By A boring ceremony with a bounty of thrilling races, the 98th Academy Awards made for combative bloodsport, where competing ballots were accompanied by character-assassinating takedowns of strangers on social media who were swayed by opposing campaign narratives, which I’m not sure is very healthy for humanity, or the long-term health of the cinematic medium, but anything that raises the stakes of art (even artificially!) is desperately needed in an era where even mass murder has been trivialized. I’d much rather have a world where I’m called a treacly traditionalist for loving SENTIMENTAL VALUE by the most unlikeable little freaks you’ve ever met than the world where Joachim Trier scrapes a few 100,000 bucks together every so often to make a new episode in a web series. If this hostility towards each other’s takes on movies is the climate required so that Kleber Mendonça Filho joins the contemporary lexicon of popular filmmakers, then fuck it, we ball, get in your Polymarket parlays now, I condone it all. For the record, I scored 17 out of 24 on my predictions ballot (of course on the year where I aced the Shorts categories, I totally flunked the major acting wins). As in 2024 and 2025, here are my five big takeaways from this year’s show.
PTA Is in the Club
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER withstood the heat. It never became a right-wing lightning rod, and the respectability crowd still clinging to the fledgling use of the term “problematic” couldn’t put a dent in it. At the same time, ONE BATTLE never broke past “prestige,” almost exclusively because so little of its public narrative has been about its incendiary politics: If you’d watched this ceremony not having seen the film, you wouldn’t have the faintest clue that an anti-ICE, pseudo-revolutionary American epic just dominated the glitziest night in show business. Sidebar, big shout-out to Javier “Backbone” Bardem for showing that crowd how the fuck it’s done. But, back to OBAA, it wasn’t seen as an action movie, a thriller, or a comedy (like EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, PARASITE, and ANORA were), it was just the best movie of the year, which many thought would put it at a disadvantage against SINNERS, a movie of many cherished faces, but as was ordained since September, no, the best movie of the year won the “best movie of the year” prize. You can take a look at MARTY SUPREME and see what happens when a movie takes a fucking hit; ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER was the Teflon Don.
Now that Paul Thomas Anderson has at last been coronated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, many of our current greats are represented by a placard on the Ovation Hollywood staircase. There’s not many left who aren’t, and fewer ascendant candidates are viable for a slot. Let’s list out the names: Linklater, Tarantino, the Safdies, Sofia Coppola, Greta Gerwig, Denis Villeneuve, Joachim Trier, Wes Anderson, Park Chan-wook, Spike Lee, David Fincher, Joseph Kosinski, and Yorgos Lanthimos? Wow, I guess Zach Cregger now, too? That’s not a lot of names, but those sure are a lot of years, and we’ve got more artists to discover in the meantime (Justine Triet, Emerald Fennell, and Edward Berger have popped up out of the blue in just the last six years). I think what’s coursing through me right now is that warm glow when a masterpiece wins Best Picture. Thomas Pynchon is now slotted into an American legacy of winning adaptations alongside the works of Dickens, McCarthy, and Shakespeare. What I’m also feeling is the electricity when the adaptation’s director then goes on stage and recites my sleeper cell phrase “1975 Oscars Best Picture nominees,” but there’s no denying that the cool kids of the American film scene have, like symphonic renditions of Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” blasting over a parody of a summer horror flick from a member of the Whitest Kids U’Know, become the establishment.
No One Can Even Pretend To Be Optimistic
In his opening monologue, O’Brien abruptly paused his joke-making to share that the purpose of the Oscars during a time of global turbulence was to “celebrate because we work and hope for better.” Fortunately, this was not some veiled defusal of winners’ potentially charged comments–this wasn’t Conan opening his monologue with a Chalamet-razzing about ballet so that no one else would do it (although this didn’t stop that Best Live Action Short dork). I really did believe him, and his jab about the Brits arresting their pedophiles dissuaded any notion that the show was going to discourage any acknowledgements of the real world. We do hope things will be better, that’s right! And then nearly every time after that, Conan did a bit about how fucking fucked this medium is. The Oscars will be aired exclusively on YouTube starting in 2029, so here’s a sketch about nonstop conservative pop-up ads interrupting the broadcast. Gen Z is propping up movie ticket sales, so here’s a (tired) bit about SUBWAY SURFERS! The vertical-cropping and breaking up of classic movies into Reels was lampooned in a bit that was … not really a lampoon, but rather an incredibly accurate depiction of how TCM, Warner, and, yes, the Academy are going about sharing film clips on their socials. Netflix is killing attention spans, so here’s Conan literally berating Ted Sarandos. That Sarandos one was quite rewarding, but fucking woof. If the talent can’t act hopeful for even 10 minutes, then why are we expected to?
