The Academy’s 98th award show featured steep competition and Hollywood glamour Sunday night.
Hitting the ground running, host Conan O’Brien opened cinema’s biggest night at the Dolby Theatre with a thrilling montage and monologue highlighting this year’s nominees, including meme-ifiable Leonardo DiCaprio of “One Battle After Another” and the newly-instated category for Casting. After recognizing the global diversity of the nominee pool and timely resonance of this year’s Oscars, a “Hamnet” hawk delivered O’Brien’s honorary trophy and the comedian set the show in motion.
2025 Academy Award winner Zoe Saldaña presented the first award of the night, bestowing the trophy for Best Supporting Actress to 75-year-old Amy Madigan for her role in “Weapons.” This was Madigan’s first Oscar, occurring exactly 40 years after she was nominated for her supporting performance in “Twice in a Lifetime” in 1986. O’Brien then announced that beginning in 2029, the Academy Awards will shift from ABC to YouTube under a five-year contract.
Actors Will Arnett and Channing Tatum took the stage shortly after to hand the Award for Animated Short Film to the stop-motion project “The Girl Who Cried Pearls,” as well as the Animated Feature Film to Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters,” which also received the Original Song Oscar for Ejae’s musical sensation “Golden.” Writer and director Maggie Kang touched on the importance of Korean representation in film today.
“Thank you to the Academy and to all the fans who got us here. And for those of you who look like me, I’m so sorry that it took us so long to see us in a movie like this,” Kang said. “But it is here, and that means that the next generations don’t have to go longing. This is for Korea and for Koreans everywhere.”
The stars of “Sinners” then performed a stirring and vibrant rendition of “I Lied to You,” led by cast members Miles Caton and Raphael Saadiq and featuring an all-star group of musicians – including Misty Copeland, Eric Gales, Buddy Guy, Brittany Howard, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Jayme Lawson, Li Jun Li, Bobby Rush, Shaboozey and Alice Smith.
Preceding a double win for the horror sci-fi film, “Frankenstein,” in both Costume Design and Makeup and Hairstyling, Anne Hathaway and Anna Wintour addressed each nominee in the category, commenting on their dedicated work as designers and artists. Making Oscars history, five actors – Paul Mescal of “Hamnet,” Gwyneth Paltrow of “Marty Supreme,” Chase Infiniti of “One Battle After Another,” “The Secret Agent’s” Wagner Moura and Delroy Lindo of “Sinners” – joined forces to present the first-ever Casting Award to Cassandra Kulukundis of “One Battle After Another.”
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An equally exciting and monumental segment followed as both “The Singers” and “Two People Exchanging Saliva” tied for Best Live Action Short Film. This was only the seventh tie in Oscars history – and the first in the live-action short category since 1995.
“You are the hope in a world that is dark, and absurd, and ridiculous, and horrifying. But that is why we make films, isn’t it? Because we believe that art can change people’s souls,” Singh said in his acceptance speech. “Maybe it takes ten years’ time, but we can change society through art, through creativity, through theater and ballet, and also cinema.”
Later on, following a skit that featured O’Brien and Sterling K. Brown’s mockery of modern audiences’ failing attention spans, Sean Penn was awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, though he was not present to accept his trophy from 2025 winner Kieran Culkin. Marvel co-stars Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans then took the stage to present Best Adapted Screenplay to “One Battle After Another” and Best Original Screenplay to “Sinners,” further mystifying the elusive forerunner for Best Picture.
An especially heartfelt part of the show came when the Academy paid tribute to film industry visionaries who died in the past year. During the extended In Memoriam segment, “When Harry Met Sally” star Billy Crystal eulogized the late director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, and Rachel McAdams of “The Notebook” (2004) took a moment to remember Oscar-winning legend Diane Keaton.
After a sincere video package, actress Barbra Streisand spoke about Robert Redford, ending her tribute by singing an excerpt from her song “The Way We Were” – the theme to the 1973 romantic drama starring her and Redford.
With Best Visual Effects going to “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” the third film in the franchise, and the award for Production Design presented to “Frankenstein” by previous Oscar-nominees Sigourney Weaver and Pedro Pascal, late night host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel arrived to introduce the nominees in the documentary categories. David Borenstein, director of the documentary feature film “Mr. Nobody against Putin” – which critiques Kremlin’s propaganda, militarization of schools and the invasion of Ukraine – thanked the Academy before addressing the audience.
“What we saw when working with this footage, it’s that you lose it through countless small little acts of complicity. When we act complicit when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities. When we don’t say anything when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume it,” Borenstein said. “We all face a moral choice. But luckily, even a nobody is more powerful than you think.”
The show continued, featuring another “Sinners” win in Best Original Score, an “F1” triumph in Best Sound and the Oscar for Best International Film going to “Sentimental Value.” After a speech dedicated to the Academy’s impact in the film industry, made by 2019 Oscar-nominee Lynette Howell Taylor, Demi Moore presented the award for Best Cinematography to Autumn Durald Arkapaw for her work on “Sinners.”
Arkapaw became the first woman to take home this prize – only three women have ever been nominated in the category – and the cinematographer’s work on the film also made her the first woman to shoot on the large IMAX 65mm and Ultra Panavision 70 formats.
[Related: Film review: Pick your battles, including this one – ‘One Battle After Another’ is a lively romp]
The night carried on with massive wins including Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar for Directing – making him one of few directors to win three or more Oscars for a single movie – and Michael B. Jordan’s triumph in the category of Best Leading Actor, presented by last year’s winner Adrien Brody. His victory received a standing ovation from the audience and made him the sixth Black man to win in the category.
Jordan thanked the “Sinners” cast, including Wunmi Mosaku, “for giving Smoke the opportunity to be him,” and Hailee Steinfeld, who was “the other half of Stack,” in his acceptance speech.
Wrapping up Oscars evening was the Award for Best Leading Actress, which was presented to Jessie Buckley of “Hamnet” – the first Irish actress to win in the category. Buckley’s speech celebrated mothers around the world, fictional and otherwise. In the end, the satirical action-thriller “One Battle After Another” racked up six Oscars, including the top prize for Best Picture.
“Getting to make this film with this cast and this crew and Paul, has already been the greatest filmmaking experience I can fathom. So, receiving this award is just beyond,” Producer Sara Murphy said. “My heart is exploding with gratitude. Thank you.”
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