As with every award ceremony across the last several years, there is no more sobering event than watching the AP’s raw live video feed of the Academy Awards, where screaming photographers and harried publicists push their client list onto a carpet—without ceremony, without fawning entertainment reporters, without the illusion of manners—and let them rip. I bring this up at the top of our coverage for the 2026 Oscars—the last of the year’s long season of award shows—because the AP’s great leveling-up session felt more in league with what has been the most equitable and egalitarian of film seasons.
Even if you thought one or more films didn’t live up to their hype (isn’t that the case every award season?), the Academy Awards really did find its heart-palpitatingly toughest-ever tie in 2026’s quiet rivalry between One Battle After Another and Sinners, along with the auteurs behind them, Paul Thomas Anderson and Ryan Coogler (I would’ve additionally added the Timothée Chalamet Best Actor drama if it wasn’t for the fact that he so often shot himself in the foot during the ramp-up to Marty Supreme’s otherwise-fraught Oscar campaign). How quiet of a rivalry was it? Coogler’s decision to not join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences came down to not wanting to judge fellow artisans’ films, because he finds it stressful. “But you pricks seem to love it,” the evening’s host Conan O’Brien said mockingly at one point (another favorite quip came at the expense of Chalamet: “Security is very tight tonight. There’s concerns about attacks from the ballet and opera communities. They’re just mad you left out jazz”).
Quiet, yes, but still perceptible. And all the more dramatic for it—even if you, the viewing audience, could guess the outcome. For example, Amy Madigan’s win for Best Supporting Actress for her wholly original villain character of Gladys from Weapons made perfect sense for a longtime legend of stage and screen as a character actor (a term rarely used anymore for those not-so-leading roles) whose work has never been fully recognized. Jessie Buckley’s Best Actress nod for Hamnet was truly an inevitability the minute Chloé Zhao yelled “cut” (that it came a week after her cool take on the Bride of Frankenstein bombed is a bummer for her and that genuinely weird new horror-musical). Though it was a shame that Delroy Lindo and Stellan Skarsgård, both in their mid-seventies, were denied Best Supporting Actor victories came down to one undeniable fact: Sean Penn ate up the screen, spat it back out, and combed his hair with it in One Battle After Another, from his first scene to his all-but-tearjerking (yet gut-bustingly funny) demise.
All of my issues with Sinners came down to the oft-commented-upon fact that the film was remarkably similar in concept to Quentin Tarantino’s script for Robert Rodriguez’s 1996 film From Dusk Till Dawn—from its criminal brothers down to the incendiary nature of its vampire nightclub. Coogler did admit to that influence, but in my mind, it was so prominent that a Best Original Screenplay nod was contradictory. Among the details that made Coogler’s script and film original, however—and kudos to a deserving Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the first woman to win a Best Cinematography Oscar—was its luminously shot spirituality, heritage, and communion. Tarantino could never take that away from Coogler.
So, what film did I think should’ve won Best Original Screenplay, and with it, Best Actor? Blue Moon and Ethan Hawke, only for its graceful, mile-a-minute, witty (and sad) script and a lived-in, completely transformative role that was so surprising, I still can’t believe that it was Hawke. And if anyone besides Hawke deserved the Best Actor prize it was Michael B. Jordan; from his youth as Wallace in The Wire and out-pacing Jeffrey Wright, Zoe Saldaña, and Melvin Van Peebles in Blackout (see it), Jordan has always shown deep commitment and made interesting choices within each role. Do I think that Sinners was his best-ever acting? No. Did I think that One Battle After Another was Paul Thomas Anderson’s best directing or best film? No. But like Al Pacino and Martin Scorsese who both won Oscars for films outside of their genus, you get it when you get it. Things are cumulative sometimes. “You make a guy work hard for one of these,” PTA noted upon his Best Film win.
I know that other writers last night wrote about how Anderson’s victory was a sort of coronation, the last of a generation of great auteurs at a time when the movie industry is getting narrower in its corporate diversity as well as in its literal display on smart phones (another kudos to whoever wrote that vertical-viewing joke, where all films’ action—even its titles—were brought down to two inches) and its increasing competition with YouTube (another wildly funny segment in the fact of Oscars’ move to that platform next year). In my mind, however—and even inclusive of independent micro-drama makers, often juggling a dozen self-devising roles—as long as the moving image meets the emotive word, there will always be worthy auteurs. PTA is one. So is Coogler. His Oscars will come, maybe at the next Academy Awards. See you then.