Future-Proofing the “In Memoriam”
The legends are dead or dying. Real fucking legends, I mean folks who entertained your grandmother, your dad, and even you growing up, are dropping. It seems that the gravity of Rob Reiner’s disturbing murder has pivoted the Academy’s approach to retrospectives. Gone are the dopey supercuts of “Best James Bond Moments,” and in their place was a touching extended “In Memoriam” that sagely repurposed the painfully stiff speechifying of years-past Best Actor inductions so that Billy Crystal and Barbra Streisand could eulogize their fallen compatriots. Trimming the fat so that the pre-established segments can be deepened with pathos and legitimate remembrance. This is one of those things the Oscars should’ve been doing for 30 years already. It sucks that David Lynch got a nine-second tribute last year, but at least Francis Ford Coppola and the rest of the Movie Brats won’t.
On a side note, the excisions were extraordinarily strange. One could argue that James Van Der Beek, George Wendt, Eric Dane, and Malcolm-Jamal Warner were primarily television actors, which is too cynical a conclusion even for me, but Brigitte Bardot? Last year they excluded Alain Delon, which is arguably a more stunning omission, so perhaps there’s a vendetta against French icons, and if that’s who you have to snub so that obscure costume designers can earn a posthumous spotlight, then so be it, but the making of this segment is one where I’d most like to be a fly on the wall in Academy HQ. I mean, they put in Mohammad Bakri and not Harold from HAROLD AND MAUDE, that’s kinda nuts, right? And for borrowing so heavily from the Game Awards (the Muppets-coded THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU spon-con for one, but that Best Original Score presentation borrowed TGA’s Game of the Year presentation bar for bar), it’s trashy that IMAX’s David Keighley wasn’t recognized for his contributions to an industry-saving technology–Geoff is right to be mad.
Why Is Awards Season 15 Months Long?
I’ll tell you what, the year between telecasts wasn’t spent oiling the gears. Numerous up-in-the-air races made for a suspenseful viewing, but that built-in entertainment was unaided by a laggy production rife with rookie microphone snafus, the awkward din of the auditorium chattering over Best Picture nominee montages, and even a moment where a strung-out Conan O’Brien repeating, “Almost there, almost there” was unsure if the ceremony was back from a commercial break. Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman’s MOULIN ROUGE duet made me want to jump out of my skin and off a bridge, the turgid Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. banter was a grim reminder of Winter’s impending DOOMSDAY bomb, and the unending BRIDESMAIDS reunion was pretty savagely undercut by Benicio Del Toro wordlessly annihilating their best efforts to draw chuckles from a listless crowd, but at least Lewis Pullman got to meet his dad for the first time! For all the ceremonies to half-ass, I don’t know if the SINNERS versus ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER year was the one to crash-course a new crew with! Thousands of children were watching their first Oscars to watch a “Golden” production, only for the show runners to shelve it for nearly three hours (almost 10 PM EST!). The performance of “I Lied To You” with much of the SINNERS cast reprising their roles in the centerpiece was both a total triumph and a pitch for the Broadway adaptation that Coogler most certainly kept in mind when he was currying the rights for the IP, but no other moment even compared.
