Every few years, Hollywood stages a ceremony that feels less like a trophy handout and more like a negotiation. The 98th Academy Awards, held March 15, 2026, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, was one of those nights. Hosted for the second consecutive year by Conan O’Brien and broadcast live on ABC and Hulu to roughly 17.86 million viewers, it was an evening that rewarded genre-defying filmmaking, made history for Black artists and women behind the camera, honored a long-awaited auteur breakthrough, and still handed its biggest prize to the most conventional choice in the room.
That tension is worth sitting with. Because the real story of the 98th Oscars was not simply who won. It was what the winning pattern revealed about where Hollywood is, and how far it still has to go.
Sinners and the Records That Came First
Before a single envelope was opened, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners had already done something no film in Academy history had managed. With 16 nominations, two more than Titanic, All About Eve, and La La Land, it became the most-nominated film ever. Set in 1932 Mississippi and rooted in the Jim Crow South, the film follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack, played by Michael B. Jordan, who return home after World War I and open a juke joint, only for a supernatural vampire threat to descend on their community. Built on Black American folklore, blues music, and genre-bending horror-thriller energy, Sinners was not the typical Oscar bait. It was something rarer: an original, studio-financed blockbuster that earned over $370 million globally while critics called it one of the most formally accomplished films of the decade.
Going into Sunday night, Sinners was carrying more industry buzz than any film in recent memory. It had already swept at the Black Reel Awards with 14 wins, dominated the Critics Choice nominations with 17, and taken the top ensemble prize at the Actor Awards. The question was whether the Academy, with its historically cautious tastes, would finally follow through with the grand sweep many expected.
It did not. Sinners won four Oscars and finished with a record 12 losses, the most of any film in Academy history. That outcome tells a complicated story, and it deserves to be told honestly.
Where Sinners Won and Why It Mattered
Of the four wins Sinners secured, each carried weight that extended far beyond the statuette itself.
Ryan Coogler took Best Original Screenplay, becoming only the second Black writer to win that category, following Jordan Peele’s landmark victory for Get Out in 2018. Coogler, who grew up in Oakland and has spent over a decade building one of Hollywood’s most trusted creative partnerships with Michael B. Jordan throughFruitvale Station, Creed, and Black Panther, received his award from Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans to a standing ovation. His speech was rooted and personal. He thanked his cast and crew, his wife Zinzi, who also produced the film, and his parents. “Memories are all we have,” he said. “I hope I’ll give you some great ones.”
Ludwig Göransson, Coogler’s longtime composer, won Best Original Score for his work on Sinners, a score that blended Delta blues, West African rhythms, and contemporary sonic experimentation in a way that was inseparable from the film’s cultural argument.
Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor, making him the sixth Black man to ever win that award. The only others are Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Jamie Foxx, Forest Whitaker, and Will Smith, a lineage Jordan acknowledged by name from memory when he took the stage. “I stand here because of the people that came before me,” he said. His win was additionally historic because, according to reports, he became the first performer since Lee Marvin to win Best Actor for playing multiple roles in a single film. Jordan’s dual performance as Smoke and Stack, two brothers with different temperaments, different fears, and different relationships to survival, demanded range that most genre films never ask of their lead. The Academy finally recognized that genre storytelling, when done with this level of craft, belongs in the same conversation as any prestige drama.
Then there was Autumn Durald Arkapaw. Her win for Best Cinematography made her the first woman, first Black person, and first Filipina to win the category in the Oscar’s nearly 100-year history. When her name was announced, she walked to the stage and asked every woman in the Dolby Theatre to stand. “I feel like I don’t get here without you guys,” she said. It was one of the night’s most powerful moments, and it honored not just her own achievement but the structural absences that preceded it.
Those four wins shaped a night that mattered for Black cinema. But they also leave behind a lingering question that Slate noted bluntly in its recap: with the most nominations in Academy history, Sinners ended up with the most losses, too. Whether that says more about the film’s ambition or the Academy’s limits is a conversation that will outlast this ceremony.
One Battle After Another and the Comfort of the Canon
On the other side of the night stood Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a Warner Bros. political action-thriller that earned six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn, Best Editing, and the first-ever Best Casting award, which went to Cassandra Kulukundis.
