The 98th Academy Awards, or shortly known as the Oscars 2026 was held on March 15 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood and hosted by Conan O’Brien.
The 98th Academy Awards, or shortly known as the Oscars 2026 was held on March 15 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood and hosted by Conan O’Brien.
March 15, 2026
The Oscars 2026 played out like a genuine clash of giants. At the top of the prestigious Best Pictures nominees are Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling counter-culture epic One Battle after Another and Ryan Coogler’s blood-soaked phenomenon Sinners, which arrived with a record 16 nominations. By the end of the night, Anderson’s film emerged as the ceremony’s biggest winner with six Oscars, while Sinners followed with four, turning this year’s Oscars into a contest between two very different visions of American cinema.
One Battle after Another claimed the top prize with Best Picture and also won Best Director for Anderson, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn, and the inaugural Oscar for Casting. The sweep carried extra weight because these were Anderson’s first competitive Oscar wins after years as one of the Academy’s most admired perennial nominees. Sinners, meanwhile, converted its nomination haul into a formidable set of victories: Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan, Original Screenplay for Coogler, Original Score for Ludwig Göransson, and Cinematography for Autumn Durald Arkapaw.
The acting races delivered their own sense of history. Jessie Buckley won Best Actress for Hamnet, becoming the first Irish performer ever to take that prize, and gave one of the evening’s warmest speeches, joking that “Ireland bought them flights” for her family. Amy Madigan won Best Supporting Actress for Weapons, a full 40 years after her first nomination, setting a record for the longest gap between nominations for an actress. Then came one of the night’s most significant milestones: Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman ever to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography, and the first Black person to do so as well.
Elsewhere, the ceremony leaned hard into firsts. Best Casting made its debut as the Academy’s first new competitive category since Best Animated Feature was introduced in 2001, with Cassandra Kulukundis taking the inaugural trophy for One Battle after Another.
There was also a rare tie in Live Action Short Film, shared by The Singers and Two People Exchanging Saliva, only the seventh tie in Oscar history. KPop Demon Hunters added fresh pop electricity to the night by winning Best Animated Feature, while “Golden” became the first K-pop song ever to win Best Original Song. Norway’s Sentimental Value won Best International Feature.
O’Brien’s opening gag, in which he dubbed himself the “last human host,” captured the mood perfectly: part anxiety, part absurdity, part showbiz self-awareness. That balance defined the evening. The 2026 Oscars honored overdue masters, rewarded bold new cultural forces, and proved that the Academy still knows how to stage a ceremony where prestige, spectacle, and history collide in one glittering room.
