The 2026 Oscars Were a Protest Against Their Own Irrelevance
Not enough witches have won Oscars. True, Ruth Gordon did win Best Supporting Actress for “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), in which she was a cunning satanist next door, dishing up chocolate mousse from Hell. But that’s just a drop in the cauldron. Where were the awards (or, indeed, the nominations) for Margaret Hamilton in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), Helen Mirren in “Excalibur” (1981), Anjelica Huston in “The Witches” (1990), Tilda Swinton in “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” (2005), Kathryn Hunter in “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (2021), or even Angela Lansbury in “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” (1971)? The nominations Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande received for their performances in “Wicked” (2024) perhaps went some way toward redressing this grievous wrong, though they conspicuously failed to repeat that trick this year for the ill-received—and ill-conceived—sequel, “Wicked: For Good.”
Yet, happily, there was recognition for sorcery on Sunday night, when the ninety-eighth Academy Awards were handed out. To no one’s surprise, Jessie Buckley was crowned Best Actress for “Hamnet,” in which she plays an Elizabethan woman who has the primordial magic of the forest running through her veins. Among the Best Supporting Actress contenders, Wunmi Mosaku stood out, in “Sinners,” for her role as a skilled hoodoo healer who is alert to the threat of a vampire siege. Mosaku, a Nigerian-British actor of stealthy gravity, lost out to a showier, witchier performance: Amy Madigan won for the supernatural horror picture “Weapons,” in which she gives a properly Gordon-esque turn, funny and frightening in equal measure, as Aunt Gladys, a psychotic hag with an impressive bag of tricks: using a snappable twig and droplets of her own blood, Gladys invades the minds and bodies of unsuspecting suburbanites and forces them to do her sinister bidding. Oscar voters proved powerless to resist Madigan’s spell; we should have guessed the outcome from the ceremony’s opening clip reel, in which Conan O’Brien, the evening’s host, turned up in Aunt Gladys’ clown wig and makeup. What is it that Dorothy says at the end of “The Wizard of Oz”? Ah, yes: there’s no face like crone’s.
Madigan, who is seventy-five, previously received an Oscar nomination for the 1985 drama “Twice in a Lifetime,” a title that now seems prophetic. Since then, she’s figured prominently into some fairly memorable Oscar moments. When Marcia Gay Harden pulled off a startling Best Supporting Actress win for her role in Ed Harris’s film “Pollock” (2000), there was Madigan in the front row, clapping with violent elation. (Harris and Madigan have been married since 1983; the two sat together and sweetly embraced on Sunday night, when Madigan’s name was called.) And, at the 1999 ceremony, Madigan and Harris sat in silent, stone-faced protest when an honorary Oscar was awarded to the director Elia Kazan, who, in 1952, avoided the Hollywood blacklist by naming eight colleagues as former Communist Party members before the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was a scene that triggered flashbacks to Madigan’s performance in “Field of Dreams” (1989), as an outspoken liberal who, at a school P.T.A. meeting, righteously opposes a “Nazi cow” responsible for a book-banning campaign.
The ninety-eighth Oscars ceremony was a P.T.A. meeting of a different kind, the P.T.A. in question being the director, screenwriter, and producer Paul Thomas Anderson. His film “One Battle After Another” dominated the evening with six wins, the first of which came in the Academy’s newly inaugurated Best Achievement in Casting. Cassandra Kulukundis, the film’s casting director, gushed about her decades-long collaboration with Anderson—and then marvelled at the fact that she had somehow managed to win an Oscar before he had. “I hope you get one tonight!” she added, to much laughter from the crowd. Kulukundis needn’t have worried. Anderson won in all three of the categories for which he was nominated: Best Directing, Best Adapted Screenplay (the film is loosely based on the Thomas Pynchon novel “Vineland”), and Best Picture, which he shared with his producers, Sara Murphy and the late Adam Somner. The wins ended a career-long Oscars drought that, before this year, had seen Anderson go zero for eleven across six earlier films—several of which, including “Boogie Nights” (1997), “There Will Be Blood” (2007), and “Phantom Thread” (2017), have made him the most revered American auteur of his generation.
Onstage at the end of the night, Anderson recalled that the Best Picture nominees for the film year 1975 were “Dog Day Afternoon,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Jaws,” “Nashville,” and “Barry Lyndon.” “There is no best among them,” he said. “There is just what the mood might be that day.” Respectful disagreement aside—the best of the five is clearly “Barry Lyndon”—it was a gracious acknowledgment of the other nine Best Picture nominees, and especially of “Sinners,” a critical and commercial smash that had been nipping at the heels of “One Battle After Another” all season long, though not, perhaps, as closely as its most passionate partisans had hoped. But “Sinners,” which had already earned a record-breaking sixteen Oscar nominations, made history nonetheless: its director of photography, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, became the first woman ever to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography—a ludicrously overdue precedent that Arkapaw acknowledged by asking every woman in the theatre to stand. “Sinners” claimed four Oscars in total, including Best Original Score, for the composer Ludwig Göransson; Best Original Screenplay, for the writer and director Ryan Coogler; and Best Actor, for Michael B. Jordan, who starred as gunslinging identical twins. The only other actor to have managed this feat was Lee Marvin, who won Best Actor for dual roles in “Cat Ballou” (1965).