Anderson’s win was historic in its own right. After 11 previous Academy Award nominations dating back to 1998, the director of Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, and The Master finally took home Oscar gold, not once, but three times in a single night. He became just the ninth filmmaker to win Best Picture, Best Director, and a screenplay Oscar on the same evening. His speech, unusually direct for the occasion, addressed the political climate. In accepting Best Adapted Screenplay, Anderson told his children he hoped their generation would bring “common sense and decency” to a world their parents had left in disarray.
As a piece of craft, One Battle After Another was clearly formidable. Six wins and 13 nominations do not happen by accident. But as Deadline noted, Anderson’s sweep also followed a familiar Oscar pattern: the auteur-driven prestige film, backed by a major studio, ultimately outpolling the more culturally disruptive competitor when it came time for Best Picture voters to choose. One Battle After Another was the Academy’s comfort zone. Sinners was where the culture had actually moved.
Acting, History, and the Career Arc
The four acting prizes spread across four different films, and each came with its own backstory.
Jessie Buckley won Best Actress for her role as Agnes Shakespeare in Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel. By winning, Buckley became the first Irish woman to take the Best Actress prize in the Oscars’ 98-year history. She had already swept the Golden Globes, BAFTA, Critics Choice, and Actor Awards with the same performance, arriving at the Dolby Theatre as the undisputed favorite. Her acceptance speech was warm and unguarded. She thanked her family, including her eight-month-old daughter who, she noted, “has absolutely no idea what’s going on and is probably dreaming of milk.” It was Hamnet’s only win on a night it had been nominated for eight.
Sean Penn won Best Supporting Actor for One Battle After Another in a win that, as multiple critics observed, carried some of the weight of a career tribute alongside its recognition of the performance. Penn was notably absent from the ceremony. Arguments could be made for Delroy Lindo or Stellan Skarsgård, but the Academy’s instinct toward recognized names with long histories in the industry clearly played a role here.
Amy Madigan opened the night by winning Best Supporting Actress for her performance as the terrifying Aunt Gladys in Zach Cregger’s horror film Weapons. The win came 40 years after her first Oscar nomination for Twice in a Lifetime in 1986, one of the longer gaps between nominations and wins in Academy history. Irish Times critic Donald Clarke summed it up plainly: it was probably recognition for a decade-spanning career more than anything else. But the role itself was genuinely unsettling work, and like the Sinners wins, it added to what was an unusually strong night for horror as a genre.
The Rest of the Board
Beyond the headline races, the 98th Oscars offered a surprisingly global spread. Norway’s Sentimental Value won Best International Feature, becoming the first Norwegian submission to ever take the prize. Javier Bardem, who presented the award, used the moment to say “No to war, and free Palestine” from the stage, the kind of political comment that once would have caused industry controversy but has become part of the ceremony’s texture.
KPop Demon Hunters won both Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song for “Golden,” the first K-pop song to ever win an Oscar. Director Maggie Kang dedicated the win to Koreans worldwide. The film’s hybrid animation and chart-topping soundtrack underscored how thoroughly Korean cultural production has embedded itself in global entertainment infrastructure.
Frankenstein, the Netflix production, swept three craft categories: Costume Design, Production Design, and Makeup and Hairstyling. Avatar: Fire and Ash took Visual Effects, with Dublin-born Richard Baneham collecting his third Oscar in that category. Mr. Nobody Against Putin won Documentary Feature, giving the night one of its clearest geopolitical moments. In a rare occurrence, Best Live Action Short ended in a tie between The Singers and Two People Exchanging Saliva, only the third tie in Oscar history.
The ceremony also introduced the inaugural Best Casting award, presented under a new “Fab Five” format where five nominees were individually introduced by cast members of the nominated films. Cassandra Kulukundis won for One Battle After Another in what was considered a mild upset over Sinners casting director Francine Maisler, a widely respected industry veteran.
The AfroDMV Takeaway
For readers of this platform, the most relevant question is not simply whether Black artists won. They did. But the more enduring question is how they won, and on what terms.
Sinners did not succeed by filing off its edges or making itself more legible to old-guard Academy voters. It went into awards season as a period horror film rooted in Black American folk tradition, built on an original story, directed by an Oakland filmmaker who retained ownership of the film himself. That deal structure, as Slate noted, could fundamentally shift the balance of power between creators and studios for generations. It won because it was formally excellent, culturally specific, and commercially dominant all at the same time.
