Everyone who watched the 2026 Oscars has an opinion, and everyone’s opinion is, to some degree, wrong in exactly the same way their personality would predict. While others would see that as a flaw, I disagree. Because these prejudices are what it means to engage with art seriously. We bring ourselves to it and see them through our lens.
This writer is no different. I have preferences. A horse in this race — if you would call it that. And I have made peace with that. This review is biased, not dishonestly but humanly, and you as the reader should apply your prejudice as you read wherever you see fit.
Now that we have settled on that. Somewhere in Nigeria, in a hostel room like the Alexander Brown Hall, on a phone screen, while being plagued by bad network from telecoms like MTN, Airtel, Glo… Thousands of people set alarms on a Sunday night to watch a room full of very rich Americans give each other statues. We do this every year ritualistically.
We argue about it in group chats, write think pieces on X, and argue between lectures and before school. We have strong opinions about people who have never heard of us. There’s something remarkable about the fact that a ceremony designed in Hollywood, for Hollywood, somehow lands with such weight here.
But it does, and this year, as always. It gave us something worth the lost sleep. The 98th Academy Awards were a historic night. It was a ceremony that managed to be funny, politically pointed, and emotionally heavy. It was also an Oscars with one decision that I, in the spirit of full, honest disclosure, am not completely over.
We’ll get there.
One Battle After Another
Before we talk about anything else, we first have to acknowledge what happened with Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Paul Thomas Anderson, who has directed ten feature-length films, five short films, twenty-three music videos, one documentary, one television episode as a guest segment director, and one theatrical play in the span of the last thirty-eight years.
Among the movies under his belt are Phantom Thread (2017), The Master (2012), and so on. A body of work, that, by any reasonable measure, should have a shelf full of Oscars by now. On March 15th, 2026, he finally got his due.
One Battle After Another swept the night. Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn, who collected his third career Oscar. Best Casting; the first ever winner of this new category. Six wins in total, from a film that felt like PTA finally letting himself go completely, the restraint of a decades-long career releasing at once.
The Sean Penn subplot was also in character, as he wasn’t even at the ceremony, having left for Kyiv to visit President Zelenskyy. Sean Penn previously won the Best Actor Oscar for the 2003 thriller Mystic River and for the Harvey Milk biopic Milk in 2009. He was also nominated in that category for Dead Man Walking (1995), Sweet and Lowdown (1999), and I Am Sam (2001). With this Oscar, he ties the record for most acting wins by a male actor with Jack Nicholson, Walter Brennan, and Daniel Day-Lewis.
All in all, the PTA sweep was satisfying in the way long-overdue things usually are. Hollywood occasionally gets it right, and this was one of those nights.
The Host
Host Conan O’Brien hosted the ceremony for the second consecutive year. He introduced himself as the “last human host of the Academy Awards.” Making jokes about pressing issues in the world — artificial intelligence, content creators, the Chalamet situation, among many others.
His monologue was genuinely moving, and it set the tone for the entire night, embracing the evolving state of the industry and doing so in his signature silly nature. It was a good monologue. Hosting the Oscars well once is impressive. Doing it two years in a row, without losing the room or yourself, is harder than it looks.
Sinners
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners arrived at the Oscars with a record 16 nominations, entering the ceremony as the most nominated film in Oscar history. Surpassing movies like All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land to get to the top of this list. It is a supernatural horror film set in 1930s Mississippi, about twin brothers who return home from war to open a juke joint and encounter vampires. At this point, I’d like to note that this is not a film that is supposed to be here, at least not traditionally or by the old rules.
It won four awards; Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman and the first woman of color ever to win Best Cinematography. Ryan Coogler won Best Original Screenplay; we should note here that he is the second Black screenwriter to win this category after Jordan Peele for Get Out. And lastly, Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor. Sinners sinned against every expectation the Academy has historically set, and the Academy rewarded it anyway.
It is an atypical horror film set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South, carrying the weight of the Middle Passage and Black diaspora identity; it is a film about what it costs to come home when home was built to diminish you and make you small and limit your potential. That is not a foreign conversation here in Nigeria, where the dream of almost every citizen is to leave the country. It is, in fact, a very familiar one. The specifics are American; the weight is universal.
