The Irish Film & TV Academy sat down with a selection committee that included Lee Cronin, the director of 'Evil Dead Rise', and Lisa McGee, the creator of 'Derry Girls', and picked an Irish-language heist thriller as the country's shot at an Oscar. The film is called 'Aontas'. The director is Damian McCann. And per Variety, it now enters the best international feature race for the 2027 Academy Awards.
That is a genuinely interesting piece of awards news. It is also, from the point of view of Polymarket's headline nominations market, almost entirely beside the point. The contract asking which film will pull the most nominations at the 99th Academy Awards is not tracking the international feature race. It is tracking the tentpoles. And the tentpole picture is unusually settled.
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What the market is actually asking
Here is the mechanical bit, because it matters. The most-nominations market on Polymarket resolves to whichever film picks up the greatest count of Oscar nominations across every category on nominations morning. Not wins. Not the best picture race. Nominations, summed up across acting, craft, screenplay, score, and everything else the Academy hands out.
That structure heavily favours the sort of film that hoovers up craft nods. A sprawling epic with lavish production design, a big score, complex sound, veteran cast, and a director the Academy already loves will tend to rack up double-figure nominations almost automatically. A tight Irish-language heist thriller, however well-received, is not built to compete on that scoreboard. It is built to compete in one category: international feature.
So 'Aontas' being chosen as Ireland's submission does not make it a contender on this contract. But the reason is not the obvious one, and the obvious one is wrong.
'Aontas' is not excluded. The contract resolves to whichever film takes the most nominations, full stop, with no restriction to the names on the board. Alongside the eight quoted titles there is a catch-all leg called 'Other', and that is where any unlisted film resolves. If 'Aontas' somehow led the field on nominations morning, the contract would pay out through 'Other'. It is eligible. Nobody is pricing it, which is a different thing entirely.
The board is telling you how it was built
Open the market and you find twenty-two legs, not eight. Eight are named films: 'The Odyssey', 'Dune: Messiah', 'Project Hail Mary', 'Wild Horse Nine', 'The Social Reckoning', 'Disclosure Day', 'Wuthering Heights' and 'The Bride!'. One is 'Other'. The remaining thirteen are called 'Film C', 'Film D', 'Film E', and so on through 'Film O'.
Those thirteen are not obscure contenders. They are empty slots. Each one shows a bid of zero against an ask of one hundred, with no turnover at all, which is what a leg looks like when nobody has ever traded it and nothing has been assigned to it. The operator built a board with room for a field, lettered the slots, and listed them before the films existed to put in them.
That is worth more than it first appears. A contract that lists more outcomes than there are candidates is showing you its construction rather than a market view, and a reader counting names on the page should know which they are looking at. Thirteen lettered placeholders and a catch-all are scaffolding. Eight quoted titles are the market.
The pricing is lopsided, and has been for a while
A quick look at the board tells you where the smart money has parked. 'The Odyssey' sits at 87% as of 28 August. 'Dune: Messiah' is on 6%. 'Project Hail Mary' is on 4%. 'Wild Horse Nine' and 'The Social Reckoning' are both under one per cent but genuinely two-sided.
The last three named films need describing precisely, because the loose word is misleading. 'Disclosure Day', 'Wuthering Heights' and 'The Bride!' each carry an ask of a tenth of a per cent or so against a bid of zero. They are not unquoted; they are one-sided. Somebody is willing to sell, and nobody at all is willing to buy at any price. A quote with no bid behind it is not a price in any sense worth reading, and treating it as one is how a board with three dead legs gets described as a field of eight.
Add the bids up across every leg and you get 94.8%, comfortably under a hundred, which is what a coherent book should look like: the shortfall is the spread. The ask side sums to something absurd, but that is arithmetic on fourteen empty legs each quoted at a hundred rather than a statement about the market, so it is not a number to repeat.
That is not a race. That is a market that has picked its horse and moved on to other questions. Lifetime turnover on the contract stands at $125,745 across the whole run, and there has been almost no trading against that lifetime figure in the last twenty-four hours. Quiet. Settled. The traders who cared have already made their call, and nothing in this week's news is nudging them to revisit.
A piece of news like the Irish submission is exactly the kind of story that reads as significant on a film blog and lands as noise on a nominations contract. It is a real event in the awards calendar. It just does not touch the mechanical question the market is trying to answer, which is: whose craft categories will get read out on nominations morning.
Why quiet markets can still be useful
There is a temptation, when a contract is trading at 87% for the favourite and 6% for the second, to say the market has nothing left to tell you. That is not quite right. What the pricing is telling you is that traders who follow this stuff closely have looked at the field, looked at the shape of the Academy's tastes over the last few cycles, and concluded that one film is doing the heavy lifting for craft nods. If you agree, there is nothing to trade. If you disagree, this is precisely the sort of market where you would want to be looking, because a wrong-but-confident consensus is the only kind of consensus worth betting against.
And if you are new to reading this kind of contract, the mechanics of a nominations count as a resolution source are worth understanding on their own. Our guide to how prediction market odds work walks through the basics. For the specific question of what the number actually represents, what is implied probability is the right entry point.
The upshot for 'Aontas' is that the international feature race has its own logic and its own likely rewards, and Ireland's committee has made a bold choice by going with an Irish-language genre picture rather than something more obviously arthouse. That is a story worth following. On this contract it is a story with no price attached, which is not the same as a story the contract refuses to hear.
iPredicta tracks the Oscar nominations market on Polymarket in our film and awards coverage, and where the international feature race attracts its own dedicated contracts, we surface those separately so readers can see which parts of the awards calendar are actually being priced. On this one, the answer today is: the tentpoles, and mostly just one of them.
Frequently asked questions
Can 'Aontas' win Polymarket's most-nominations market?
Yes. The contract resolves to whichever film receives the most Oscar nominations, and it is not restricted to the titles printed on the board. The market carries a catch-all 'Other' leg, and any film outside the named eight resolves through it. So 'Aontas' is eligible in exactly the way every other unlisted film is eligible. What it does not have is a quote: nobody is pricing that outcome, which reflects what traders think is likely rather than what the rules permit.
Why is 'The Odyssey' priced so far ahead of everything else?
The market is counting total nominations across all categories, and traders appear to be reading it as a large-scale prestige production that will draw heavy craft-category nods. Whether that read is right is a separate question. The pricing simply reflects that the people trading the contract expect it to sweep the craft categories in a way its rivals will not.
