Oscars 2026: Full breakdown and highlights from the 98th Academy Awards

Explore the highlights and key winners of the 98th Academy Awards, featuring memorable moments and historic achievements from Oscars 2026.

The 98th Academy Awards unfolded at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles with a fairly middling sense of competitive tension that had defined the entire awards season, as the Warner Bros’ champions — Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling political thriller One Battle After Another and Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending Southern gothic Sinners— arrived as the ceremony as the two dominant forces and turned the Oscars into a head-to-head contest that ultimately shaped nearly every major headline of the night.

By the end of the evening, Anderson’s One Battle After Another emerged as the night’s largest winner with six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Casting, and Best Supporting Actor, in a sweep that reflected the film’s steady accumulation of industry support through the precursor circuit and confirmed Anderson’s long-awaited coronation after decades of nominations without a directing win.

Also read | Oscars 2026: Winners, surprises and full results from the 98th Academy Awards

Producer Sara Murphy and Paul Thomas Anderson, winner of the Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director for ‘One Battle After Another’, which won the Oscar for Best Picture, pose together in the Oscars photo room at the 98th Academy Awards in Hollywood, Los Angeles | Photo Credit: REUTERS

The Oscars race that led to this victory unfolded over months of industry awards that largely favored Anderson’s film, especially after it secured key precursors such as the Producers Guild Award, Directors Guild Award and BAFTA victories that historically correlate with the Best Picture outcome, though the momentum never hardened into inevitability because Coogler’s Sinners remained the season’s most visible cultural phenomenon and arrived with a record-breaking 16 nominations, the largest tally ever achieved by a single film in Academy history.

Though Sinners did not take home the top prize, its presence shaped the ceremony in another way through Michael B. Jordan’s Best Actor victory, which capped a late-season surge that began when he won a major industry acting prize weeks before the Oscars and turned what had looked like a Timothée Chalamet-favoured race into a glorious upset. Jordan’s win formed the centerpiece of the film’s four-Oscar haul, which also included Best Original Screenplay for Coogler, Best Original Score for Ludwig Göransson, and a historic Best Cinematography win for Autumn Durald Arkapaw.