The results of this year’s Oscars were so predictable as to be entirely unexciting. Months ago, the pundits had called the major results: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Pynchon adaptation One Battle After Another to win Best Film and Best Director, Jessie Buckley to win Best Actress for Hamnet, Sinners to win Best Original Screenplay. It wasn’t hard to predict because they had won these prizes in ceremony after ceremony. And so, last night in Los Angeles, events unfolded with the grim pre-ordination of awards voters who had seen what they liked and liked what they saw.
The results of this year’s Oscars were so predictable as to be entirely unexciting
There were, admittedly, a couple of interesting stories, but they took place long before the ceremony. The presumed frontrunner for Best Actor, Timothée Chalamet, managed to annoy a lot of potential voters. His arrogant, showboating awards campaign seemed at least in part a deliberate homage to the similarly obnoxious character he played in the film Marty Supreme, even though his already notorious comments denigrating ballet and opera were made after all the ballots had been sent in. Instead, the award went to Michael B. Jordan, star of Sinners, which was, by the by, the most nominated film in Oscar history with 16 nominations.
As a film with a strong African-American theme and focus, it would have been inconceivable that it was not acknowledged in some significant way – leaving aside debates as to the picture’s actual quality, but it was ever thus. And so its awards for Screenplay, Actor, Score and Cinematography (the latter one of the evening’s few genuine surprises as One Battle After Another had been expected to win) made it a worthy runner-up, with honor maintained.
It was an excellent night for Warner Bros., the studio behind both Sinners and One Battle After Another, and it will be interesting to see whether its now-inevitable sale to Paramount will result in work of this caliber still being made. Yet it was the stories around the ceremony itself that will attract attention, along with the usual various fashion disasters and faux pas. (The worst, by a country mile, being Hamnet director Chloé Zhao’s dress, which made her look as if she had dressed in trash bags.)
Sean Penn, who won Best Supporting Actor for his barnstormingly absurd performance in One Battle After Another, was not present, depriving us of what might have been an acceptance speech for the ages. Instead, it was left to the previous year’s winner Kieran Culkin, who picked up the award in his stead, to quip: “He couldn’t be here this evening, or didn’t want to,” and punctured a great deal of the pomposity in the process.
Politics are never far away when actors are around, however, and so it was unsurprising that Javier Bardem, who vies with Mark Ruffalo to be the A-lister who takes the most overtly pro-Palestine, anti-Israel stand in public, wore a “No a la Guerra” pin. He announced to reporters on the red carpet that he was “wearing a pin that I used in 2003 with the Iraq war, which was an illegal war, and we are here, 23 years after, with another illegal war, created by Trump and Netanyahu with another lie.”
Nobody who accepted an award said anything quite so pointed, although the evening’s host Conan O’Brien – by general consent, less effective this year than in his first stint in 2025 – awkwardly quipped that: “It’s the first time since 2012 there are no British actors nominated for Best Actor or Best Actress. A British spokesperson said, ‘Yeah, well, at least we arrest our pedophiles.’”
Yet the most important figure of the night was another no-show, in the form of President Trump. Many of the acceptance speeches referred obliquely to the current state of the United States, following on from O’Brien’s comments about “very chaotic and frightening times.” Of course, Donald detractor Jimmy Kimmel managed a quip, saying: “There are some countries whose leaders don’t support free speech. I’m not at liberty to say which. Let’s just leave it at North Korea and CBS.”
We now await Trump’s verdict on his nemesis Kimmel and the night in general via Truth Social. It is doubtful that he was much of a fan of either of the main award winners of the night, but who knows – and in the meantime we can reflect on an Oscars that could have badly done with a dose of Will Smith-esque outrage to liven things up a bit. Alas.
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