The 98th Academy Awards belonged, predictably, to Paul Thomas Anderson. His political thriller One Battle After Another swept six Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for an absent Sean Penn. Conan O’Brien returned as host and delivered the sharpest monologue in years, threading comedy and political unease with genuine skill, taking aim at the current administration, the Epstein files and Timothée Chalamet’s cultural takes in roughly equal measure.
The soul of the evening, however, was Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. The supernatural blues horror took Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan’s extraordinary dual performance as twins Smoke and Stack, Best Original Screenplay for Coogler himself in his first ever Oscar win, Best Original Score for Ludwig Göransson and Best Cinematography. Jordan’s speech, in which he thanked the Warner Bros executives who “bet on the culture,” was the night’s most resonant moment.
The acting categories produced two genuine highlights. Jessie Buckley won Best Actress for Hamnet, becoming the first Irish actress ever to claim the prize, besting Emma Stone and Kate Hudson in a category of rare depth. Amy Madigan won Best Supporting Actress for Weapons, forty years after her first nomination in the same category. Both wins felt earned rather than engineered. Javier Bardem’s brief “No to war, and free Palestine” before presenting Best International Feature, which went to Joachim Trier’s Norwegian Sentimental Value, provided the ceremony’s most direct political moment.
And yet. The Oscars is an event that costs tens of millions of dollars to produce, at which the average attendee’s outfit budget exceeds the annual median household income of the country being discussed. It is a gathering of people who, by and large, live in a sealed world of production deals and private security and vast generational wealth, many of whom have worked within institutions credibly accused of protecting abusers for decades. The event takes place in an industry that has, in recent years, been both a platform for progressive speech and a shelter for regressive behaviour.
The hypocrisy is not incidental. It is structural. The Academy Awards exists, in part, to manage the industry’s image, to place a gilded frame around Hollywood’s reflection and present it to the world as though the frame were the painting. The political commentary that erupts at these ceremonies is real in its passion and limited in its consequence, because the morning after, the same executives return to the same offices and make the same calculations. The films that win, however luminous, are still products. The system that rewards them is still a system.
The 98th Academy Awards was, by the standards of recent ceremonies, a genuinely good one. But the event still requires a suspension of disbelief that grows slightly harder to sustain each year, a willingness to set aside the scaffolding and look only at the gold. Some nights that is easier than others. This was one of the easier nights. That is not nothing. It is also not enough.
The 98th Academy Awards belonged, predictably, to Paul Thomas Anderson. His political thriller One Battle After Another swept six Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for an absent Sean Penn. Conan O’Brien returned as host and delivered the sharpest monologue in years, threading comedy and political unease with genuine skill, taking aim at the current administration, the Epstein files and Timothée Chalamet’s cultural takes in roughly equal measure.
The soul of the evening, however, was Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. The supernatural blues horror took Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan’s extraordinary dual performance as twins Smoke and Stack, Best Original Screenplay for Coogler himself in his first ever Oscar win, Best Original Score for Ludwig Göransson and Best Cinematography. Jordan’s speech, in which he thanked the Warner Bros executives who “bet on the culture,” was the night’s most resonant moment.
The acting categories produced two genuine highlights. Jessie Buckley won Best Actress for Hamnet, becoming the first Irish actress ever to claim the prize, besting Emma Stone and Kate Hudson in a category of rare depth. Amy Madigan won Best Supporting Actress for Weapons, forty years after her first nomination in the same category. Both wins felt earned rather than engineered. Javier Bardem’s brief “No to war, and free Palestine” before presenting Best International Feature, which went to Joachim Trier’s Norwegian Sentimental Value, provided the ceremony’s most direct political moment.
And yet. The Oscars is an event that costs tens of millions of dollars to produce, at which the average attendee’s outfit budget exceeds the annual median household income of the country being discussed. It is a gathering of people who, by and large, live in a sealed world of production deals and private security and vast generational wealth, many of whom have worked within institutions credibly accused of protecting abusers for decades. The event takes place in an industry that has, in recent years, been both a platform for progressive speech and a shelter for regressive behaviour.
The hypocrisy is not incidental. It is structural. The Academy Awards exists, in part, to manage the industry’s image, to place a gilded frame around Hollywood’s reflection and present it to the world as though the frame were the painting. The political commentary that erupts at these ceremonies is real in its passion and limited in its consequence, because the morning after, the same executives return to the same offices and make the same calculations. The films that win, however luminous, are still products. The system that rewards them is still a system.
The 98th Academy Awards was, by the standards of recent ceremonies, a genuinely good one. But the event still requires a suspension of disbelief that grows slightly harder to sustain each year, a willingness to set aside the scaffolding and look only at the gold. Some nights that is easier than others. This was one of the easier nights. That is not nothing. It is also not enough.
The Key Winners at a Glance
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