One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s wry look at nativism and activism in a time drenched in both, won best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay along with several other prizes at a celebratory if at times pointed Oscars on Sunday night.
“You make a guy work hard for one of these,” the American auteur said upon accepting the best director prize, one of three he scored on the night after a 30-year career in which he’d previously won zero.
Anderson was hardly the only person to break a dry spell. A slew of first-time winners dominated the 2026 Oscars, which also contained some supporting appearances from politics and late Hollywood legends.
An acclaimed veteran filmmaker (Ryan Coogler), an acclaimed even more veteran filmmaker (Anderson), an acclaimed veteran actor (Michael B. Jordan) and an acclaimed even more veteran actress (Amy Madigan) all won statuettes for the first time. Ditto a K-pop song (“Golden”), an Irish woman competing for best actress (Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley), a female cinematographer and a Black cinematographer (ceilings both broken by Autumn Durald Arkapaw) and a casting director (Cassandra Kulukundis, winning an inaugural prize).
In total, the ceremony saw first-time winners in seven of the eight major categories, turning the annual Hollywood proceedings into a kind of celebration of the overlooked. Only Sean Penn’s supporting actor win deviated from the trend. Fittingly, he didn’t come.
The wins for people who’d never graced the Oscar stage before stood in sharp contrast to an anchor sequence at the show’s center, when the late Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, Rob Reiner, Robert Redford and Catherine O’Hara (the majority are Oscar winners) were spotlighted as part of an In Memoriam segment that proved to be one of the most impactful in years. Collectively, the two extremes — the emergent Oscar winners with stars of past decades — had the effect of both honoring past glory while reminding that the present isn’t looking too shabby, either.
It also stood in contrast to the larger mood, which, though not much spoken of from the stage, with U.S.-led war, ICE actions, incursions into press freedom and the threat of AI job dislocation could only be described as bleak.
Both Anderson and Coogler won trophies for their screenplays, the One Battle After Another filmmaker for adapted and the Sinners auteur in original. “Please, please, please sit down because ’cause I’m very nervous and they’re gonna play me off,” Coogler said as he took his first-ever prize. Coogler has had his share of hits in the past with Fruitvale Station and Black Panther but had never won an Oscar.
Anderson had gone even longer: He had been nominated 11 times before Sunday night dating back to a screenplay nomination for Boogie Nights in the 1990s but never won.
The triumphalism shifted often Sunday between the two Warner Bros. movies, Battle and Sinners, the latter of which brought Arkapaw’s win for cinematography. “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 like moments like this happen because of you guys,” she said upon accepting the prize.
Jordan won for the same film, in which he played two roles, and also saluted the pioneers who came before him as he shouted out to a number of past Black Oscar acting winners. “To be among those giants, to be among those ancestors. … I feel it,” he said. The film won four Oscars in total, a decent hit rate for its record-breaking 16 nominations.
Battle, for its part, took six, but Anderson sought to play down its dominance. “There is no best among them; there is just what the mood is that day,” Anderson said after winning best picture, citing the 1976 Oscars and its deep bench to make a point about the good company in this one. Still, the director behind beloved films from other decades that include Phantom Thread, Hard Eight, Magnolia and The Master was visibly relieved at finally breaking the streak, saying with a little bit of swagger that he was nonetheless happy to “keep this one for myself.”
With its low-key ICE-related themes skillfully cloaked in charm and comedy, Battle managed to dominate the awards zeitgeist without shouting its message from the rooftops. The film led the pack pretty much since its September release, its candidacy at times seeming ahead of the news events that would soon catch up to and engage with it. Wins from the Producers Guild, Directors Guild, BAFTA and the Golden Globes assured the Warner Bros. movie could coast to the finish line. That its parent company became the subject of a vicious takeover fight in the middle of all of that and its star pair of executives suddenly facing imperiled employment only gave the moves more urgency; every rival bid from Netflix and Paramount somehow only highlighted the tenderness of the art that the moguls were fighting over.
Fragility was on display in a different way Sunday night. Earlier in the show, a lengthy In Memoriam segment unspooled, as Barbra Streisand gave a meaningful speech recalling her time with Robert Redford and sang part of “The Way We Were” to him; Billy Crystal paid tribute to his frequent collaborator Rob Reiner and the director’s wife, Michelle, who were both murdered in December; and Rachel McAdams honored Diane Keaton and Catherine O’Hara — all part of a segment that saw a host of boomer and other late legends feted.
The heartstring-y Hollywood tone shifted quickly after the sequence, though, as Jimmy Kimmel took the stage to hand out documentary prizes. The late-night host got in digs at CBS News under David Ellison and President Donald Trump/Amazon for the Melania documentary.
“There are some countries whose leaders don’t support free speech. I’m not at liberty to say which. Let’s just leave it at North Korea and CBS,” he deadpanned, then, noting how some doc filmmakers took their lives in their hands to tell the truth, said that “there are also documentaries where you walk around the White House trying on shoes.”
Kimmel, who of course was targeted by the Trump administration and briefly suspended by ABC in September after a joke he made in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, then added, “Oh man, is he going to be mad his wife wasn’t nominated for this,” presumably referring to Trump and the Melania doc. (It wasn’t eligible for this Oscars; perhaps Amazon will undertake a campaign next year.)