That combination has historically been difficult for the Academy to reward. The Oscars have always been more comfortable praising Black stories for what they represent than for the mastery of how they are made. Sunday night at least partially corrected that imbalance. Jordan’s acting win, Coogler’s screenplay win, and Arkapaw’s historic cinematography win together sent a message that Black creative excellence is being recognized on its own craft terms, not just as a social statement.
At the same time, the film that walked away with the most trophies was the more conventional choice. And that tension between what the culture is doing and what the Academy ultimately rewards most did not resolve on Sunday. It simply became more visible.
That visibility is worth something. Whether it is worth as much as a Best Picture win is a question worth debating long after the after-parties are over.
EVENT SUMMARY: What Happened at the 98th Academy Awards
The 98th Academy Awards ceremony took place on Sunday, March 15, 2026, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. Conan O’Brien hosted for the second consecutive year. Awards were presented in 24 competitive categories, including the newly introduced Best Casting category, the first new competitive Oscar since Best Animated Feature was added in 2001. The telecast aired on ABC and streamed on Hulu, drawing approximately 17.86 million U.S. viewers. One Battle After Another led all films with six wins. Sinners followed with four. Frankenstein won three. KPop Demon Hunters won two. All the Empty Rooms, Avatar: Fire and Ash, F1, The Girl Who Cried Pearls, Hamnet, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, Sentimental Value, The Singers, Two People Exchanging Saliva, and Weapons each claimed one.
COMPLETE WINNERS AND NOMINEES
Best Picture WINNER: One Battle After Another Nominees: Sinners, Hamnet, Frankenstein, Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, Bugonia, F1, Train Dreams
Best Director WINNER: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another Nominees: Chloé Zhao (Hamnet), Josh Safdie (Marty Supreme), Joachim Trier (Sentimental Value), Ryan Coogler (Sinners)
Best Actor WINNER: Michael B. Jordan, Sinners Nominees: Timothée Chalamet (Marty Supreme), Leonardo DiCaprio (One Battle After Another), Ethan Hawke (Blue Moon), Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent)
Best Actress WINNER: Jessie Buckley, Hamnet Nominees: Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), Kate Hudson (Song Sung Blue), Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value), Emma Stone (Bugonia)
Best Supporting Actor WINNER: Sean Penn, One Battle After Another Nominees: Benicio del Toro, Jacob Elordi, Delroy Lindo, Stellan Skarsgård
Best Supporting Actress WINNER: Amy Madigan, Weapons Nominees: Elle Fanning (Sentimental Value), Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (Sentimental Value), Wunmi Mosaku (Sinners), Teyana Taylor (One Battle After Another)
Best Original Screenplay WINNER: Ryan Coogler, Sinners Nominees: Robert Kaplow (Blue Moon), Jafar Panahi and collaborators (It Was Just an Accident), Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie (Marty Supreme), Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt (Sentimental Value)
Best Adapted Screenplay WINNER: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another Nominees: Will Tracy (Bugonia), Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein), Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell (Hamnet), Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar (Train Dreams)
Best Cinematography WINNER: Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Sinners Nominees: F1, Frankenstein, One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value
Best Original Score WINNER: Ludwig Göransson, Sinners Nominees: Jerskin Fendrix (Bugonia), Alexandre Desplat (Frankenstein), Max Richter (Hamnet), Jonny Greenwood (One Battle After Another)
Best Original Song WINNER: “Golden,” KPop Demon Hunters Nominees: “Dear Me” (Diane Warren: Relentless), “I Lied to You” (Sinners), “Sweet Dreams of Joy” (Viva Verdi!), “Train Dreams” (Train Dreams)
Best Animated Feature WINNER: KPop Demon Hunters
Best International Feature WINNER: Sentimental Value (Norway) Nominees included: The Secret Agent (Brazil) and others
Best Documentary Feature WINNER: Mr. Nobody Against Putin
Best Film Editing WINNER: One Battle After Another
Best Casting (inaugural category) WINNER: Cassandra Kulukundis, One Battle After Another
Best Sound WINNER: F1
Best Visual Effects WINNER: Avatar: Fire and Ash
Best Production Design WINNER: Frankenstein
Best Costume Design WINNER: Frankenstein
Best Makeup and Hairstyling WINNER: Frankenstein
Best Animated Short WINNER: The Girl Who Cried Pearls
Best Live Action Short WINNER (TIE): The Singers and Two People Exchanging Saliva
MY REVIEW: Did They Deserve It?
