Gotham Awards Fire the Starting Gun as The Rock's Oscar Road Turns Rocky

The race for the 2026 Academy Awards officially began on October 28, when the Gotham Awards unveiled their nominations and fired the starting gun on a season that had been quietly loading its weapons for nearly a year of festival premieres. The Gothams are not the Oscars, and they never pretend to be. Their voters are drawn from small, rotating juries of critics, journalists, film curators and programmers, with separate panels of filmmakers and industry professionals deciding the winners. A name missing from their list is not automatically a campaign in freefall.

But the Gothams do something subtler and, for some contenders, far more valuable: they point the Oscar conversation in a direction it might otherwise never have looked. This year, that finger is pointing squarely at If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You — and, by extension, away from Dwayne Johnson.

A24's Quiet Favorite Refuses to Slip Away

The Mary Bronstein-directed A24 drama has been running this marathon since January, when it premiered at Sundance and generated immediate buzz for star Rose Byrne. It rolled into Berlin in February, where Byrne collected the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance, and she has been lodged in the Best Actress conversation ever since.

Staying visible after such an early start is notoriously difficult — films that peak in January often fade into the wallpaper by autumn. The Gothams proved this one did not. The film landed four nominations:

• 🏆 Best Feature

• 🎬 Best Director

• ✍️ Best Original Screenplay

• 🌟 Outstanding Lead Performance

That is the kind of haul that turns a well-liked indie into a genuine presence. It cements Byrne as a fixture rather than a footnote, and it opens an outside chance in categories nobody expected the film to contest.

The Rock's Problem Is Arithmetic, Not Talent

Johnson remains a leading candidate for Best Actor for The Smashing Machine, the Benny Safdie drama in which he plays MMA legend Mark Kerr. His narrative started beautifully at Venice, where the premiere crowd handed him a teary-eyed standing ovation. Then the floor gave way.

The film crashed at the box office, opening well below projections that had been revised downward only days earlier. Around the same time, A24's other heavyweight, Marty Supreme, stole headlines by appearing as a surprise screening at NYFF and collecting rave reactions. IndieWire reported that Marty Supreme simply was not finished in time to be considered for the Gothams — unsurprising for a December release. And Johnson's own omission is not shocking on its own; nobody is losing sleep over Leonardo DiCaprio either.

But The Smashing Machine being blanked entirely? That stings. The first real chance to rewrite the story after a financial misfire has come and gone.

Why the Money Matters

Here is the part that gets uncomfortable. Campaigns are not free, and studios do not print money in the lobby. A24 has three horses in this race, and only so much hay. If critics groups follow the Gothams' lead and keep elevating If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You, the studio has every reason to shift resources toward the film with four nominations instead of the one with a single viable lane.

Acting nominations for otherwise unrepresented films do happen. Winning for a film that is neither well-represented nor well-liked is a different beast entirely. Johnson did not need another disadvantage stacked on top of a box-office disappointment.

He will not vanish from the conversation overnight. His fame alone keeps the lights on. But the path just narrowed, and the season's opening bell rang for someone else.

Whether the Academy follows the Gothams' lead or writes its own script remains to be seen. For now, one thing is clear: the campaign that needed a boost got it, and the campaign that could not afford a setback received exactly that.