Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another towered over the 98th Academy Awards nominations with 13 nods, which ultimately yielded six Oscars. But the evening’s real victory belonged to the Academy itself. For once, the awards resisted the gravitational pull of a single dominant frontrunner. The winners for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actress, for instance, were split across three different films, signalling a subtle but meaningful shift for an institution long inclined to consolidate its support around one clear frontrunner. In the weeks leading up to the ceremony, the outcomes felt unusually open-ended, and that unpredictability turned out to be the night’s most refreshing quality.
In recent years, the Oscars have tended to function less as a surprise finale than as the last confirmation in a chain of awards-season signals. By the time envelopes containing the results are opened, the winners have usually been identified by months of precursor victories at the Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice Awards, Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards, and British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA). This year, that predictive machinery broke down. Amy Madigan surged past better-decorated competitors to take supporting actress for Weapons, while Sean Penn’s best supporting actor came on the back of only a SAG win.
Even categories that appeared settled retained an element of suspense. Jessie Buckley’s best actress win for Hamnet seemed the closest thing to a sure bet, after sweeping the Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice, SAG, and BAFTA awards, yet Rose Byrne’s acclaimed turn in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You remained a formidable challenger, making it entirely plausible that the category could sway either way. The biggest break from the pattern, however, came from Michael B Jordan, who won the Best Actor Oscar without collecting a single major precursor prize — something that hasn’t happened in the category since Adrian Brody’s unlikely victory for The Pianist in 2003 (it was Brody who handed Jordan his Oscar).
Year of firsts
If unpredictability defined the night’s races, another theme emerged from the podium. The 99th Academy Awards produced an unusually large number of first-time winners, spanning both long-overdue recognition and the arrival of new voices. Jessie Buckley’s Best Actress win for Hamnet marked the first Oscar of her career, a moment that confirmed her steady ascent as one of the most compelling performers of her generation. It also marked the first win by an Irish actress in the category. The night brought a first Oscar for Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier, whose Cannes Grand Prix-winning Sentimental Value took home the award for Best International Feature Film. Again, the victory was more than a personal milestone; it was the first Norwegian film to win in the category.
Also read: How Oscar-winner Jessie Buckley draws Shakespeare’s wife out of the shadows in Hamnet
For some, the wins were decades in the making. Anderson finally ended his 14-year Oscar drought, winning Best Director for One Battle After Another; his first Oscar win brought not one but three awards, with the director also receiving honours for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film. Additional victories for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture only reinforced what cinephiles have long known: Anderson belongs firmly in the pantheon of all-time great writer-directors. His longtime collaborator Cassandra Kulukundis also took home the inaugural Oscar for Best Casting Director — a category introduced this year — for One Battle After Another. Having worked with Anderson on ten films over the past three decades, she joked from the stage, “It’s insane that I won one before you.” (The award for Best Casting Director was announced before any of the three won by Anderson.) The film’s editor, Andy Jurgensen, was another first-time winner, taking home Best Film Editing.
Highlighting creative partnerships
Elsewhere, the ceremony highlighted creative partnerships shaping contemporary Hollywood. Michael B Jordan’s Best Actor win — making him the sixth Black actor to win in the category and the first since Will Smith for King Richard in 2022 — further consolidated his long-running collaboration with director Ryan Coogler, a partnership increasingly comparable to enduring actor–director pairings such as Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio or Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke. The night also saw Coogler win his first Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Even the night’s smaller categories delivered novelty: the Oscar for Best Live Action Short ended in a rare tie between The Singers and Two People Exchanging Saliva. “A tie — wow, we didn’t know that could happen,” exclaimed The Singers director Sam A. Davis from the stage.
In that sense, the nominations revealed something equally significant: an Academy slowly widening its field of vision. Horror — long dismissed as a genre unworthy of prestige recognition — finally found meaningful acknowledgement this year. Madigan’s win for Weapons and the awards-season dominance of Coogler’s Sinners suggested a shift toward recognising the craft and political imagination embedded in genre filmmaking.
Beyond US studio films
The Academy also continued its gradual move toward international recognition in categories historically dominated by American studio films. Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent landed nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor, while Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value made history as the first Norwegian film to receive nine Oscar nominations, including nods for all four of its actors. Yet the Academy’s political imagination still reveals clear limits. Even One Battle After Another’s Best Picture win — a film that takes an explicit stand against the resurgence of fascist supremacy in America — illustrates how comfortably the Oscars align themselves with political cinema when it arrives packaged as a major cultural event and a box-office juggernaut. The same could be said of Sinners, whose genre spectacle made its politics legible within the language of mainstream entertainment.
Also read: How Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value weaves poetry through small moments and fragile conversations
By contrast, films that confront geopolitical violence more directly rarely receive the same embrace. Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident and Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab both secured nominations for Best International Feature, yet neither meaningfully entered the wider awards discourse despite the urgency of their subject matter — the aftermath of political repression in Iran and the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Their containment within the international category suggests that while the Academy may be expanding its aesthetic horizons, it remains far more hesitant to foreground films that implicate the geopolitical realities in which the United States itself is entangled.
Perhaps that tension will come to define the 99th Academy Awards in hindsight. This was a ceremony that celebrated the films Hollywood often wishes it made — ambitious, politically charged works like Sinners and One Battle After Another — even as the industry continues to default to safer formulas. The Oscars have long served as a projection of Hollywood’s ideals rather than its everyday practice. This year’s ceremony felt like a brief moment when those ideals and reality came closer together: unpredictability returned, new voices emerged, and the Academy suggested that the boundaries of prestige might finally be expanding.
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