Best Picture — One Battle After Another I will be honest: this felt like the safer pick. Six wins is not a fluke, and Anderson’s film was clearly built to last. But when you consider that Sinners set the all-time nominations record and still lost the biggest prize, there is a credibility gap that the Academy has not fully resolved. On pure craft terms, One Battle After Another earned this. As a cultural statement, it was the expected choice. Verdict: Deserved on merit. Debatable in context.
Best Director — Paul Thomas Anderson This one is harder to argue against. After 11 nominations and three decades of respected filmmaking, Anderson’s first Oscar win felt genuinely earned rather than compensatory. The scale of the project, the performances he drew out, and the directorial vision are all well-documented. His speech calling for “common sense and decency” for his children’s generation also gave the win some moral weight. Verdict: Deserved.
Best Actor — Michael B. Jordan Fully deserved, and then some. Playing two distinct brothers in a genre film that demanded physical transformation, emotional duality, and old-school movie-star magnetism, Jordan delivered one of the most complete lead performances of the awards season. His historic acknowledgment of the Black actors who came before him, naming each one from memory onstage, elevated the moment beyond personal triumph. This was not a sentiment win. It was earned. Verdict: Deserved.
Best Actress — Jessie Buckley Buckley swept every major precursor before arriving at the Dolby Theatre, and you do not win the Golden Globe, BAFTA, Critics Choice, and Actor Awards in a single season without having delivered something exceptional. Her portrayal of Agnes Shakespeare in Hamnet was described broadly as “barnstorming.” She also made history as the first Irish woman to win the category. Was there a case for another nominee? Possibly. But this win had real substance behind the narrative. Verdict: Deserved.
Best Supporting Actor — Sean Penn This is the category where I have the most questions. The performance was credible, but as multiple critics noted, Penn has the kind of career biography that tends to tip close votes in his direction. Delroy Lindo’s performance received strong notices, and Stellan Skarsgård had his advocates. Penn was not even present at the ceremony. This felt like a recognition of longevity as much as the specific role. Verdict: Partially deserved. Could have gone elsewhere without complaint.
Best Supporting Actress — Amy Madigan The 40-year gap between her 1986 nomination and this win for Weapons made the story nearly irresistible. But the performance itself, as the deeply unsettling Aunt Gladys in a horror film, was reportedly as disturbing and precise as any in the category. Her win also further validated horror as a genre at this ceremony. Verdict: Deserved, with the understanding that the career narrative accelerated it.
Best Original Screenplay — Ryan Coogler One of the best wins of the night, full stop. Coogler became only the second Black writer in Oscar history to win this category, following Jordan Peele. For a film this structurally ambitious, blending supernatural horror, Jim Crow history, folklore, and family trauma, the screenplay was the foundation of everything. Verdict: Fully deserved.
Best Cinematography — Autumn Durald Arkapaw Historic on every level. First woman, first Black person, first Filipina to win in this category. That alone would make the win significant. But the visual language of Sinners, its command of natural light, its staging of the Delta landscape, and its control of shadow during the supernatural sequences, made the win cinematically justified on its own terms. Her speech, asking every woman in the room to stand, was the ceremony’s most emotionally complete moment. Verdict: Fully deserved.
Best Animated Feature and Original Song — KPop Demon Hunters This win reflects where global pop culture actually lives. A Korean-American animated film with a K-pop soundtrack winning both categories sends a clear message about the direction of mainstream entertainment. “Golden” becoming the first K-pop song ever to win an Oscar is a cultural milestone regardless of your feelings about the genre. Verdict: Deserved, and culturally overdue.
BOTTOM LINE
The 98th Oscars did not complete a revolution. But they put one in motion. Black cinema did not merely show up on Sunday night. It changed the room’s temperature. The wins for Jordan, Coogler, Göransson, and Arkapaw were not symbolic gestures. They were hard-fought recognitions of formal excellence, creative risk, and cultural specificity. That the biggest prize still went to a more conventional choice does not cancel what happened. It just reminds us that the Academy’s full conversion is still a work in progress.
For the DMV’s African diaspora community, which already understands that excellence is rarely handed over and is built and claimed instead, Sunday night had both a victory and a lesson baked into it.