Mar. 15, 2026, 10:47 PM EDT

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” was crowned best picture at the 98th Academy Awards,handing Hollywood’s top honor to a comic, multi-generational American saga of political resistance.

The ceremony Sunday, which also saw Michael B. Jordan win best actor and “Sinners” cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw make Oscar historyas the first female director of photography to win the award, was a long-in-coming coronation for Anderson, a San Fernando Valley native who made his first short at age 18 and has been one of America’s most lionized filmmakers for decades. Before Sunday, Anderson had never won an Oscar.

The Oscar night belonged to Warner Bros., the studio of “One Battle After Another” and Ryan Coogler’s vampire tale “Sinners.” It was an oddly poignant note of triumph for the fabled studio, which weeks earlier agreed to a sale to Paramount Skydance, David Ellison’s rapidly assembled media monolith. The deal, which awaits regulatory approval, has Hollywood bracing for more layoffs.

“Sinners” and “One Battle After Another” were each Hollywood anomalies: big-budget originals born from a personal vision. In a year where anxiety over studio contraction and the rise of artificial intelligence often consumed the industry, both films gave Hollywood fresh hope.

Jessie Buckley won best actress at the 98th Academy Awardsfor her performance as Agnes Shakespeare in “Hamnet,” making her the first Irish performer to ever win in the category.

At an Oscars where no other acting award seemed a sure thing, Buckley cruised into Sunday’s Oscars at the Dolby Theatre as the overwhelming favorite. But in the last decade, Buckley has quickly established herself as a widely admired actor, on stage and screen, and her anguished performance in “Hamnet” was arguably the defining tearjerker of 2025.

In her seat, Buckley immediately plunged her head into her hands.

“It’s Mother’s Day in the U.K.,” said Buckley on the stage. “I would like to dedicated this to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart.”

After a lionized career stretching back three decades, Paul Thomas Anderson won his first Oscar for best director,a long-in-coming coronation for the “One Battle After Another” filmmaker.

Anderson, a widely admired figure in Hollywood who grew up in San Fernando Valley and made his first short at age 18, had not won an Academy Award before Sunday. Earlier in the ceremony, he won his first, for best adapted screenplay.

“You make a guy work hard for one of these,” said Anderson.

Michael B. Jordan won best actorfor his double-duty performance as the twins Smoke and Stack in Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.”

The win was a triumphant moment for Jordan, one of Hollywood’s most widely loved young actors, whose ascent to Hollywood stardom began, partly, with Coogler’s feature debut, 2013’s “Fruitvale Station.”

The Dolby Theatre rose to its feet in the most thunderous applause of the night.

“Yo, momma, what’s up?” said Jordan after staggering to the stage.

Later, Jordan added: “I stand here because of the people who came here before me,” listing best actor winners from Sidney Poitier to Will Smith.

“Sinners” cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw has made Oscar history,becoming the first female director of photography to win the award in the 98 year history of the Academy Awards.

The win was a long-in-coming triumph for women behind the camera. Arkapaw was just the fourth womanever nominated in the category; the first was Rachel Morrison in 2018 for “Mudbound.” The Dolby Theatre audience rose to a standing ovation as she took the stage.

“I really want all the women in room to stand up,” said Arkapaw. “Because I don’t feel like I get here without you guys.”

Anderson and Ryan Coogler each won their first Oscars,moving tributes were paid to Robert Redford, Diane Keaton and Rob Reiner and an absent Sean Penn won best supporting actor at the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday.

“One Battle After Another” came into the show the best picture favorite, and it picked up three wins in the first half of the ceremony. Anderson, the film’s writer-director, earned a standing ovation for his first win in 14 nominations.

“I wrote this movie for my kids to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left in this world — we’re handing off to them,” said Anderson, who loosely adapted Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland.”. “But also with the encouragement that they will be the generation that hopefully brings us some common sense and decency.”

The film also won the first award for best casting,for Cassandra Kulukundis, and best supporting actor for Penn. Penn, a previous two-time Oscar winner, had skipped other recent award ceremonies, too. Presenter Kieran Culkin said he “couldn’t be here this evening — or didn’t want to.”

Immediately after Anderson’s first Oscar, Coogler notched his first Academy Award, too. The “Sinners” writer-director won best original screenplay, and earned his own standing ovation. (“Sinners” later added the award for best score.)

‘KPop’ and ‘Frankeinstein’ win for Netflix

From the start, when host Conan O’Brien sprinted through the year’s nominees as Amy Madigan’s character in the horror thriller “Weapons” in a pre-taped bit, Sunday’s ceremony was quirky, a little clunky and preoccupied with the shifting place of movies in culture. There was, of all things, a tie for best live-action short film.

