March 16, 2026

This has not been the year of the Supreme — whether you are Marty Mauser or the Iranian ayatollah. Timothée Chalamet’s acclaimed blockbuster went home empty-handed, denied all nine of its nominations. The ayatollah, by contrast, probably enjoyed more sympathy among attendees at the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday night, where Javier Bardem prefaced the Oscar for Best International Feature with a cursory “Free Palestine” before Norway’s Sentimental Value deservedly triumphed over the Palestinian propaganda film it was up against, an opportune moment to cue “Hava Nagila” as the exit music.

Still, this was only a blip in an otherwise well-organized and surprisingly enjoyable Oscars ceremony. Hosted by Conan O’Brien, the show was, for the most part, more interested in celebrating cinema than in indulging the usual contemporary cliché of perfunctory political sniping at Republicans. The evening’s humor was often sharp without becoming overbearing, ranging from jokes about media companies and the future of the telecast to broader jabs at collapsing attention spans and the indignities of modern cultural consumption. One especially effective bit reimagined Casablanca for the TikTok age, with Dooley Wilson as Sam at the piano, forced to pause and reiterate plot points to Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine to keep a dopamine-fried audience engaged. Finally, the celebrities have a genuine cause for concern, sparing them the burden of adopting fashionable political causes they scarcely understand to signal their virtue.

O’Brien hinted in his opening monologue that the evening “may get political,” joking that anxious viewers could always defect to an alternative Oscars hosted by Kid Rock at Dave & Buster’s. I chuckled. But despite the warning, the content of the announcers’ and acceptance speeches was appreciably less clogged than usual, with half-baked sermons and punchlines about complex geopolitical crises. Among the evening’s lighter pleasures was a Bridesmaids reunion to present the awards for Original Score and Sound, where an ever-spry Melissa McCarthy and the reliably witty Kristen Wiig traded playful barbs with the audience, including reading off ostensibly anonymous notes like, “You ladies look beautiful tonight … you are all aging well. Signed, Stellan Skarsgard.”

There was also a lovely, moving tribute to Rob Reiner and his late wife, introduced by Billy Crystal, that highlighted not only their enduring contributions to the arts but also the deep affection they inspired among those who worked with them. Crystal maintained his composure throughout, as persuasive a testament to his acting abilities as anything he has ever committed to film.

Not every acceptance speech was so grounded. Maggie Kang, accepting the animation award for KPop Demon Hunters, lamented how long it had taken for people “who look like me” to see themselves represented in an Oscar-winning film. Kang would have been 39 years old when the Korean film Parasite (2019) won four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay — and, unlike Kang’s animated feature, it was actually in the Korean language.

This was, in fairness to Chalamet, a fiercely competitive year. Three major films — One Battle After Another, Marty Supreme, and Sinners — loomed especially large, even if only two were ultimately rewarded. Marty Supreme was shut out entirely, while One Battle After Another emerged as the night’s dominant victor with six Oscars.

I was glad to see Sean Penn win the supporting actor award. His Colonel Lockjaw in One Battle After Another is one of the most beguiling villain performances in recent memory — arguably the most memorable since Bardem’s Anton Chigurh, though Bardem himself seems not to have evolved much beyond it. And yet, while I had predicted One Battle After Another would win Best Picture, I was hoping the Academy might choose Marty Supreme, the more joyous and affirmatively pro-American film, or even Sinners, which celebrates one of America’s genuinely great artistic traditions, the blues.

Perhaps this was, in part, an overdue coronation for Anderson, who, despite reams of nominations, had never previously won; There Will Be Blood narrowly lost Best Picture to No Country for Old Men in 2008. More charitably, one can look past One Battle’s lionization of some of the most debauched villains in history (communist revolutionaries) and instead regard Anderson’s film as a story about motherhood, familial responsibility, and the moral demands of raising a daughter.

Which brings me to the evening’s most touching and important moment: Jessie Buckley’s acceptance speech. Winning Best Actress for Hamnet, Buckley gave the kind of sincere remarks that modern Hollywood, steeped in cynicism, rarely permits itself anymore. She praised marriage, motherhood, and family with endearing warmth, lovingly telling her husband, “I want to have 20,000 more babies with you,” before addressing her eight-month-old daughter: “I love you, I love being your mum, and I can’t wait to discover life beside you.” And as the first ever Irish winner of Best Actress, Buckley delivered all of this without feeling compelled to complain about how long it had taken the Academy to recognize the Irish.

It is such moments of grounded clarity and unapologetic glamour that once made the Oscars worth watching. The appeal was never merely the gowns or the theatrical self-congratulation. It was the occasional reminder that these moneyed and manicured denizens of the silver screen still possess recognizably human attachments: husbands, wives, children, griefs, loyalties, and loves. For all of Hollywood’s vanities and absurdities, that illusion of shared humanity remains the ceremony’s only truly enduring magic.

Originally published on The Washington Examiner