At last, the 2026 Oscars marked the end of this long, roller coaster of an awards season on Sunday night as “One Battle After Another” continued its domination at the ceremony.
The Paul Thomas Anderson-directed black comedy-thriller won six statuettes, including Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing and Casting.
“Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster horror flick which led the ceremony with a record-breaking 16 nominations, won four Oscars: Best Actor, Original Screenplay, Original Score and Cinematography.
“Frankenstein,” Guillermo del Toro’s sci-fi adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel of the same name, picked up three awards; the global phenomenon “K-Pop Demon Hunters” nabbed two trophies.
Comedian Conan O’Brien returned to host the ceremony for the second time. He didn’t waste any time cracking jokes and aimed his monologue and other comedic bits at President Donald Trump, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos and of course, at Best Actor nominee Timothée Chalamet, who received several jabs throughout the night.
“Sinners” star Michael B. Jordan won the Oscar for Best Actor, his first win and first nomination. That race had tightened in recent weeks after Jordan nabbed SAG’s Actor Award over Chalamet, who starred in “Marty Supreme.” Chalamet, who won the Golden Globe for Best Performance By A Male Actor in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical, has made headlines for his comments about ballet and opera, saying that “no one cares” about the art forms anymore.
“Hamnet” star Jessie Buckley won Best Actress, a win that was not at all surprising considering she’d basically locked up the category all awards season.
For the first time, the academy presented an award for Best Casting, which went to Cassandra Kulukundis, the casting director of “One Battle After Another.”
HuffPost covered the awards ceremony live. See below for updates.
‘One Battle After Another’ Wins Best Picture After Dominating The 2026 Awards Season
“One Battle After Another” just won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 98th Academy Awards. Paul Thomas Anderson directed the film, which has dominated the 2026 awards season.
The film won six Oscars on Sunday night, including Best Director, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Editing And Casting.
The film was up against “Sinners,” “Bugonia,” “Frankenstein,” “Hamnet,” “Marty Supreme,” “The Secret Agent,” “Sentimental Value” and “Train Dreams" in the Best Picture category.
Paul Thomas Anderson Addresses ‘One Battle After Another’ Criticism Of Black Female Character Portrayals: ‘It’s Complicated’
Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” took home six Academy Awards Sunday night, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.
The much-talked-about action-thriller was an awards season front-runner, despite some criticism from audiences over certain portrayals in the film, particularly over the fetishization of Black female characters like Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills.
Speaking to HuffPost from the Oscars press room after the show, the filmmaker acknowledged that he knows “a little bit about that critique,” noting “it’s complicated.”
“I know that Teyana [Taylor] has talked about it a lot,” Anderson said. “I know that we have the portrayal of many different characters. In particular, her character, who is so flawed and, unfortunately, makes decisions that are detrimental to the revolution that she’s trying to fight.”
He continued, “It’s complicated. We always knew that we were trying to make something complicated. We knew that we weren’t making something that was heroic, and we needed to lean into that. And we needed to own the fact that this woman was suffering not only from postpartum depression, but she had issues of her own that she hadn’t really reconciled with.”
The director added, “It’s a very dangerous thing when you start out, you want to change the world, but you start to kind of become selfish and you read your own reviews. That was our hero in Perfidia, who becomes an anti-hero. Point of it is to set up a story of Willa, the next generation. What happens when your parents who are damaged and have handed quite a difficult history to you, how do you manage that? That’s our story, and our story is in Chase [Infiniti] and her evolution, like I talked about, in terms of the generational aspect, to try to do better.”
Watch his comments to HuffPost's Njera Perkins below and read her critique of "One Battle After Another" here.