As expected, the Netflix sensation “KPop Demon Hunters,” 2025’s most-watched film, won best animated featureas well as best song for “Golden.” It was a big win for Netflix but a more qualified victory for the movie’s producer, Sony Pictures. Though it developed and produced the film, Sony sold “KPop Demon Hunters” to the streaming giant instead of giving it a theatrical release.

On Netflix, “KPop Demon Hunters” became a cultural phenomenon and the streaming platform’s biggest hit. It has more than 325 million views and counting.

“This is for Korea and Koreans everywhere,” said co-director Maggie Kang.

Another Netflix release, Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” picked up three awards for its lavish craftfor costume design, makeup and hairstyling and for production design.

Amy Madigan won best supporting actressfor her performance in the horror thriller “Weapons,” a win that came 40 years after the 75-year-old actor was first nominated, in 1986, for “Twice in a Lifetime.” Letting out a giant laugh as she hit the stage, Madigan exclaimed, “This is great!”

O’Brien presides over a ceremony shadowed by politics

Hosting for the second time,O’Brien began the Dolby Theatre show alluding to “chaotic and frightening times.” But he argued that the current geopolitical climate made the Oscars all the more resonate as a globally unifying force.

“We pay tribute tonight, not just to film, but to the ideals of global artistry, collaboration, patience, resilience and that rarest of qualities today — optimism,” O’Brien said. “We’re going to celebrate. Not because we think all is well, but because we work, and hope, for better.”

Throughout the show, O’Brien hit a number of targets, like Timothée Chalamet for his diss of opera and ballet. But the ceremony seldom wasn’t shadowed by politics, whether in references to changes under U.S. President Donald Trump or the recently launched war in Iran.

Joachim Trier, whose Norwegian family drama “Sentimental Value” won best international filmquoted James Baldwin in his acceptance speech.

“All adults are responsible for all children,” he said. “Let’s not vote for politicians that don’t take this seriously into account.”

Presenter Jimmy Kimmel, whose late-night show last year was suspended after comments he made about Charlie Kirk’s killing, was among the most blunt.

“There are some countries that don’t support free speech,” said Kimmel. “I’m not at liberty to say which. Let’s just leave it at North Korea and CBS.”

Shortly after, “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” a film about a Russian primary school teacher who documents his students’ indoctrination to support Russia’s war with Ukraine, won best documentary.

“’Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ is about how you lose your country,” co-director said. “And what we saw when working with this footage is that you lose it through countless, small, little acts of complicity.”

“We all face a moral choice,” he added, “but, luckily, a nobody is more powerful than you think.”

Tributes to Reiner, Redford and others

Elegy also marked the Oscars. Producers expanded the in memoriam segment following a year that featured the deaths of so many Hollywood legends, including Keaton, Robert Duvall and Redford. Barbra Streisand spoke about Redford, her “The Way We Were” co-star.

“Bob had real backbone,” said Streisand, who called Redford “an intellectual cowboy” before singing a few bars of “The Way We Were.”

Billy Crystal paid tribute to Rob and Michele Reiner, who were killed in their home in December. Crystal, a close friend of Rob Reiner’s who memorably starred in 1989’s “When Harry Met Sally…” and 1987’s “Princess Bride.” In his moving remarks, Crystal quoted the latter.

“All we can say is: Buddy, how much fun we had storming the castle,” said Crystal.

Theatrical looks to best streaming, again

It seemed all but certain that the night’s final award wouldn’t go to a streaming release; Apple’s “CODA”remains the only streaming film to achieve that distinction. Instead, best picture is likely to go to an anomaly in today’s movie industry: big-budget original films from a personal vision.

“Sinners” and “One Battle After Another” were both theatrical releases shot on film. And both came from Warner Bros., the legacy studio that’s agreed to mergewith David Ellison’s new media colossus, Paramount Skydance. The $111 billion deal, which awaits regulatory approval, has rattled an industry already reconciling itself to the acquisitions of MGM (by Amazon) and 20th Century Fox (by The Walt Disney Co.).

Apple’s “F1,” a movie that it partnered with Warner Bros. to distribute theatrically, won for best sound. The lone blockbuster of the year to go home with a win was “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” for visual effects.

Some of O’Brien’s best digs came at the expense of the streamers. Netflix chief Ted Sarandos, he joked, was in a theater for the first time. The host also lamented the lack of nominees for Amazon MGM: “Why isn’t the website I order toilet paper from winning more Oscars?”

