It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these. For film awards fantasy fans, Red Carpet Rosters is live for the new season. It is, without exaggeration, the best version of this site that has ever existed.
I’ve always believed Red Carpet Rosters was the most comprehensive film awards fantasy site on the internet.
However, this season, for the first time, I actually believe it’s the best.
That’s a different claim, and I want to tell you why I finally feel comfortable making it.
A Quick Look Back
Some friends of mine and I started doing a version of this back in 2018 with a literal read-only viewer built in R Shiny. I updated everything by hand. My league members had to tell me their starting lineups. From there, we moved to a real fantasy sports codebase, and Red Carpet Rosters became something you could actually manage yourself, draft, and compete on.
This off-season’s overhaul is the first time since that original leap that something has felt like a genuine step-change rather than an incremental improvement. I mean that seriously. This wasn’t a facelift. Nearly every system got rebuilt from the ground up.
What’s Actually New
Joining or starting a league no longer requires me at all. Sign up, verify your email, and you can join a public league, join a friend’s private league with their password, or become a commissioner yourself in minutes. No more emailing me and waiting.
The playoffs are different, nay, better. Instead of a handful of teams in a single-elimination bracket, every team now makes the playoffs. There are five rounds. Win your round and you climb a rung. Lose and you drop one. Even a team that stumbles early has a real path to the Championship. A team on the bottom rung could claw and climb their way to the top because we all know how crazy film awards season can get leading all the way up to the Oscars.
Why the ladder, specifically? Above everything else, I wanted people actively playing for as much of the season as possible. That’s always been the appeal of fantasy sports: the competitiveness doesn’t stop until it has to. But our playoffs aren’t a quick weekend the way they are in other fantasy sports. They stretch across the busiest, most unpredictable months of the entire awards season. Having the Oscar nominations land in the middle of a regular season matchup always felt fundamentally wrong. That’s the moment the whole season has been building toward. It deserves to matter like the postseason moment it actually is.
This is really the same instinct that got us head-to-head scoring in the first place, even though it’s genuinely more work to build. Back in 2018, we tried pure cumulative points, but it became obvious who was going to win about halfway through, and once that’s obvious, what’s left to play for? The old playoff format had the same problem in miniature: once you were down to four teams in the semifinals, everyone else was just watching. A ladder fixes that. Win or lose, every team has another round in front of them, another shot to climb back up. Winning is fun. But you know what’s more fun? More winning!
Overall Rank is a new, live, in-season ranking that updates as real points come in. It’s smarter than sorting by raw points, because it accounts for how deep or shallow each category’s talent pool actually is. A modest scorer in a thin category can be worth more than a bigger scorer in a stacked one. It’s genuinely useful for waiver decisions, and especially for anyone drafting into a league that starts mid-season. (If you want to know more about this, it follows a VORP-style calculation that anyone who takes fantasy sports seriously can tell you is the best way to approach drafts. A quick internet search’s results will go into more and, frankly, better detail. What I will say is that the rank calculation assumes a ten-team league with default settings.)
The whole site has a fresh look, including player photos throughout, draft boards, matchups, statistics pages, all of it.
And there’s a long list of smaller things that add up: a category-by-category points breakdown so you can see exactly where a player’s value is coming from, a live draft queue so you’re never scrambling when it’s your turn, a debut director indicator for players making their first feature, and dozens of quality-of-life fixes that used to be small annoyances that just aren’t anymore.
Getting Ready for October
The season officially kicks off October 27th, with the Gotham Awards nominations. Drafts open in early October, once this year’s default pre-draft rankings are finalized.
That means there’s plenty of runway right now to get set up before things get busy:
- Sign up if you haven’t already, or log back in if it’s been a while. Your existing username and password still work.
- Join or create a league. Public leagues are open now; private leagues can be created instantly.
- Browse the FAQs/Rules page if you want a refresher on how everything works, including the new playoff format.
Thank You
This has been the most ambitious stretch of work this site has ever gone through, and I’m genuinely proud of where it landed. If you’ve been part of this league for years, thank you for sticking with it through every version. If you’re new, welcome because you’re joining at a great time, especially when 2026 features movies like The Odyssey, Project Hail Mary, Digger, Dune III, Obsession, and countless others.
See you on the red carpet.
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