As expected, it ended up being Battle After Battle night at the 98th annual Academy Awards, with the political thriller taking home six Oscars out of a total of 13 nominations.
But as Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece continued its march toward awards season dominance, there were moments of genuine surprise and subversion at Sunday’s ceremony.
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Some of those moments had to do with the current political climate in the United States.
Host Conan O’Brien and his fellow hosts skillfully avoided mentioning President Donald Trump by name, but their criticism took direct aim at his policies since he returned to office.
Other surprises emerged within the film community itself. For the seventh time in Oscar history, a tie was announced: two films received the same number of votes for Best Live Action Short Film.
As a result, both the surreal thriller Two People Exchanging Saliva and the melancholic bar drama The Singers shared the Academy Award.
Here are six key takeaways from the night.
A two-horse race between Sinners and One Battle
The vampire movie Sinners came into Sunday night’s ceremony with a record 16 Oscar nominations. But the big question of the night was: how many nods could be turned into wins?
Its biggest competition was, of course, Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which earned the second-most nominations.
Sinners director Ryan Coogler and Anderson competed directly in several major categories, including Best Picture and Best Director.
In both cases, Anderson emerged victorious, although he acknowledged how fickle those awards can be.
“I just want to say that, in 1975, the Oscar nominees for Best Picture were Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jaws, Nashville and Barry Lyndon,” the four-time Best Director nominee said, listing films now considered Hollywood classics.
“There is no one better among them. It’s just the mood that there may be that day.”
In the categories of Best Supporting Actor and Best Editing, One Battle After Another also won, as well as the inaugural award for Best Casting.
But in a sign of how well-matched their two films were, both Coogler and Anderson emerged from the night writing Oscars.
Anderson won Best Adapted Screenplay for his use of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, while Coogler took the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Sinners, a work inspired by his uncle’s love of the blues.
Jordan kills Chalamet in Best Actor race
Sinners, which won four Academy Awards in total, scored some of the most emotional and exciting wins of the night.
In the Best Cinematography category, for example, Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman to top the category.
It was his first nomination and first win, with Arkapaw beating out veteran cinematographers like Marty Supreme’s Darius Khondji and Frankenstein’s Dan Laustsen, both multiple nominees.
Another big win for Sinners came in the form of Michael B Jordan, the actor whom Coogler has cast in every film since his directorial debut in 2013’s Fruitvale Station.
Jordan, 39, was in a tight race for Best Actor with another young performer, Timothee Chalamet, 30, of the 1950s ping-pong drama Marty Supreme.
But Chalamet’s aggressive campaign may have ultimately sabotaged his prospects. Throughout the night there were multiple critical comments regarding Chalamet’s recent comments disparaging opera and ballet.
“No one cares” about any of the art forms anymore, Chalamet said in an interview last month.
“We can change society through art, creativity, theater, ballet and also cinema,” director Alexandre Singh pointedly said during his acceptance speech for the award for Best Live Action Short Film.
O’Brien, meanwhile, acknowledged the backlash with a joke about increased security at the night’s Oscars ceremony.
“I’m told there are concerns about attacks from both the opera and ballet communities,” O’Brien said, before addressing Chalamet. “They’re just mad because you left out jazz.”
A conga line of slights
Given the dominant performances of Sinners and One Battle After Another, many critically acclaimed films came up empty-handed, or nearly so.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, as expected, won three awards in technical categories, including Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Hair and Makeup.
Meanwhile, Netflix’s smash hit KPop Demon Hunters also lived up to expectations that it would dominate in its Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song categories.
But then there were old favorites like Hamnet that failed to generate much traction, even for director Chloe Zhao, a former Oscar winner. Of eight nominations in total, she only won one win: the Best Actress trophy for Irish performer Jessie Buckley.
However, Marty Supreme and the Brazilian film The Secret Agent fared worse. Despite having nine nominations and being considered an early contender for Best Actor, Marty Supreme did not earn any wins.
The Secret Agent, which swept the Best Actor and Best Director categories at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, also didn’t win anything at this year’s Oscars.
The same was true of Oscar favorite Yorgos Lanthimos’ quirky kidnapping drama Bugonia.