“I’m honored to be the last human host of the Academy Awards,” said O’Brien. “Next year it’s going to be a Waymo in a tux.”

Mar. 15, 2026, 10:35 PM EDT

“Sinners”is a hoodoo movie, deeply and unapologetically so. In making the film set in the 1930s Mississippi Delta, director Ryan Coogler and producer Zinzi Evans were intentional about displaying the real culture of this region I call home, and they leaned on scholars such as Yvonne Chireau to explore conjure as a sophisticated spiritual technology. For instance, we see the hoodoo in the sacred symmetry of twins Smoke and Stack, brilliantly played by Michael B. Jordan. Smoke and Stack mirror the Marassa, those divine twins in the Haitian Vodou and West African Yoruba Ife tradition who navigate the world as a singular, divided soul. They move with a grace older than the roads they travel, their every choice colored by myths finally given flesh, blood and consequence.

This grounding brings a visceral magic to the screen. “Sinners,” for good reason, was nominated for a record-breaking 16 Oscars, including for best picture. (The film picked up four wins on Sunday night, including best actor honors for Michael B. Jordan, best original screenplay for Coogler and a historic win in cinematography for Autumn Durald Arkapaw. But it lost in several of the other major categories to “One Battle After Another,” which took home best director and best picture.)

Here in the Black South, the speculative is more than a genre. It is an inherited truth. To make a film that speaks of conjure or hintsas Coogler did, is to engage in a deep cultural reclamation. When “Sinners” embraces this, we see the ancient future in action: the understanding that ancestral knowledge is the key to navigating worlds yet to come. Coogler, who grew up in California,  wrote “Sinners” to honor his Mississippi ancestors, including his uncle James, who loved the Delta blues and regaled the young Coogler with stories about his home. Coogler’s vision trusts the ancestors enough to let the spirits walk alongside the living, just as they always have in our free verse and folktales.

There is a persistent, hollow noise in our cultural discourse that dismisses Black American culture as a happy accident rather than what it is: a deliberate, brilliant construction. Our traditions are too often discussed as found items rather than legacies forged in unique crucibles. Our culture was born from blood and bone, and it has produced high art forms crafted by those who turned survival into a song. Nothing about Black Americans’ spiritual and cultural traditions are accidental, no matter our geography.

But place matters. Regional specificity is the antidote to the monolith myth that wrongly renders the Black culture in the Delta and the Gullah-Geechee Sea Islands and Appalachia as one and the same. Coogler captures the authenticity of the Delta with his details, like the tamale sign in the backdrop, a quiet nod to the intersecting bloodlines — Indigenous, African and European — that created the creative genius of the Delta. Whether it’s the Chows, whose presence is an acknowledgement that Chinese families have long been embedded in the community fabric of the Deltaor the compacts made by the Choctaw leader Chayton (Nathaniel Arcand), our history is itself a crossroads. When we see sibling relationships and rituals treated with reverence, we see Coogler’s refusal to whitewash our origins.

Perhaps most significantly, Coogler’s screenplay dramatizes the 1930 Delta’s spiritual landscapes with an elegant precision, refusing the easy binary of “demonic” vs. “devout.” We see it in the bitter resentment of the Irish vampire, Remmick — portrayed with frightening intensity by Jack O’Connell — who carries the scars of a native faith forcibly stripped away. He’s a contrast to Sammie Moore, played by Miles Caton, who emerges from the sanctuary of a praying family. This foundation of faith grants him the agency to choose his own vocation, proving the film is a meditation on the varied ways we reach for the divine to stay strong.

I think of the Mississippi Delta as a living, breathing archive, a landscape where the river’s curve mimics the spine of a people who refused to be broken. In the quiet theater of our lives, we often look for mirrors, but what we truly need are portals.

One of the film’s most breathtaking movements — the jook joint musical sequence — becomes such  a portal. As the ancestors pulse alongside the living to the notes of Raphael SadiqBoo Mitchell and Rhiannon Giddensit proves the difference between a ghost and a memory: one haunts the house, the other haunts the blood.

Black American cultural contributions are among the nation’s most significant exports, but the fruit is too often severed from its roots, and we see our rituals absorbed into the mainstream without a nod to the specific communities who nurtured them. We must demand visions such as Coogler’s that understand that the spirit remembers what the map forgets.

American cinema needs more of this raw truth — stories that pulse in the blood and set spirits free. We don’t need endless remakes. We need the conjure, the haints and the original hope that comes from knowing exactly who we are. Coogler believes in the alchemy of cinema and sound, and in “Sinners,” he bottled that lightning, letting the frequency of the Delta resonate through the theater and into our hearts.

