Chalamet or Jordan? Oscars Betting Becoming a $100 Million-Plus Business With Kalshi and Polymarket - Variety

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Oscar trades are dwarfing the volume of prior years with several days to go.

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Timothée Chalamet was the overwhelming favorite to win the best actor Oscar until about two weeks ago, when Michael B. Jordan won SAG’s Actor Award. Suddenly, the price of a Chalamet contract on Kalshi dropped from 68¢ to 51¢.

Chalamet remained a narrow favorite. But when his remarks seeming to deprecate ballet and opera started to draw backlash on March 6, he fell again. Since March 7, Jordan has been the frontrunner.

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It makes little difference — to Kalshi users — that Oscar balloting had closed on March 5, meaning that the ballet controversy came too late to affect the outcome. The vibe had shifted — and the market corrected to meet it.

By March 10, traders had bought $48.4 million worth of Oscar contracts on Kalshi — far exceeding the $29.6 million total from 2025. And with activity expected to ramp up in the days before the Oscar show on Sunday, the final tally for 2026 is projected to run significantly higher.

“It’s definitely one of our faster growing verticals,” says Jack Such, a spokesperson for Kalshi. “It’s one of the tentpole individual events. It’ll do tons of volume.”

The days of $5 per entry office pools are becoming quaint as prediction markets explode. In January, Polymarket, Kalshi’s main rival, went all in on the Golden Globes (which is owned by Penske Media Corporation, which also owns Variety ). The Globes featured real-time odds on the telecast, encouraging viewers to make the show more interesting by putting money on it. Some social media users thought the integration risked overshadowing the awards.

On Polymarket, $30 million had been traded on best picture alone as of Thursday — surpassing the $5.3 million for the entirety of the best picture race in 2025. “One Battle After Another” is the clear favorite on both platforms, at about 75¢. Between the two, more than $100 million has been traded on Oscar contracts thus far.

Prediction markets have been around for several years, but got a major boost in October 2024, when a federal appeals court allowed Kalshi to offer contracts on the upcoming election. While most pollsters saw the race as a coin-flip, Kalshi users bet heavily on Donald Trump — and were proven right.

Since then, the markets have surged in popularity. The major sports betting platforms, DraftKings and FanDuel, have launched their own prediction markets to get in on the action.

DraftKings had been offering Oscar bets since 2019, when it was allowed only in New Jersey. Gambling is regulated at the state level, and since then a few others have approved Oscar betting — Michigan, Indiana, Arizona, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Kansas, Missouri and Puerto Rico.

But prediction markets are not considered gambling. They are regulated as futures contracts by the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission. As prediction platforms moved into sports, traditional gambling interests have pushed back, leading to a fight between state regulators and the CFTC over jurisdiction. The Trump administration’s CFTC has asserted that it alone has authority over prediction markets.

As the markets have grown in popularity, concerns have arisen about insider trading. None of those issues has arisen yet with regards to the Oscars, and the winners themselves are famously a closely guarded secret, known only to the accountants at PwC.

But with contracts offered on which celebrities will attend, and which words will be spoken on stage (“ballet” is trading at 62¢ on Polymarket) it’s not hard to imagine the possibilities for mischief.

Kalshi maintains surveillance systems to flag suspicious trading activity, similar to those used on stock exchanges.

“If the system flags something, we look into it,” Such says. “And then, because we have everyone’s information, we can be like, ‘Oh, wow. This is Nicole Kidman’s high school best friend,’ or whatever, right? The surveillance system and identity verification does the trick.”

Kalshi forbids Academy members from trading on Oscar contracts. The Academy does not have an explicit rule against it, but does have maintain Standards of Conduct that require a general level of professionalism and integrity in the voting process.

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