's either something listed on kalshi that's currently low, or something genuinely surprising, like "i'm still here" last yr)
@Mochi it seems like "download price history" just grabs the daily price used for the graph (?) which isn't ideal. so if there's an edge case, i expect i'll need to use the kalshi API to get the actual transactions. my gold standard will be "weighted average of the actual price paid" (the day before if there are transactions then, if it's not traded actively then I'll have to extend it for a few days).