By the time the lights come up, we carry the weight of that geography. Even when the world tries to wash the records away, the river remembers. Our stories are a laying on of hands, a calling up of a frequency that resonates in the marrow. They remind us that some magic is real, rooted deep in the soil and carried on the music, waiting for the right hands to call it forth. Vision made manifest is not just about what we see on a screen; it is about the stories we have always told ourselves to stay whole.

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning author, poet and editor whose work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and the genius of the Mississippi Delta. Her most recent book is “Mojorhythm”(Third Man Books, 2025). An Octavia E. Butler Award winner, she edited the World Fantasy Award-winning anthologies,”Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the Africa Diaspora,””Dark Matter: Reading the Bones,” and”Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction.”

Mar. 15, 2026, 10:35 PM EDT

UPDATE (March 15, 2026, 10:35 p.m. ET):In a crowded field, “One Battle After Another” won best picture of the yearbeating out fan-favorite “Sinners” to take home the night’s biggest award.

For much of the Oscars’ history, best picture nominees have been limited to five — as it was and is with pretty much every other Oscar category. From the late 1920s until 1943, the academy nominated between eight and 12 films for best picture. But from 1944-2008, there were just five nominees. A nice, accessible number, one that — if you were a fan of the Oscars — made it fairly easy to remember the nominees even years later.

But after a backlash over “The Dark Knight” and “WALL-E” — two hugely popular 2008 films that were also critical darlings — failing to get best picture nods, the academy expanded the roster, eventually settling on 10. The idea was to generate more broad interest among the masses in the stuffiest of awards shows. And that’s how “F1” ended up a best picture nominee.

It didn’t workbut that’s not really the fault of the academy. The terminal decline of broadcast television has culled the audiences for all awards shows. And watering down the prestige of a best picture nominee by adding to the mix films like “Top Gun: Maverick” (from the director of “F1”) did not spark a renaissance in Oscars ratings or box office draws. While the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon of 2023 — when “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” dominated both the summer box office and critics’ year-end lists — was a boon for Oscar ratings, it doesn’t seem to have sparked a lasting trend, largely because the success of films in the vein of those two movies has yet to be replicated. And it’s hard to believe there’s a substantial number of diehard “F1” fans that are going to make it a point to tune in for Conan O’Brien’s monologue.

But the Oscars do have their diehard fans, and they’re a type. I’d know; somewhere in the archives is a column from my high school newspaper lamenting the academy’s choices at the 1995 Oscars (honoring films released in 1994). The soppy boomer nostalgia of “Forrest Gump” won best picture (and a bunch more), which to my teenage film-obsessive mind was an outrage when pitted against the revolutionary-for-its-time frenetic dark comedy of “Pulp Fiction,” the timelessly rewatchable sentimentality of “Shawshank Redemption,” the charming and sophisticated romantic comedy of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and Robert Redford’s criminally forgotten requiem for a certain kind of 20th century American innocence, “Quiz Show.” (I’ve softened a bit on “Gump” with time, but only a little.)

Five nominees made it easier to even pit certain years against each other in critical conversation. How does 1974’s crop of best picture nominees, including “The Godfather Part II,” “Chinatown” and “The Conversation,” stack up against 1976’s “Taxi Driver,” “All the President’s Men” and “Network”? That’s a debate no one could ever win, but it’d sure be fun to watch.

The Academy Awards are still the gold standard of American show business prizes. The Golden Globes are usually good for a laugh, but hardly anyone remembers who won anything. The Grammys are capable of putting on a good show (the music helps on that front), but like the Emmys, they still don’t quite carry the cultural gravitas of the Oscars.

This is unlikely to last forever, though. “Going to the movies” as a standard pastime enjoyed by the majority of the entertainment-seeking public is just not a thing anymore since the rise of streaming — a trend exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, fewer movies are being made by studios, and the “mid-budget” movie — an adult drama, a sophisticated comedy, a quirky indie with a recognizable star — has practically gone extinct at the cinema.

There’s no rational reason why “top ten” lists of the best films of the year should be perfectly acceptable for film obsessives, but 10 best picture nominees are too many — and yet, that appears to be the case. As John Young wrote for Entertainment Weekly in 2012, “It’s better to be loved by a small and passionate group instead of liked by a much larger group.”

I get that the problems of movie fanatics who like to argue about obscure Oscar trivia don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy worldbut the specialness of the Oscars still remains its greatest asset. And opening up the best picture academy to both the “pretty good” and the “kinda ok” hasn’t done any favors to preserving that specialness.

Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW, often covering free speech, civil liberties and extremism. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider.