The 2026 Oscars ceremony was a night of satisfying firsts. Jessie Buckley became the first Irish woman to win the best actress Oscar, taking home a long-predicted award for her searing performance as Shakespeare’s bereaved wife Agnes Hathaway in Hamnet. Meanwhile, Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman and the first Black person to win for cinematography for her work on the Depression-era vampire blockbuster Sinners.
Family drama Sentimental Value was the first Norwegian film to pick up the international feature film award, and a new Oscar for casting was awarded for the very first time to One Battle After Another casting director Cassandra Kulukundis. Then there was a first Oscar win for 75-year-old Amy Madigan, as best supporting actress for her role in the thriller Weapons, 40 years after she was last nominated. And to cap it all, after 14 years of trying and 11 previous nominations, the director Paul Thomas Anderson won his first ever Oscar. In fact, he won three.
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“You make a guy work for one of these,” he joked, as he picked up the best director statue, one of six Oscars won by One Battle After Another, his comedy thriller inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which wryly presents radicalism and resistance in an America in the grip of a sinister police state. The movie also took home best picture—and was the night’s big winner, picking up best adapted screenplay (for Anderson), best editing (for Andy Jergensen), and best supporting actor for Sean Penn who plays a racist soldier.
Penn wasn’t there to collect it (“He couldn’t be here this evening, or didn’t want to,” said presenter Kieran Culkin), and so missed celebrating his own piece of history as only the fourth actor to win three Academy Awards, joining the likes of Daniel Day Lewis, Jack Nicholson, and Walter Brennan.
Even so, the rest of the cast, led by an exuberant Teyana Taylor, flooded onto the stage to celebrate the best picture award with wild joy. In his third speech of the night, Anderson found exactly the right words to sum up the mood of the ceremony by comparing this rich cinematic year with 1975. “The nominees in that year were One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, and Nashville,” he said. “There is no best among them. There is just what the mood might be that day. But we’re happy to be part of this; a wonderful, wonderful journey.”
It was an elegant tribute to the strength of the other best picture nominees, particularly Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which ties themes of African American identity into a narrative about music and vampires and was the other frontrunner for the prize in a closely fought Oscar race. In the end, Sinners bagged four of its record 16 nominations, winning best original screenplay for Coogler, best score for Ludwig Göransson, best cinematography, and best actor for Michael B Jordan, who plays Smoke and Stack, twin owners of a Delta juke joint.