Paul Thomas Anderson finally got his Oscar. Michael B. Jordan played twins and won for both of them. A K-pop song made history. And somewhere, Sean Penn did not bother to show up. The 98th Academy Awards, held Sunday night at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, delivered one of the most culturally electric ceremonies in recent memory, closing out a marathon awards season defined by two Warner Bros. powerhouses in a battle for the ages.
One Battle After Another, Anderson’s dark political thriller about a washed-up revolutionary fighting to protect his daughter, captured six Academy Awards on the night, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, Best Film Editing, and the first-ever Oscar for Best Casting. It was a sweep that felt simultaneously inevitable and deeply earned. Anderson, nominated for an Oscar fourteen times over the course of his career without a single win, accepted the Best Director prize with pensive, almost disbelieving modesty, telling the audience, “You make a guy work hard for one of these. I really appreciate it.” When producer Sara Murphy accepted the Best Picture award alongside him, she summed up the emotional weight of the night simply: “My heart is exploding with gratitude.” Anderson closed the show with a toast: “What a night, you guys. Let’s have a martini.”
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which arrived at the ceremony as the most-nominated film in Oscar history with sixteen nominations, a period vampire thriller rooted in the origins of Blues music and the richness of southern Black culture, left with four awards and an argument that it, too, had genuinely won the night. The film claimed Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan, Best Original Screenplay for Coogler, Best Original Score for Ludwig Göransson, and Best Cinematography for Autumn Durald Arkapaw. Arkapaw’s win was a landmark: she became the first woman, and the first woman of color, ever to win the Academy Award for cinematography. She asked every woman in the audience to stand with her, and the room obliged. Reporters at the ceremony described it as the most electric moment inside the Dolby all night. Jordan’s victory, meanwhile, capped a performance in which he played two distinct characters, twins named Smoke and Stack, and became the first actor in Oscar history to win for a dual role in the same film. In the press room, he told aspiring performers, “Be honest and truthful, and dream big, man.”
On the acting side, Jessie Buckley completed what had been the most predictable sweep of the season by winning Best Actress for her portrayal of Agnes Shakespeare in Hamnet. She was the only acting winner whose outcome felt settled well before the envelope was opened. Far more contentious was Best Supporting Actress, where Amy Madigan, playing the deeply unsettling Aunt Gladys in the horror film Weapons, took the prize over several formidable competitors, marking a significant late-career triumph and a rare major Oscar win for a genre film. Madigan noted that she had last been nominated for a supporting actress award back in 1986 for Twice in a Life. Best Supporting Actor went to Sean Penn for One Battle After Another, his third career Oscar and first in the supporting category. Penn, who has largely avoided public appearances throughout the awards season, was not present at the ceremony. Kieran Culkin, last year’s supporting actor winner, stepped to the microphone to accept on Penn’s behalf and delivered a deliciously dry line: “Sean Penn couldn’t be here this evening. Or didn’t want to.”
Beyond the film-versus-film narrative, the night belonged in important ways to KPop Demon Hunters, the Netflix animated sensation that has racked up close to 600 million views and already secured a sequel. The film won Best Animated Feature, and its song “Golden,” performed by the trio EJAE, Rei Ami, and Audrey Nuna as the girl group HUNTRIX, became the first K-pop song ever to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song. The performance itself was one of the visual highlights of the evening, incorporating traditional Korean hanbok costumes and a crowd of audience members waving light sticks in the fashion standard at K-pop concerts. EJAE, getting emotional backstage, reflected on what the win meant: growing up, she said, people didn’t know where Korea was. Now Korean lyrics are being sung all over the world.