First, I’ll admit that the fact that a film this ambitious, this genre-defiant, and immensely culturally loaded was made at all is worth celebrating. That it won, however, is another conversation.
The Debate
Going into the 2026 Oscars, Timothée Chalamet was the clear frontrunner for Best Actor. This was his third nomination, following Call Me by Your Name in 2018 and A Complete Unknown in 2024. Both of which were impressive performances.
In “Marty Supreme,” directed by Josh Safdie, he plays Marty Mauser, a ping-pong hustler clawing his way out of Manhattan’s lower East Side. A performance that has been described by many as more impressive and more physically demanding than most people would say or give it credit. As the Academy Awards is the final night for awards season, going into that night, he had already won the Golden Globe and the Critics’ Choice Award. The film earned 9 nominations in total, and he was thirty years old and already on his third Oscar nomination. The numbers pointed strongly in one direction.
Then came the podcast.
During a CNN and Variety Town Hall opposite Matthew McConaughey, Chalamet said he didn’t want to be working in art forms that were perceived to be dying arts, and named ballet and opera as his examples. He immediately joked that he’d just lost “14 cents in viewership” and was “taking shots for no reason.”
The internet chose not to take the joke in the spirit it was given. What followed was a full-on pile-on: opera houses posting shade, ballet companies offering discounts in his name, Whoopi Goldberg calling him “vapid and shallow,” Steven Spielberg making pointed remarks at SXSW, and Andrea Bocelli and Misty Copeland weighing in. His betting odds collapsed, and Michael B. Jordan became the favorite.
Now, here’s where it gets complicated.
The voting deadline was March 5th. The controversy didn’t fully ignite until after the clips circulated widely. So the clean narrative that the opera and ballet communities defeated Chalamet at the Oscars is probably more fantasy than it is accurate. However, people seemed to think otherwise. For example, Jon Stewart, an American comedian, who declared on The Daily Show that “opera and ballet have defeated Timothée Chalamet. No contest. A knockout.” It made for great television. But it was almost certainly not what decided the vote.
What Chalamet said was careless. However, it was not read in full context as the cultural crime it was treated as. He said he didn’t want to be in the business of begging people to care about things they don’t care about. Even a former opera singer writing in defense of him pointed out that while his tone was flippant, he was making a point about declining audiences that the industry largely refuses to say out loud. There were even cases of celebrities like Doja Cat, who initially went after him loudly, later admitting she had never been to a ballet or an opera and was, in her own words, “virtue signaling.”
Michael B. Jordan’s win, by contrast, was not a consolation prize. He played identical twins in Sinners —Smoke and Stack — performing opposite himself in every shared frame, a technical and emotional achievement with essentially no precedent in Oscar history. But something interesting happens during his acceptance speech. In his acceptance speech, he named every Black performer who had won Best Actor or Best Actress before him: Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, Forest Whitaker, and Will Smith, and said, “To be amongst those giants, amongst those greats, amongst my ancestors, amongst my gods.”
I find that a speech like that framed the win as a legacy. As lineage. As a Black man stepping into a procession that has been painfully short for a reason. And the Academy, moved by both the performance and the cultural weight Sinners carried into that room, voted within that frame. That is not an accusation; it is an observation. The film was genuinely great; the performance was genuinely demanding, and the moment was genuinely charged. All three things were true simultaneously, and it would be dishonest to pretend the third had nothing to do with the outcome. Whether that is a problem depends entirely on who you are and what you think awards are for.
My honest position: Chalamet’s performance was the better one. Marty Supreme going home with zero wins from nine nominations is one of the cruelest outcomes in recent Oscar memory. The controversy was overblown and likely irrelevant to the actual vote count. Jordan’s win was genuine. It wasn’t a pity prize or a political act. However, I think it was inseparable from the cultural moment Sinners was riding, and I think the Academy voted for both the performance and what it represented simultaneously.
Both things can be true. The best criticism holds the tension rather than resolving it cheaply. I am trying.
The Future of Nollywood
In a bid to not get caught up in the glitz and glamour of the global scene. For a young Nigerian watching the ceremony, there was a quiet issue that deserves to be said plainly: Nigeria was not at the 2026 Oscars. Again.
