The Oscars 2026

The 2026 Oscars ceremony was a night of satisfying firsts. Jessie Buckley became the first Irish woman to win the best actress Oscar, taking home a long-predicted award for her searing performance as Shakespeare’s bereaved wife Agnes Hathaway in Hamnet. Meanwhile, Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman and the first Black person to win for cinematography for her work on the Depression-era vampire blockbuster Sinners.

Family drama Sentimental Value was the first Norwegian film to pick up the international feature film award, and a new Oscar for casting was awarded for the very first time to One Battle After Another casting director Cassandra Kulukundis. Then there was a first Oscar win for 75-year-old Amy Madigan, as best supporting actress for her role in the thriller Weapons, 40 years after she was last nominated. And to cap it all, after 14 years of trying and 11 previous nominations, the director Paul Thomas Anderson won his first ever Oscar. In fact, he won three.

Photo: Getty Images

“You make a guy work for one of these,” he joked, as he picked up the best director statue, one of six Oscars won by One Battle After Another, his comedy thriller inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which wryly presents radicalism and resistance in an America in the grip of a sinister police state. The movie also took home best picture—and was the night’s big winner, picking up best adapted screenplay (for Anderson), best editing (for Andy Jergensen), and best supporting actor for Sean Penn who plays a racist soldier.

Penn wasn’t there to collect it (“He couldn’t be here this evening, or didn’t want to,” said presenter Kieran Culkin), and so missed celebrating his own piece of history as only the fourth actor to win three Academy Awards, joining the likes of Daniel Day Lewis, Jack Nicholson, and Walter Brennan.

Even so, the rest of the cast, led by an exuberant Teyana Taylor, flooded onto the stage to celebrate the best picture award with wild joy. In his third speech of the night, Anderson found exactly the right words to sum up the mood of the ceremony by comparing this rich cinematic year with 1975. “The nominees in that year were One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, and Nashville,” he said. “There is no best among them. There is just what the mood might be that day. But we’re happy to be part of this; a wonderful, wonderful journey.”

It was an elegant tribute to the strength of the other best picture nominees, particularly Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which ties themes of African American identity into a narrative about music and vampires and was the other frontrunner for the prize in a closely fought Oscar race. In the end, Sinners bagged four of its record 16 nominations, winning best original screenplay for Coogler, best score for Ludwig Göransson, best cinematography, and best actor for Michael B Jordan, who plays Smoke and Stack, twin owners of a Delta juke joint.

Jordan’s win was a stand-out moment of the night, as he hugged his delighted mother and emotionally thanked Coogler, with whom he has made five films. “You gave me opportunity and space to be seen,” he said, before thanking other Black actors who had paved the way, including Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, and Will Smith, and promising he would “keep stepping up and keep being the best version of myself I can be.”

Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s victory for her cinematography created another of the ceremony’s most memorable images when Coogler rushed to the back of the room to bring her son to the front to hear his mother’s ground-breaking speech. She asked all the women in the room to stand, an impressive number since this year’s awards has seen a record 74 nominees across all categories. “I have felt so much love from all the women on this whole campaign and gotten to meet so many people and I just feel moments like this happen because of you guys, and I want to thank you for that,” she said.

In her heartfelt best actress acceptance speech, Buckley also thanked women—specifically her fellow nominees. “Thank you to the incredible women that I stand beside,” she said. “I am inspired by your art and your heart, and I want to work with every single one of you.” She went on to talk about the fact that she had played a mother just before she became pregnant with her daughter Isla, now eight months old. “I love you and I love being your mom and I can’t wait to discover life beside you.”

“It’s Mother’s Day in the UK today,” she concluded. “So I would like to dedicate this to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart. We all come from a lineage of women who continued to create against all odds.”

Photo: Getty Images

Meanwhile, it was another night of disappointment for Timothée Chalamet, once odds-on to win the best actor prize for his performance as an obsessed tennis player in Marty Supreme. Just as last year, when he was hotly tipped to win for playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown and went home empty-handed, the film itself won none of its nominations.

What’s more, Chalamet found himself the butt of host Conan O’Brien’s jokes in a smartly written opening monologue. “Security is extremely tight tonight,” he said. “I’m told there are concerns about attacks from both the opera and ballet communities.” It was part of a sophisticated piece of tightrope walking from O’Brien, which kept the ceremony both lighter and smarter than it often is.

He landed jabs at AI and world strife, but his tone was on the whole gentle. “Everyone watching right now, around the world, is all too aware that these are very frightening times. It’s at moments like these that I believe that the Oscars are particularly resonant: 31 countries across six continents are represented this evening and every film we salute is the product of thousands of people speaking different languages, working hard to make something of beauty.”

Other presenters were more direct. Javier Bardem took to the stage and before presenting the award for best international feature film, said: “No to war, and free Palestine.” Presenter Jimmy Kimmel mocked President Trump by pointing out that Melania’s Amazon-backed documentary about her life wasn’t up for any awards.

Daniel Borenstein, co-director of the best documentary feature winner Mr Nobody Against Putin, offered a warning: “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 produce it and consume it. We all face a moral choice, but even a nobody is more powerful than we think.”

In one of the most moving moments of the night, the team behind Netflix’s documentary short All the Empty Rooms, which shows the empty bedrooms of children killed in school shootings, had Gloria Cazares, mother of one of those victims, accept the award for best documentary short. “My daughter Jackie was nine years old when she was killed,” she said. “Since that day her bedroom has been frozen in time. Gun violence is now the number one cause of death in kids and teens. We believe that if the world could see their empty bedrooms, it would be a different America.”

Elsewhere, the ceremony was its usual mixture of the beautifully achieved and the messy. Some presenting jokes landed with force—for example, a deadpan Anna Wintour putting on her famous sunglasses and failing to compliment Anne Hathaway’s dress when they together presented the award for best costume. Others, such as a duologue for father and son Bill and Lewis Pullman, fell flat. And a Bridesmaids reunion—much as we love them—seemed to go on forever.

But, in general, this year’s Oscars felt like a good night for Hollywood—mostly because it was honoring films that people had actually watched and widely enjoyed. Sinners, One Battle After Another, and Hamnet have been successful at the box office and admired by viewers. So has F1, which—as widely predicted—won best sound. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which took home three Oscars in the technical categories, has been a streaming success for Netflix. Indeed, with plenty of firsts and lots to talk about, the 98th Academy Awards will be one for the history books.

See Every Red Carpet Look From the 2026 Oscars:

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