Prediction Markets Nailed Most Oscar Winners as Trading Volume Pushed Deeper Into Culture
Key Facts
- Kalshi correctly called 18 of 24 Oscar categories, while Polymarket got 19 of 24, based on the favorites heading into the close of Academy voting.
- Both platforms correctly forecast the marquee races, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor.
- Kalshi’s Oscar trading volume topped $105 million, up from $29.6 million in 2025 and $2.3 million in 2024, according to Barron’s.
- The biggest misses came in lower-profile categories, including Cinematography, Animated Short, Documentary Feature and Casting, plus a rare tie in Live Action Short Film.
The markets got the big races right
Prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket were broadly on the money heading into the 2026 Oscars, with traders correctly identifying most of the eventual winners before the ceremony. Polymarket got 19 of 24 categories right, while Kalshi finished 18 for 24, a strong hit rate for a market built around an awards show rather than a sporting event.
More importantly, they were right where the audience was paying closest attention. Both platforms had the eventual winners in the headline races, including One Battle after Another for Best Picture, Paul Thomas Anderson for Best Director, Michael B. Jordan for Best Actor, and Zendaya for Best Actress.
They also lined up correctly on Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Adapted Screenplay, showing that the pricing was not just catching the obvious top-line categories but tracking much of the core board accurately.
Where the markets missed
The misses were concentrated in a handful of categories where Oscar forecasting is usually thinner and volatility is higher. Traders on both platforms were wrong on Best Animated Short Film, Best Documentary Feature Film and Best Casting, while Cinematography split the two platforms because Polymarket had Sinners and Kalshi had One Battle after Another as the favorite.
Live Action Short Film was the oddest result of the night. The Academy’s official result was a tie between The Singers and Two People Exchanging Saliva - an unusual event. Kalshi offered “Tie” as an explicit outcome and priced it at 2%, while Polymarket’s market rules treated the alphabetically first listed film as the winner in the event of a tie.
Volume growth was the clearest signal
The more consequential number was not the hit rate but the money. Kalshi’s Oscar markets generated more than $105 million in trading volume this year, up sharply from $29.6 million in 2025 and $2.3 million in 2024. That is a steep year-over-year expansion for a market built around an awards show rather than sports, politics or macro data.
Kalshi has also been explicit about trying to make entertainment markets part of its broader product push. In a March 13 company announcement tied to a Rotten Tomatoes integration ahead of the Oscars, Will Brackett, Head of Partnerships at Kalshi, said in a statement: “By adding Kalshi’s real-time forecasting, we’re giving fans a dynamic view of how audiences see the awards race evolving in real time.”
Kalshi said in the same release that its Oscar-related markets had already surpassed $48.4 million in total volume as of March 10, before the ceremony itself.
Why This Matters For Bettors
For bettors, the real takeaway is not that prediction markets had a good Oscars night. It is that they did the job they are supposed to do: take messy public information and turn it into prices that are actually useful.
Awards races are full of soft signals - precursor wins, campaign momentum, guild voting, late media sentiment - and there is no clean statistical model the way there is in sports. Kalshi and Polymarket still managed to price most of the board correctly, including the races people actually cared about. That is a strong case for prediction markets as forecasting tools, not just novelty side action.
The second point is scale. A market that gets a few thousand dollars of hobbyist traffic is interesting. A market that pulls more than $100 million around an awards show is something else. At that point, the story is not just that people like betting on the Oscars. It is that cultural events are becoming legitimate trading inventory. More money does not make a market perfect, but it does make the price more meaningful. The bigger the crowd, the harder it is to dismiss the number as just noise.
The broader betting angle is that this is exactly where prediction markets can grow fastest: outside the territory sportsbooks already dominate. Sports betting is mature, heavily optimized, and in many spots brutally efficient. Culture, politics, business and current events are different. They are information markets, and information markets still leave room for people who move faster than the consensus. That does not mean every contract is sharp or every price is trustworthy.
Thin markets, weak rules and strange settlement edge cases still matter. But the Oscars were another reminder that when attention and liquidity show up together, prediction markets start to look a lot less like a gimmick and a lot more like a serious product category.
What Happens Next
The next step is likely more product expansion, not less. Kalshi has already used the Oscars to build distribution through a Rotten Tomatoes partnership, and the company’s own pre-Oscars materials framed awards markets as part of a wider push into entertainment forecasting. That suggests cultural contracts are becoming a strategic acquisition and engagement tool rather than a novelty add-on.
For the wider betting and prediction-market ecosystem, the Oscar result adds another data point in favor of mainstream event contracts - particularly when the underlying event has broad public visibility and a clean settlement mechanism.
The caveat is that edge cases still matter. The Live Action Short tie showed that contract design and settlement rules can become part of the story, especially in thin or unusual markets. As platforms expand further into culture, those rule details will matter more to trader confidence than the headline accuracy rate alone.
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Ari started his gaming career as a poker grinder, then a crypto trader, before stumbling onto prediction markets. He’s now deep into betting on everything from politics to pop culture to tech layoffs. If it has uncertainty and odds, Ari’s in.
Skeptical by nature, Ari is fully convinced that the weirdest bets often hide the sharpest edges. If you’ve ever wondered whether it’s possible to beat the market by reading the news better than everyone else - Ari’s here to show you how.
