Guess what kids? You never stop learning — even on summer break.
As Labor Day weekend approaches and schools re-open their doors, Gold Derby can’t help but think about all the lessons we’ve absorbed since the Memorial Day holiday announced the start of the warm-weather season. Lessons like, Jacob Elordi and Zendaya made darn sure they got the Harrison Ford-in-The Force Awakens clause written into their Euphoria Season 3 contracts. Also, only Taylor Swift can convince celebrities to surrender their Instagram-connected smartphones. Oh yeah, and audiences will definitely pay to watch Anne Hathaway battle Meryl Streep and Robert Pattinson… but not rampaging dinosaurs.
But this summer has also offered some instructive courses on what’s happening in the big four awards ceremonies, starting with the Emmys on Sept. 14, and continuing on through the Grammys (Feb. 7), the Oscars (March 14), and the Tonys (June 13). Let’s all open our Summer 2026 textbooks and review, because there will definitely be a pop quiz later.
Something Widow this way comes
Showing, not telling, is good advice for both screenwriters and awards predictors alike. So while we could tell you once more (with feeling) that the Widow’s Bay surge is the Emmy story of the summer, it’s probably better just to show you the Apple TV comedy contender’s upward swing over the past few months. Since launching on the streamer at the end of April, the Katie Dippold-created series first won over viewers and then conquered voters as it earned the highest number of nominations for any freshman series.
Widow’s Bay Emmy morning showing immediately threw a race that previously seemed like a coronation for the fifth and final season of HBO Max’s Hacks into doubt. To be sure, that show leads the overall Comedy Series nomination count with an historic 24 nods and also remains ahead in Gold Derby’s overall odds. But expert Bay-watchers are seeing the tides turning towards an upset in multiple categories, including Best Comedy Series, as the show’s cast and creative team went anywhere and everywhere in the waning days of FYC campaigning.
If one or more of those upsets comes to pass, it’s a potent reminder that major Emmy sea changes can occur in a matter of weeks, not months, and push even the sturdiest of ships off course. But Hacks won’t be completely hexed, not when Jean Smart is on course to make Emmy history with a 5-for-5 clean sweep for Best Comedy Actress. If there’s one thing we’ve learned across five seasons it’s to never bet against the unsinkable Deborah Vance.
Comedy Series
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Winner
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Winner
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Only Murders in the Building
Winner
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Margo’s Got Money Troubles
Winner
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Winner
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Winner
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Winner
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Obsession indicator
The one-two punch of Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’s Backrooms made this summer one for the history books, confirming that YouTube is the new training ground for the next generation of hitmakers… at least in the horror space. (Meanwhile, The Amazing Digital Circus showed that animated success stories can also originate on YouTube.) But we’ve obviously had scary movies strike it big before; what set Obsession in particular apart was how quickly the conversation pivoted from box-office gold to Oscar gold.
And no one benefitted more from that pivot than the movie’s 25-year-old lead actress and future X-Man, Inde Navarrette, whose star power exploded after the movie took off with a younger and very online crowd. (It didn’t hurt that those fans could claim Naverrette as one of their own after it emerged that she previously had a side hustle as a Twitch streamer.)
Calls for her to be nominated for, and win, Best Actress began flooding social media and then crossed over into the mainstream discourse as comparisons were drawn to such recent Oscar winners as Anora‘s Mikey Madison, Weapons‘s Amy Madigan, and — Navarrette’s personal favorite — Sinners‘s Michael B. Jordan. “[His] performance in that movie … is just inspiring for everybody involved, and I feel that Oscar win was extremely deserved,” the actress told us in June.
Navarrette is currently sitting pretty at No. 2 on our experts-only Best Actress leaderboard, aided by the strength of her layered performance, the popularity of Nikki as a character — she’s even joining the annual Halloween Horror Nights extravaganzas at the Universal Studios theme parks — and the fact that summer was light on other contenders. That’s likely going to change now that the fall prestige pictures are about to start rolling out, but rest assured that Focus will launch an awards campaign that keeps us all obsessed with Obsession.
Best Actress
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Inde Navarrette
Obsession
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Virginie Efira
All of a Sudden
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Ruth Madeley
Being Heumann
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Rosalind Eleazar
Misty Green
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Lea Seydoux
Gentle Monster
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Mikey Madison
The Social Reckoning
To Ithaca and beyond
It’s a tale almost as old as Homer’s epic poem: Christopher Nolan drops an Imax-sized spectacle in late July that critics adore, audiences flock to see, and awards prognosticators elevate to the top of almost every single Oscar leaderboard… except for four. Arriving three years after Oppenheimer‘s dominant Oscar run, The Odyssey currently seems on course to sail past that movie’s 13 nominations, and possibly matching or pulling ahead of the 16 bids earned by last year’s record-setter, Sinners.