Fears about artificial intelligence
The ceremony, however, at times deviated from the competition between films to discuss issues facing the film industry and the country as a whole.
Among them was the increasing growth of artificial intelligence (AI) in the creative sector.
In the weeks leading up to the 98th Oscars, an AI-generated video clip had gone viral that appeared to show Hollywood icons Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in a rooftop brawl worthy of a James Bond movie.
The clip had been generated using artificial intelligence software developed by Chinese firm ByteDance, and Hollywood leaders quickly denounced it as a threat to their livelihood, not to mention copyright infringement.
Those concerns echoed on the Oscars stage on Sunday, when O’Brien and others addressed the growing use of AI.
“Tonight we celebrate people, not AI, because animation is more than a message,” actor Will Arnett said emphatically when presenting the animation awards.
O’Brien, meanwhile, joked that by next year, his hosting spot would be filled by “a Waymo in a tuxedo.”
Trump criticized for threatening free speech
Another concern looming over the night’s Oscars ceremony came in the form of President Donald Trump, who has sparked controversy by launching deadly military attacks in Venezuela and Iran, as well as leading a violent immigration crackdown in the United States.
At no time was Trump mentioned by name. But his leadership was alluded to throughout the night.
O’Brien, the host, set the tone from the beginning with his indirect attacks on the Republican president in his opening monologue.
“When I hosted last year, Los Angeles was on fire,” the two-time Oscar emcee said in sarcasm-laced comments. “But this year everything is going very well.”
Comedian Jimmy Kimmel was even more direct. Last September, his show was briefly suspended after Trump criticized the comedian.
Subsequently, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, appointed by Trump, threatened with the broadcast license of the television channel on which Kimmel appears.
“There are some countries whose leaders don’t support free speech. I’m not at liberty to say which ones. Let’s leave it to North Korea and CBS,” Kimmel joked, referring to another network that canceled a late-night comedy show.
Several Oscar-winning filmmakers also became involved in the controversies surrounding Trump.
Best Documentary Award winner David Borenstein, for example, drew a parallel between his film – an exploration of authoritarianism in Russia – and what is currently happening in the United States.
“Mr. Nobody vs. Putin is about how you lose your country,” Borenstein explained.
“What we saw in working with this material is that control is lost through countless small acts of complicity: when we act as accomplices, when a government murders people in the streets of our major cities, when we say nothing, when oligarchs take over the media.”
Political speeches avoid mentioning the war with Iran
The Oscars are awarded about seven months before the crucial US midterm elections, in which Trump’s Republican Party could lose its majority in Congress.
But while several filmmakers hinted at their anti-Trump stances, few explicitly denounced his policies.
For example, the Norwegian Joaquim Trier, winner of the Best International Film category, hid his criticism in a quote from James Baldwin about the duty to protect children.
“Let’s not vote for politicians who don’t take this seriously,” Trier said.
No artists during the night made reference to the US-Israeli war against Iran, although its effects were felt among participants in this year’s Oscar crop.
Writer-director Jafar Panahi, whose work was nominated for two Oscars on Sunday, has already said he plans to return to his native Iran once awards season concludes.
Meanwhile, Iranian politician Sara Shahverdi, the subject of a nomination in the Best Documentary Short Film category, was prevented from attending the Oscars due to Trump’s visa ban on 39 countries.
Palestinian actor Motaz Malhees, star of the Oscar-nominated film The Voice of Hind Rajab, also told the media that he could not be present at the ceremony due to the travel ban.
The clearer recognition of US-led and supported conflicts in the world was brief. When Spanish actor Javier Barden took the Oscar stage to present an award, he uttered six words: “No to war and free Palestine!”
But overall, the Oscar winners and presenters kept their comments vague, emphasizing global unity over political criticism.
“If I can be serious for a moment, everyone watching right now around the world is very aware that these are very chaotic and scary times,” O’Brien told the audience at the beginning of the night.
“It’s times like these that I think the Oscars have special resonance. Check it out. Thirty-one countries from six continents are represented tonight, and every film we celebrate is the product of thousands of people speaking different languages.”
Cinema, he and others argued, transcended borders. The talent on stage was not just from the United States.