The Nigerian Official Selection Committee (NOSC) considered six films for submission and ultimately voted for no submission at all, with the NOSC chair, Stephanie Linus, citing a lack of the creative and technical intentionality required to compete globally. This, however, has become a familiar and worrying pattern. Since beginning participation in 2019, Nigeria has submitted only a handful of films, and none of them have been nominated.
The first submission, Genevieve Nnaji’s Lionheart, was disqualified because too much of its dialogue was in English. A language that is, by colonial inheritance, Nigeria’s official one.
And yet, the most celebrated Nigerian film of this Oscars cycle didn’t represent Nigeria at all. My Father’s Shadow, the semi-autobiographical debut feature from British-Nigerian director Akinola Davies Jr., became the first Nigerian film ever selected for the Cannes Film Festival’s Official Selection, winning a Special Mention for the Caméra d’Or. It was submitted to the 98th Oscars as the UK’s entry for Best International Feature Film. Not Nigeria’s, but Britain’s.
The film was produced by Element Pictures and financed by BBC Films and the British Film Institute, which is even what allowed it to travel as far as it did. The story is set in Lagos, on the day of the 1993 election crisis. It follows two brothers who spend a day with their estranged father as political unrest slowly closes in around them. It is Nigeria, told by Nigerians, about Nigerians, with a Yoruba song performed on set that was not scripted but became one of the film’s most emotionally precise moments. But it was selected as the UK’s entry, and if it had won, the conversation about whether to call it a Nigerian film would have been a painful one.
This is the structural problem Nollywood keeps running into. The talent exists. The stories exist. Nigeria has many problems; talent isn’t one of them. Aligning our creativity, resources, and strategy in a way that positions our films for global recognition, however, has proven difficult. Akinola Davies had BBC Film and Element Pictures. He had the institutional infrastructure that turned a personal Nigerian story into an internationally competitive film. Without that, My Father’s Shadow stays in Lagos, and the Oscars don’t know it exists.
What this movie proves, however, is that Nigerian Stories, told with the right resources behind them, can sit at the very top of the global cinema scene. A 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a BAFTA Award for Outstanding Debut, two Gotham Awards, and Cannes. The film didn’t win an Oscar nomination, but it moved through spaces Nigerian cinema has never occupied before. That means the ceiling is not where we thought it was. The question is who gets to build toward it whether it be Nigerians with Nigerian infrastructure or Nigerians who had to leave to get there.
What This Year’s Oscars Actually Means
Every yearly ceremony, in a way, records what the industry thinks matters in a particular cultural moment. The most significant shift on display was the full legitimization of genre filmmaking at the highest level. Traditionally dominated by historical epics, dramatic biopics, and prestige dramas, the Best Picture category this year included two horror films, a science fiction film, and an action-sports film, with nearly half the slate falling outside the normal conventional boundaries of what the Academy usually rewards. (Think Sinners)
Jessie Buckley won Best Actress for Hamnet, and Amy Madigan won Best Supporting Actress for Weapons. A late-career win, the room received warmly. The new Best Casting category, won by Cassandra Kulukundis for One Battle After Another was long overdue; the fact that it took this long to honor casting directors says something unflattering about which kinds of labor the industry considers prestigious.
The In Memoriam segment carried its annual controversy, with James Van Der Beek, Eric Dane, Brigitte Bardot, and Malcolm-Jamal Warner among those excluded. Whoever curates that segment will always, inevitably, get it wrong for someone.
Streaming’s structural dominance is also no longer a conversation about the future. It is the present. The 2026 nominations revealed the extent to which streaming companies and legacy studios are now competing for the same cultural influence, with Netflix movies receiving 18 nominations in total and Warner Bros. leading all distributors in wins.
What the night ultimately confirmed is that the films the industry is most excited about right now are ambitious, genre-defiant, and increasingly made by people who were not in the room a generation ago. A changing culture, fractured viewing habits, the battle against AI, and tectonic corporate shifts are all bearing down on Hollywood simultaneously. The 2026 Oscars did not solve any of that. But it was, at minimum, a ceremony that showed evolution from traditions. And whether the Academy is truly evolving is a question that will take a couple more years to answer honestly.
What I do know is that concerning this year’s awards, everybody had an opinion and most people did not agree. But regardless of whatever side of the discourse you are on, the conversations, the arguments, and the discourse are what make this worth watching. The Oscars have ended. The discourse lives on. See you next year.