Should we be annoyed, dismayed, worried, jaded, or relieved that, at the second Oscars of the second Trump Administration, barely a month into a spuriously waged war on Iran, so many of the winners’ speeches steered clear of politics? Was it incumbent upon the artists behind “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners,” two Oscar front-runners of genuine political heft, to speak out as forcefully against white supremacy as their films do? This reserve has become the Academy’s way: it’s not as if the “Oppenheimer” juggernaut of two years ago initiated a flood of speeches denouncing nuclear proliferation. The Oscars are clearly not the Grammys, where this year’s big winner, Bad Bunny, called out ICE in one of his speeches. Nor are the Oscars the Berlin International Film Festival, which became mired in controversy last month, as journalists flooded press conferences with questions about Palestine and Israel, Trump and ICE, and the role of politics in cinema.
Anderson, who has consciously avoided politics in the multiple speeches he’s given this season, did lower his guard a bit when he won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar: “I wrote this movie for my kids,” he said, “to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left in this world we’re handing off to them.” Anderson was not alone in invoking children and the future; the Danish-Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier, accepting the award for Best International Feature Film for the drama “Sentimental Value,” paraphrased an idea from James Baldwin’s essay “The Children Are Ours”: “All adults are responsible for all children,” Trier said, “and let’s not vote for politicians who don’t take this seriously into account.”
These were stirring, unimpeachable sentiments; imagine the furor that might have erupted, by contrast, if Sean Penn, who famously disdains awards ceremonies, had shown up to collect his prize for Best Supporting Actor, for “One Battle After Another.” When he won Best Actor in 2004, for “Mystic River,” he kicked off his speech with a jab about the nonexistence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You suspect that he might have had a thing or two to say about the real-life applications of his “One Battle” character, a white-supremacist Army colonel who oversees an ICE-like crackdown on immigrants.
Even so, the night was not an entirely apolitical affair. Javier Bardem, presenting Best International Feature Film with Priyanka Chopra Jonas, started his remarks with a forceful “No to war, and free Palestine.” O’Brien threw in a jab about the failure to hold pedophiles accountable in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Predictably, the most topically urgent speeches could be found in the nonfiction-film categories. Gloria Cazares spoke movingly about her daughter, a victim of the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, as she accepted the award for Best Documentary Short with Joshua Seftel and Conall Jones, the filmmakers of “All the Empty Rooms,” which takes viewers into the bedrooms of children lost to gun violence across America. David Borenstein accepted the Best Documentary Feature Oscar for “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” which he described as a film “about how you lose your country.” Clearly not speaking only about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, he added, “You lose it through countless small little acts of complicity.”
Jimmy Kimmel, who presented both nonfiction awards, mocked “Melania,” Brett Ratner’s widely panned documentary about Melania Trump, and slammed the ascent of Bari Weiss in David Ellison’s media empire, Paramount Skydance. “As you know, there are some countries whose leaders don’t support free speech,” Kimmel said. “I’m not at liberty to say which. Let’s just leave it at North Korea and CBS.” It was a sharp dig, though I do wish that Kimmel, in invoking authoritarian regimes, had thought to mention Iran—or that someone in the writer’s room had thought to shout out the Iranian director Jafar Panahi, perhaps the greatest and certainly the bravest of this year’s nominated filmmakers. Panahi’s film “It Was Just an Accident,” a nominee for Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay, is partly drawn from his own experiences as a prisoner in the Islamic Republic. Like the superb Brazilian film “The Secret Agent,” from the director and screenwriter Kleber Mendonça Filho, Panahi’s film is a political thriller of searing moral urgency. The fact that neither film won anything is a reminder of the Academy’s cultural myopia: for all its efforts to diversify and internationalize its voting membership, the organization seems largely oblivious to the finest, most vital work being done by filmmakers outside of America.
Ultimately, it wasn’t the brutalities of the Trump Administration or Israel’s atrocities in Gaza that drew the most sustained protest on Sunday night but rather the encroaching threat of irrelevance for a film industry facing challenges on many fronts: declining ticket sales, the rise of A.I., soul-crushing corporate mergers. In one bit after another, O’Brien celebrated the cinema of the past, with nods to “North by Northwest” (1959) and “Casablanca” (1942), in order to lampoon where Hollywood seems to be heading. Among his targets were the appalling distortion of films to fit smartphone screens and the tendency of scripts in the Netflix era to become nonstop-exposition machines. He playfully posited a worst-case scenario for 2029, when the Oscars, a longtime fixture of broadcast television, will begin streaming exclusively on YouTube. The segments were funny, even when the laughter caught in your throat. Long before an uncommonly graceful and gimmick-free In Memoriam segment, with extended individual tributes to Rob Reiner, Catherine O’Hara, Diane Keaton, and Robert Redford, there was no mistaking the faintly elegiac cloud that hung over this year’s Oscars—the sense of a ceremony, and of an entire industry, unable to stop memorializing itself. The greatness of this year’s finest films aside, it will surely take more than fresh reserves of movie magic, let alone a snap of Aunt Gladys’s twig, for a spirit of optimism to prevail again. ♦