Was the book or movie better? Check out the books that inspired these 2026 Oscar-nominated films ahead of the March 15 show!
Best Picture Nominees
Frankenstein: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Scientist Victor Frankenstein learns how to create life, but his discovery goes quickly awry when he creates a monster larger and stronger than an ordinary man. As the monster uses its power to destroy everything Victor loves, the young scientist is forced to embark on a treacherous journey to end the monster’s existence. It’s an epic, enthralling tale of horror from a master of suspense.
Hamnet: Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O'Farrell
A thrilling departure: a short, piercing, deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare's 11 year old son Hamnet—a name interchangeable with Hamlet in 15th century Britain—and the years leading up to the production of his great play. England, 1580. A young Latin tutor—penniless, bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman—a wild creature who walks her family's estate with a falcon on her shoulder and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer. Agnes understands plants and potions better than she does people, but once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose gifts as a writer are just beginning to awaken when his beloved young son succumbs to bubonic plague. A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest masterpieces of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent departure from one of our most gifted novelists.
One Battle After Another: Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
Later than usual one summer morning in 1984...On California’s fog-hung North Coast, the enchanted redwood groves of Vineland County harbor a wild assortment of Sixties survivors and refugees from the “Nixonian Reaction,” still struggling with the consequences of their past lives. Aging hippie freak Zoyd Wheeler is revving up for his annual act of televised insanity when news reaches him that his old nemesis, sinister Federal agent Brock Vond, has come storming into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed Justice Department strike force. Zoyd instantly disappears underground, but not before dispatching his teenage daughter Prairie on a dark odyssey into her secret, unspeakable past...
Freely combining disparate elements from American pop culture – spy thrillers, Ninja potboilers, TV soap operas, sci-fi fantasies – Vineland emerges as what Salman Rushdie has called in The New York Times Book Review “that rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years.
Train Dreams: Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.
It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime.
Best Visual Effects Nominee
The Lost Bus: Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by Lizzie Johnson
On November 8, 2018, the people of Paradise, California, awoke to a mottled gray sky and gusty winds. Soon the Camp Fire was upon them, gobbling up an acre a second. Less than two hours after the fire ignited, the town was engulfed in flames, the residents trapped in their homes and cars. By the next morning, eighty-five people were dead. San Francisco Chronicle reporter Lizzie Johnson was there as the town of Paradise burned. She saw the smoldering rubble of a historic covered bridge and the beloved Black Bear Diner and she stayed long afterward, visiting shelters, hotels, and makeshift camps. Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting and reams of public records, including 911 calls and testimony from a grand jury investigation, Johnson provides a minute-by-minute account of the Camp Fire, following residents and first responders as they fight to save themselves and their town...But she also investigates the root causes, from runaway climate change to a deeply flawed alert system to Pacific Gas and Electric's decades-long neglect of critical infrastructure.
Best Makeup and Hairstyling Nominee
The Ugly Stepsister: Cinderella by Charles Perrault
An illustrated collection of eleven tales including such familiar titles as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and less familiar ones such as Tufty Ricky and The Fairies.
All summaries are provided by the publisher.