The 98th Academy Awards were held on Sunday, March 15, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. It aired live on ABC and was hosted by comedian and former late-night host Conan O’Brien for the second consecutive year.
O’Brien was not as good as he was last year, with some intentionally bad Gen Z jokes to boost younger viewer engagement which clearly did not click with a lot of the audience physically present.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” was the night’s biggest winner, taking home six Oscars with 13 total nominations. This was Anderson’s first Best Director Oscar award; he was previously nominated 3 times for the award. Michael B. Jordan earned the award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his dual role in “Sinners.” Jordan played twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, in the Ryan Coogler-directed supernatural thriller. Jessie Buckley won the award for Best Actress for her work in “Hamnet,” where she starred as William Shakespeare’s wife Agnes.
Sean Penn won Best Supporting Actor in “One Battle After Another” and Amy Madigan won her first Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her work in “Weapons.”
Penn made history after he won his third Oscar, making him the fourth actor to win three Oscars, according to an article, “This Actor Just Joined an Exclusive Club of Three-Time Oscar Winners,” by Yahoo Entertainment. However, he was not present to accept his third award, despite having over an 80% chance of winning on the prediction market, Kalshi, for weeks. However, according to The Hill, Penn was in Ukraine meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky to push for an end to the Russian-Ukrainian War. Penn notably despises the Oscars due to lack of cultural diversity according to GQ. In 2022, he gave one his Oscars to Zelensky, and after the Academy refused to allow Zelensky speak at the show, he said he didn’t care if Ukraine melted the award down to convert them “to bullets they can shoot at the Russians,” according to Slate.
This year, the Academy added a new category, the Best Casting Award, which was the first category addition in 25 years, according to The Hill. This process of introducing a new category took years, and significant persuasion for the Academy Board of Directors. The Academy is not the first to honor casting directors being years late after the BAFTAs (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) introduced it in 2019.
History was made when “Sinners” broke the record for the number of nominations with 16 – the previous maximum number of nominations for a live action movie was 14, which was tied by 3 movies, “All About Eve” (1950), “Titanic” (1997), and “La La Land” (2016).
“Sinners” took home four of the 16 Oscars for which it was nominated. “One Battle After Another” took home 6 of the 13 it was nominated for, while “Marty Supreme” was completely snubbed and won zero of the nine for which it was nominated.
In the weeks leading up to the Academy Awards, Timothée Chalamet, who was also nominated for Best Actor, was the frontrunner by a large margin. According to Kalshi, Chalamet had a 78% chance of winning the award up until Mar. 5. It all changed when a viral clip of Chalamet saying, “no one cares” about opera or ballet caused major backlash from professionals in the Arts Community and several other celebrities according to USA Today.
It was a big year for international films this year, with 23 of the 50 total nominations coming from movies produced or made internationally, according to nationaltoday.com, while 15 of the 50 international films received Oscar nominations last year.
Throughout the night, it was difficult to keep off the topic of politics; presenters like Jimmy Kimmel, Javier Bardem, and O’Brien himself, as well as award-winners such as David Borenstein and Joachim Trier, referenced and commented on the political state of the country and the world.
More history was made because of a tie for Best Live Action Short Film between “The Singers” and “Two People Exchanging Saliva.” This is the seventh tie in Oscar history, with the last time happening in 2013. Oscars are voted on by the members of The Academy, ties are possible, but extremely rare, according to Buzzfeed. Netflix’s most-watched movie of all time, “K-Pop Demon Hunters” with over 500 million views (as of March 2026), was nominated for, and easily won, two Oscars: Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song for “Golden,” the first K-Pop (Korean Pop) song to win an Oscar Award. “Golden” also took home a Grammy Award, which is an award to recognize outstanding musical achievements. “Golden” was the first K-Pop song to win a Grammy award, according to an article from the BBC titled, “Golden becomes the first K-Pop song to win a Grammy.”
The 98th Oscars was a historic night with numerous records broken. The show was filled with well-deserved victories and shocking upsets. With over 17.86 million viewers globally, the Oscars yet again proved why it remains the most watched award show of the year.