The winners of All the Empty Rooms, a doc short about the child victims of school shootings, then took the stage to describe their experience. “Since that day, her bedroom has been frozen in time,” Gloria Cazares, whose daughter was killed in the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. “Jackie is more than just a headline. She is our light and life. Gun violence is now the No. 1 cause of death in kids and teens. We believe if the world could see their empty bedrooms, we’d be a different America.”
That moment was followed by a speech from David Borenstein, co-director of doc winner Mr. Nobody Against Putin, about a teacher in a Ural Mountain town, Pavel Talankin (also a director on the movie), who documents Putin misdeeds with his students. Borenstein’s speech quickly went from one about Russia to one about America. “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 could produce it and consume it — we all face a moral choice,” he said, making the subtext text. “But luckily even a nobody is more powerful than you think.”
Javier Bardem would later take the stage presenting international feature and, notably resurfacing an anti-Iraq War pin from 2003, said “No to war, and free Palestine,” to some applause from the audience. He was the only A-list celebrity to comment on Iran from the stage, though even his comments were hardly elaborate. Then Sentimental Value, one of the least political films in the international field, won that prize. Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident might have gotten a bump from the two-week-old war in Iran but, if it did, it was not enough to lap the Norwegian favorite.
Sentimental director Joachim Trier did make his own small political statement when he said, “All adults are responsible for all children, and let’s not vote for politicians that don’t take this seriously into account,” before elaborating backstage that he had in mind Palestinian children, Ukrainian children and children in Sudan.
The night began on a touching, career-capping note as Madigan took her first Oscar nearly 45 years since she began acting while casting directors were honored for the first time at the show after an omission lasting even criminally longer.
Madigan won the supporting actress statuette for her role as the creepily supernatural Aunt Gladys in breakout horror hit Weapons, winning an Oscar in her second try. Her first nomination came 40 years ago for the romantic drama Twice In a Lifetime. “What’s different is I got this little gold guy,” Madigan said in her acceptance speech, comparing this Oscar campaign to the last one.
Beginning with a cackle befitting her Weapons character, she said she had tried to think of a speech while in the shower Saturday night, and then proceeded to give emotional thank-you’s to various people who worked on her film and on her career. “As you can tell I’m a little flummoxed,” she said, while alluding to all the other Warner Bros. contenders that had welcome her on the awards trail. She also thanked longtime husband Ed Harris and “of course all the dogs.”
In an equally uplifting moment, the inaugural best casting Oscar saw the actors who had been cast in the nominated films all stand on stage and go down one by one thanking the casting directors who put them in their movies. “I’m very grateful for you personally that you made room for one who’s been doing this a little while,” Sinners star Delroy Lindo said as he thanked casting director Francine Maisler.
But the decorated veteran and category favorite was then upset by longtime Anderson collaborator and One Battle After Another casting director Cassandra Kulukundis, who then went to the podium and gave a freewheelingly happy speech that only reinforced the value of the prize. “I have to thank the Academy for even adding this category and casting directors for fighting to make this happen despite everything in their way,” she said, saying it was “freaking insane” that she was up there.
Their movie also continued its early strong run as Sean Penn won supporting actor for his turn as a white-nationalist law-and-order man Steven J. Lockjaw in the political dramedy. Penn’s three acting Oscars ties a male record.
A sense of hope came from an unlikely source: the live-action short category, which saw an uncommon tie and prizes for two sets of filmmakers. One of the movies, the New Yorker-produced Two People Exchanging Saliva, is a brilliant and unsettling dystopic work shot like a Calvin Klein ad and isn’t giving anyone any hugs; the other, The Singers, shows barflies coming together showcasing surprising musical talent and fit with the inspirational theme.
Shortly after Madigan’s win, KPop Demon Hunters took the animated feature Oscar, no doubt giving heart to the millions of fans of the Netflix phenom who may not otherwise be avidly following best picture odds. An emotional director co-director Maggie Kang took the stage and said, “For those of you who look like me, I’m so sorry that it took this long to see us in a movie like this,” the Korean-Canadian filmmaker then vowing it would not be long until the next one.
What hope was foregrounded played out against a backdrop of deep uncertainty, not least for the employment of the people in the room. Presenter Will Arnett said the quiet part out loud when, preparing to hand out the animated prizes early in the evening, said, “Tonight we’re celebrating people, not AI.” Animation, he added, “is more than a prompt; it’s an art form and it needs to be protected.”
And Frankenstein’s win in costume and hair-and-makeup categories also amounted to an AI rebuttal given director Guillermo del Toro’s outspoken words about AI this campaign season. Winner Jordan Samuel thanked “the prosthetic and makeup people for all the hard work they did,” a comment that is hard to hear without thinking about the way LLMs can generate looks without anyone working on a shoot at all.
The show began with host Conan O’Brien trying to push a more hopeful message despite the dislocating and war-torn times.
After noting said toughness, O’Brien said that “it’s at moments like these that the Oscars are particularly resonant, citing the dozens of countries watching and represented and the pursuit of the rarest of qualities today: optimism. So please let us celebrate not because we think all is well but because we know and hope for better.’”