Netflix, despite finishing behind Warner Bros. on the overall tally, claimed seven awards on the night, with Frankenstein alone taking three craft trophies: Best Costume Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and Best Production Design. Guillermo del Toro’s gothic reimagining also drew one of the more memorable backstage interviews of the season. Apple Original Films’ racing drama F1 claimed Best Sound. The documentary space was dominated by Mr. Nobody Against Putin, whose protagonist delivered a powerful acceptance speech in Russian that moved much of the room. The Academy’s first-ever award for Best Casting, a new category representing the first expansion of Oscar categories since Best Animated Feature was introduced in 2002, went to Cassandra Kulukundis for One Battle After Another. The live-action short film category produced a genuine rarity: a tie, with The Singers and Two People Exchanging Saliva sharing the award. A visibly stunned presenter Kumail Nanjiani opened the envelope, paused, and announced it evenly.
Conan O’Brien hosted the ceremony for the second consecutive year, and while he had told reporters in the days prior that he intended to steer away from politics, the monologue he actually delivered was something considerably more pointed. He appeared in a pretaped opening sketch dressed as Aunt Gladys from Weapons, careening through the sets of every Best Picture nominee before removing the wig to address the room. He quipped that he was “the last human host of the Academy Awards,” predicting that next year’s emcee would be a Waymo in a tux. He needled Timothée Chalamet, who arrived with girlfriend Kylie Jenner and laughed gamely along, over the actor’s controversial dismissal of opera and ballet, suggesting that security was tight because of threats “from both the opera and ballet communities. They’re just mad you left out jazz.” He took shots at Netflix chief Ted Sarandos for attending a theater, at the Epstein files, at the Trump administration’s renaming of the Kennedy Center, and at the American healthcare system. Between presenting segments, O’Brien noted, “We’re coming to you live from the ‘Has A Small Penis Theater.’ Let’s see him put his name in front of that,” a jab at the president’s well-documented habit of attaching his name to federal landmarks. The joke that drew the loudest groan of the night involved the absence of British acting nominees for the first time since 2012: “A British spokesperson said, ‘Yeah, well, at least we arrest our pedophiles.'” He closed his monologue not with a punchline, however, but with a sincere address to the global audience, noting that 31 countries across six continents were represented in the night’s films and that the ceremony was, in uncertain times, a tribute to optimism, patience, and the possibility of beauty through collaboration.
The political current running through the room did not end with the host. Presenter Javier Bardem opened his remarks with “No to war and free Palestine” before reading the winner for Best International Feature Film, which went to Norway’s Sentimental Value. That film’s director, Joachim Trier, closed his acceptance speech by paraphrasing James Baldwin and urging audiences not to vote for politicians who fail to take children’s welfare seriously. Documentary winners used their time at the microphone to speak against oligarchy, and gun violence advocates brought the mother of a school shooting victim onstage. Former four-time host Jimmy Kimmel, presenting a pair of trophies, landed digs at the president and at a documentary produced by the first lady. Amid it all, O’Brien’s framing from the opening, that these were chaotic and frightening times but that the evening was a case for optimism, felt less like ceremony boilerplate and more like a genuine thesis for what the night was attempting to do.
The evening also delivered a wave of reunion moments that briefly lifted the ceremony into the register of something warmer than awards protocol usually allows. Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans, marking the 14th anniversary of the original Avengers film and looking ahead to their return in Avengers: Doomsday later in 2026, presented the screenplay awards together. The original Bridesmaids cast, including current nominee Rose Byrne, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Melissa McCarthy, and Ellie Kemper, reunited to present the Original Score and Sound awards, receiving an ovation so sustained that Yahoo’s live correspondent inside the room reported she could not remember hearing anything as electric all night. Billy Crystal honored the late Rob Reiner. Barbra Streisand paid tribute to Robert Redford, closing with the message that art can lead change.
Sinners entered the night as the record holder. One Battle After Another ended it as the winner. But the 98th Academy Awards, with its historic cinematography prize, its first K-pop song winner, its new casting category, its absent supporting actor, its political presenters, and its host who turned a comedy monologue into a brief and genuine appeal to the better instincts of a divided world, may ultimately be remembered less for who won and more for how alive the whole thing felt.