So if this is the version of the show that has a full year to prepare, then what’s really the harm in slashing a month? It’s March 2026 and you’ve got red carpet motherfuckers still asking Chase Infiniti about TITANIC. Enough is enough. It is completely ordinary to see these stars on TV, so the Oscars lack the classical allure of having superstars descend upon your home television set. There’s still some spark, don’t get me wrong: You can’t show me Mikey Madison looking like THAT and then make me watch a Burger King humiliation ritual where they can’t stop telling me how much they suck cock at making hamburgers. That doesn’t make me feel very nice about my Sunday night watching the Oscars in my garage while every prognosticator on Twitter is on their third month of a mass psychosis episode. But you see the camera pan over the long faces in that crowd of folks who’ve spent season after season reciting the same Q&A anecdotes and–in a real “the stars are just like us!” moment of shared connection–you reckon that nobody there feels very nice about watching the Oscars either. And I’m sure they are also craving the day where we can stop talking about HAMNET, or when ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER gets to live its life as “a great movie” instead of “literally worse for Black women than the Atlantic slave trade.” Conan’s opening the show with lunch meat punchlines, like, folks, let’s wrap this shit up in early February, the whole town is begging you.
Ok, But Actually, How Did Michael B. Jordan Win?
MBJ was not the star of SINNERS, nor its campaign run. Ryan Coogler was the man of the hour since the jump, and while the Internet is not real life, you just did not get the same quantity of conversations about the totality of the Smoke and Stack performances as you did about Chalamet’s final sob in MARTY SUPREME, DiCaprio’s defeated musings on Willa’s hair, every one of Andrew Scott’s flattenings of Ethan Hawke’s heart in BLUE MOON, or Wagner Moura’s magnetic drawl in the opening gas station shakedown of THE SECRET AGENT. Michael B. Jordan is a celebrated, unbelievably well-liked sweetheart, so I’m not stunned that his peers hoisted him to this win. What I think I’m responding to is that this trophy–usually reserved for showstoppers who force the rest of the film to cling onto them–was awarded to a sturdy pillar of the overall storytelling experience. Jordan is an ingredient, not the dish of SINNERS. That doesn’t really happen at the Oscars. Truly, how did this happen? I didn’t see any traction for MBJ, but the timeline lays out a simple answer. Michael B. Jordan endured an unfortunate BAFTA incident on February 22nd that curries both sympathy and awareness to his presence in the race, he wins the SAG on March 1st in a viral moment thanks to Viola Davis, and then closes the gap in votes by March 6th. Bing, bop, boom, boom, boom, bop, bam. Was that all it was? It’s possible! I mean, that may very well have also been how Amy Madigan won Best Supporting Actress against four performances in Best Picture-nominated films. Penn and Buckley rounded out SAG’s Actor Awards, too, I mean, that late-game ceremony may have been the deciding factor for every leftover Oscar ballot (and with this being the first year where the Academy required app-users to watch every nominated film for their vote to be eligible, it’s quite possible that 2026 saw a boost in late-minute voters). For as much as it makes sense, it makes even less the more I think about it.
Flummoxing, pattern-less narratives have got me scratching my head in the aftermath. SINNERS garnered so much enthusiasm that it scored Best Actor and Best Cinematography, but it couldn’t extend that support to a crafts sweep? FRANKENSTEIN somehow held fast. Sean Penn can sneak a third Oscar (both an incredible performance and a waste of a win), but DiCaprio was never a frontrunner because … He already had an Oscar? The newly international voting body has spent this decade proving its worldly bona fides–not to mention adoration for Brazil–but then Wagner Moura isn’t the default runner-up when the Chalamet campaign hits an EsDeeKid-sized pothole? The Academy loves Timmy Chalamet up until they all see how much he loves them back? Timmy, if you’re reading this, I promise it doesn’t have to be like this. You just blitzed through your THE AVIATOR, INCEPTION, and THE WOLF OF WALL STREET trifecta to try to win an Oscar, you didn’t space them out, so I’m telling you, please, God, you don’t have to do a REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, JAY EDGAR, and THE GREAT GATSBY run. We will stop asking you about winning an Oscar, you just have to stop fucking saying that you want to win one, okay, it’s that easy! Good for Michael B. Jordan, who went on stage and charmed a crowd with yet another of the night’s me-me-me acceptance speeches (sorely disappointing on a night where such overtly political cinema prospered–come on, gang, you can’t let the Norwegian be the only one name-dropping James Baldwin), however, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t underwhelmed.
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