Firmly lodged in the No. 1 spot on our Best Picture leaderboard since its July 17 release, Nolan’s epic is guaranteed a berth in that category — and many more — regardless of how the back half of the year plays out. The question will be whether the film leaves its hooks in Oscar voters and convinces them to make like Odysseus and return to Ithaca in the months ahead to find the dramatic meat beneath its feast of larger than life images. (Also, will Nolan’s version of Ancient Greece continue to look as dazzling to their eyes after they take in Denis Villeneuve’s futuristic Arrakis?)
Oppenheimer benefitted from being an interior epic that traversed one man’s psyche in grandly cinematic terms; The Odyssey plays out on a much larger stage at at time when voters seem to prefer character-forward stories. You’d have to go back to Peter Jackson’s trilogy-capping Return of the King to find a similarly scaled Best Picture winner and, not coincidentally, that comparison has already been drawn. While it remains to be seen whether Nolan can retain his Oscar crown, when it comes to sheer consistency of success, he bows to no one.
Best Picture
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Song sung BTS
Music lovers have been “Choosin’ Texas” all summer long, as country crooner Ella Langley extended her Billboard‘s Hot 100 chart-topping streak from February into beach season. The record run has also increased her Grammy odds across multiple categories including Record of the Year. With the Top 3 contenders in that category — Olivia Dean, Raye, and Taylor Swift — staying flat, any movement helps liven up what’s been a sleepy couple of months in Grammy-land.
Then again, no news is good news when the Recording Academy suffered some serious backlash in July after a set of rule changes introduced a Best Asian Pop Music Performance category that resulted in presumed frontrunners, South Korean K-pop royalty BTS, declining to submit their latest album Arirang for consideration. “We have decided not to submit to the Grammys this year,” the band members posted on their individual social media channels. “I hope that music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language. Thank you to ARMY and all of you who are always with us.”
While the Recording Academy quickly attempted to clear the air by insisting that BTS would have been eligible across all categories, the optics surrounding the Asian Pop Music award are clearly going to remain an issue when both the summer — and September — end. Here’s to choosin’ better ways to honor global music going forward.
Record of the Year
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Taylor Swift
The Fate of Ophelia
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Ella Langley
Choosin’ Texas
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PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson
Stateside
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9.
Rosalia, Bjork, Yves Tumor
Berghain
10.
Ariana Grande
Hate That I Made You Love Me
Broadway bears
Corn puddin’ and vampire blood may have been on the menu at the 2026 Tony Awards in June, but look for marmalade to be served early and often at the 2027 ceremony. After conquering the West End, Paddington Bear officially confirmed his impending arrival in New York next spring, as Paddington the Musical joins fellow Olivier Award winners like the Rachel Zegler-starring Evita and Inter Alia with Rosamund Pike in making the trip to Broadway in pursuit of Tony honors.
Last season saw two such transfers pulling off wins on both sides of the pond, John Lithgow in Giant and Lesley Manville in Oedipus. Certainly, the hope within the industry is that Broadway audiences will grant Paddington and Evita a longer run than Cats: The Jellicle Ball, which combined furry critters with Andrew Lloyd Weber tunes. That ecstatically reviewed production closed in August after missing out on a Best Musical Revival win, with its Tony-nominated star André De Shields telling Gold Derby that the twin forces of “hate and intolerance” were behind its commercial struggles.
In contrast, the thinking is that Zegler’s star power and Paddington’s enduring popularity make them more likely to attract the tourists and occasional New York theatergoers so essential to ticket sales. And those rising tides could lift the respective Tony boats of both shows, even amid a sea of challengers like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Warriors among new musicals and Lincoln Center’s The Sound of Music in the revival race.
Then again, sometimes all it takes is a dedicated fangbase to keep a Broadway show humming along. Revisiting The Lost Boys recently, we noted that the youth-powered show — which scored 12 nominations last season — seems to have acquired the the same enthusiastic Gen-Z audience that’s kept The Outsiders going for three years and counting after its Best Musical win. Why only stay gold when you can also stay red?
No labor required
Inside Track is powering down for the Labor Day holiday. Enjoy your last tastes of summer, and we’ll be coming to you live from the not-at-all mean streets of Toronto when we return in two weeks.
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