One Battle After Another and Sinners deservedly dominated the 2026 Oscars. Michael B Jordan and Jessie Buckley won Best Actor and Best Actress respectively – two modest, unassuming stars who gave heart-warming acceptance speeches. Here, in a special extra edition of the Culture Newsletter, our film critic Robbie Collin gives his verdict on the awards, and we round up our coverage of film’s biggest night.
Serena Davies – Culture Editor
One Battle After Another is a Hollywood liberal fantasy in movie form. Of course it won
One Battle After Another’s cast and crew gather on stage after winning Best Picture
Robbie Collin
Chief Film Critic
Was the Academy ruled by its head or its heart in 2026? There was a point around a week ago when this year’s two Best Picture frontrunners, One Battle After Another and Sinners, seemed to fall neatly into those two boxes. What’s your poison? The noodly satirical thriller from Paul Thomas Anderson, the previously unsung 55-year-old veteran? Or the courageous, pressing vampire horror from Ryan Coogler, who counts as a thrusting (relative) youngster at 39?
Yet as prize after prize went to Anderson’s film last night – six to Sinners’ four, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn, who kept up his impressive season-long streak of a) winning things and b) not turning up to collect them – it became clear that One Battle isn’t just a piece of work that Hollywood admires for its craftsmanship and nerve, but that it loves dearly too.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle took home six Oscars
Well, naturally, some would doubtless argue. It’s about a gaggle of preening Californian radicals getting the upper hand on a brutal and conspiracy-raddled US government. It’s the Hollywood liberal fantasy in movie form. But that’s to misapprehend what Anderson’s film is actually doing, which is flashing us a distorted-yet-painfully recognisable reflection of America’s turbulent present in order to satirise it from all angles – while hopefully postponing its real-world combustion at the same time. It’s essentially Dr Strangelove for the Maga-versus-wokery era, and as such is a Best Picture winner I suspect will age extraordinarily well.
How many more of those the studios will be producing in the years ahead remains to be seen, especially since Warner Bros, the studio that gave us both One Battle and Sinners, is about to be swallowed by Paramount, whose output last year didn’t merit a single Oscar nomination. Let’s savour the good stuff while it’s here.
Anderson, sweetly magnanimous in victory, made a point of flagging the essential bizarreness of the entire awards-giving exercise. After listing the Best Picture nominees of 1976 – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Barry Lyndon, Jaws, Nashville, Dog Day Afternoon – he pointed out: “There is no best among them. There is just what the mood might be that day.”
He’s obviously right – and while it could have been a good few years before, say, F1’s day came along, if the vote had been held a week later or earlier, Sinners might have easily won the top prize. In the end it still left with a solid haul, including Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor for its 39-year-old star Michael B Jordan, who’s managed to become one of the most commercially successful male leads of his time through talent and bloody-mindedness alone.
Michael B Jordan won Best Actor
All the key roles that smoothed Jordan’s path to the Dolby Theatre stage last night – in Fruitvale Station, Black Panther, the Creed trilogy, and finally Sinners – were ones that he and Coogler had to cook up for themselves. Perhaps that Oscar will encourage the studios to take more risks on this notably un-risky leading man.
Have they simply been too smitten with Timothée Chalamet to notice him? Whatever the case, the Academy have clearly decided that this truly generational star – now a three-time acting nominee at 30, as well as (like Jordan) a proven box-office draw – can stand to wait another few years before he gets an Oscar of his own. But he’s in good company if so: they made Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Paul Newman and Leonardo DiCaprio wait too.
That some of these outcomes were widely predicted (especially Jessie Buckley’s Best Actress win for Hamnet) didn’t sap the tension from a consistently lively Oscar vintage: some major categories like the supporting performances were hard to call with any certainty in advance, while Frankenstein worked surprisingly hard in the end for Netflix, taking three craft prizes (production design, makeup and hairstyling, and costume design) that will keep the streaming giant – which also won Best Animated Feature and Best Song for KPop Demon Hunters – happy enough until the 2027 season kicks in.
Is it too soon to think about that yet? Of course it is. We’ve got at least six months of down-time, during which I pledge to grumble only once per month, tops, that Marty Supreme (nine noms, no wins) was robbed.
Enjoy more of our Oscars coverage below:
Catch up on all the night’s events with our Oscars blog here.
And read our review of the largely excruciating ceremony here.
We also salute the winners of the two lead acting awards. Irish actress Jessie Buckley was a shoo-in from the start of awards season – she won every gong going, yet seemed astonished every time she found herself up at the podium. We chart her rise from TV star to toast of Hollywood here.
Best Actor Michael B Jordan, on the other hand, was initially an outsider in his category, but as original favourite Timothée Chalamet’s campaign lost momentum, so his gained it.
Fancy the long view? We’ve ranked every past Best Picture winner.
Conan O’Brien could not be faulted for his effort as host
The winners in full:
Best Picture
One Battle After Another
Read our review ➤
Best Director
Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another
Best Actor
Michael B Jordan, Sinners
Read our review ➤
Best Actress
Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
Read our review ➤
Jessie Buckley is the first Irish woman to win the Oscar for Best Actress
Best Supporting Actor
Sean Penn, One Battle After Another
Best Supporting Actress
Amy Madigan, Weapons
Read our review ➤
Best Adapted Screenplay
One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson
Best Original Screenplay
Sinners, Ryan Coogler
Best Casting
One Battle After Another
Best Cinematography
Sinners
Best Film Editing
One Battle After Another
Best Costume Design
Frankenstein
Best Make-up and Hairstyling
Frankenstein
Best Production Design
Frankenstein
Best Score
Sinners
Best Song
Golden from KPop Demon Hunters
Best Sound
F1
Read our review ➤
Best Visual Effects
Avatar: Fire and Ash
Best International Film
Norway, Sentimental Value
Thanks for reading this special Culture newsletter. We’ll be back again on Saturday.
– Serena
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