Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
Hollywood finally exhaled. After years of wringing its hands over the death of the theatrical experience and the creeping, algorithmic dread of artificial intelligence, the 98th Academy Awards delivered something entirely unexpected. They delivered joy. Pure, unadulterated, triumphant joy radiated from the Dolby Theatre, sweeping away the heavy cynicism that usually chokes this annual industry parade. It was a spectacular night. The voters actually got it right.
The supposed bloodbath between Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners never materialised into the bitter, ugly rivalry that the press so desperately wanted to manufacture. The Academy simply made room to celebrate both of these towering, fiercely original American epics. They proved that there is still a massive, hungry appetite for grand, uncompromising cinematic storytelling. Anderson finally took home his gold. After fourteen career nominations and decades of shaping the very fabric of modern cinema, he walked away with six trophies, including Best Picture and Best Director. He stood on that stage and spoke to his children with profound, echoing warmth. He spoke of restoring common sense and decency to a fractured world. It was a deeply human moment from a director who has spent his life dissecting the beautiful, ugly mess of the human condition.
Coogler’s masterpiece was not pushed into the shadows. Sinners snatched four awards and gave the ceremony its fiercely beating heart.
Michael B. Jordan is now an Academy Award winner. He stepped up to the microphone to accept Best Actor for his staggering dual performance as twin brothers fighting Jim Crow-era vampires, and the entire room vibrated with the sheer, undeniable electricity of a newly crowned king. Jordan thanked the theatregoers. He thanked the actual, everyday people who bought tickets and dragged this wild, visionary horror film into the cultural stratosphere. He knows that the magic happens in the dark, communal space of a cinema. He knows that without the audience, the art simply does not exist.
Autumn Durald Arkapaw took the stage for Sinners and permanently smashed a ninety-eight-year-old ceiling. She became the first woman in the entire, heavily male-dominated history of the Academy Awards to win Best Cinematography, standing before a room of her peers and rewriting the archaic rules of the industry in real time. The heavy weight of that statistic evaporated the second she asked the women in the audience to stand up and share the victory. It was not an angry gesture. It was an embrace. It was a joyous, inclusive invitation to the next generation of girls holding cameras in their backyards.
Emma Stone dazzled in Louis Vuitton minimalism, while Demi Moore wore a sweeping, shimmering tidal wave of Gucci feathers. They looked like royalty. But the glamour this year felt warm and earned, entirely stripped of the brittle, desperate panic that has plagued the red carpet in recent memory. Everyone seemed genuinely thrilled to be in the same room.
Conan O’Brien anchored the entire glorious circus with absolute mastery. He fired hilarious, sharp darts at Netflix executives and the bizarre reality of watching movies formatted vertically for smartphones, but he never let the room descend into cruelty. He steered the massive ship toward optimism. He reminded a global audience of billions that art requires collaboration, immense patience, and the incredibly rare ability to hope for better days. He joked about artificial intelligence eventually replacing him with a self-driving Waymo vehicle in a tuxedo. The audience roared with laughter. They laughed because, for the first time in a very long time, they actually felt secure in the enduring power of human creativity.
You could feel this soaring, brilliant hope when Jessie Buckley rightly took Best Actress for Hamnet. She possesses a raw, untamed talent that cannot be manufactured in a studio laboratory. Her performance is a force of nature. You could feel it again when Amy Madigan laughed her way through her Best Supporting Actress speech for Weapons, clutching a trophy she earned four heavy decades after her very first nomination. She thanked her husband, Ed Harris, for sticking around through the chaos of their lives. It was a beautiful, entirely unpolished expression of a life lived fully within the crazy, demanding trenches of the acting profession.
Even the political reality of the world was handled with a fierce, necessary grace. The world is burning. We all know the world is burning. But when the directors of Mr Nobody Against Putin won Best Documentary, they used their massive platform to beg for peace. The Russian director Pavel Talankin stood under the bright lights of Hollywood and asked humanity to stop dropping bombs. He reminded us that standing up to authoritarianism is possible through countless, tiny acts of bravery. Javier Bardem demanded a free Palestine, and Joachim Trier pleaded for the protection of children in war zones. These were not the hollow, performative gestures of celebrities desperate for social media approval. These were artists using their brief, golden minutes to demand a better future for the human race.
Look at the wildly diverse, brilliantly weird canvas of winners. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein swept the craft awards, celebrating the messy, tactile genius of practical makeup and gothic costume design. A totally unhinged, neon-drenched spectacle called K-Pop Demon Hunters won Best Animated Feature, proving that the Academy is finally willing to embrace the chaotic, hyper-kinetic tastes of a younger audience. There was even an impossibly rare tie for Best Live Action Short Film. The wealth was shared. The joy was distributed evenly across the board.
The heavy losses did not feel like tragedies. Timothée Chalamet did not win Best Actor for Marty Supreme, but his staggering performance is already cemented in the cultural record. Sean Penn won his third Oscar for playing a ridiculous, terrifying racist colonel in Anderson’s epic, and he did not even bother to show up to collect the trophy. He simply did not care. The absence of certain stars did not dim the lights. The ceremony itself was bigger than any single ego.
The tribute to the fallen was a celebration of incredible lives.
The In Memoriam segment is usually a rushed, slightly awkward parade of polite clapping. This year, it carried a beautiful, transcendent warmth. Billy Crystal walked out and spoke about his dear friend Rob Reiner with a crack in his voice, filling the massive theatre with genuine love. Barbra Streisand appeared, completely unannounced, to sing ‘The Way We Were’ for Robert Redford. She called him her intellectual cowboy. The room went absolutely silent. It was a breathtaking tribute to a golden era of Hollywood, delivered by a living legend who understands the eternal power of a great song. They were not just mourning the dead. They were celebrating the colossal, unshakeable legacy of American cinema.
We spend so much time mourning the death of the movies. We write endless obituaries about the crushing burden of streaming algorithms and the slow, inevitable decline of our collective attention spans. We convince ourselves that the magic is gone. The 2026 Oscars proved those tired obituaries completely wrong. The art form is vibrant. The art form is breathing, fighting, and soaring to incredibly beautiful new heights.
When the lights finally came up in the Dolby Theatre, the lingering feeling was not relief. It was a profound, thrilling gratitude. The movies are going to be just fine.
