Oscar Winner: Best Actor

Why we chose it

This is the "everyone's overdue" Oscar bloodbath. Cruise leads on pure faith in Digger — Iñárritu's dark comedy where he plays a Southern oil baron who causes a global catastrophe, out October 2 — and the joke is that CinemaCon footage showed him barely recognizable with a beer belly and comb-over: the never-won-competitively legend finally doing an ugly transformation for the guy who got DiCaprio his Revenant statue.

The catch: the presumed frontrunner won't screen for another three months, so that 24% is priced entirely on a trailer. Damon is the Nolan-hit play — The Odyssey made $639 million in two weekends and will be showered with nominations — but pundits say the real threat is Malkovich, an overdue 73-year-old whose two noms came 40+ years ago, doing career-best work in Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine, which left Telluride to a frontrunner-making ovation.

Scott's 14% is the classic bait: in Elsinore he plays Ian Charleson, who kept performing Hamlet after a terminal AIDS diagnosis — pure Academy catnip, but the film around him is shakier. Beware the favorite tax: last year Chalamet led early before Michael B. Jordan's late surge won it. And Pattinson's misspelled longshot may already be dead — Netflix moved Here Comes the Flood off this year's calendar.