Sunday night rolled around and, apparently, so did the Academy Awards — the 98th edition, to be precise. I’ll be honest, I originally guessed something like the 80th because that felt about right for the level of enthusiasm most people seem to have left for this thing. But yes, ninety-eight years of Hollywood gathering together to congratulate itself in a ceremony that grows longer every year while somehow becoming less relevant at the exact same time. It’s almost impressive.
Once upon a time, the Oscars actually felt like an event. Big movies, big stars, and at least a handful of films the average American had actually heard of. These days? The ceremony feels less like a celebration of cinema and more like a closed-door meeting of a very exclusive club that keeps shrinking its own membership. Hollywood has managed to build a cultural gated community where the residents throw elaborate parties while fewer and fewer people bother to drive by the front gate.
Just glance at this year’s Best Picture lineup and try not to deliver your own Oscar-worthy performance for Best Shrug. Expanding the category to ten films was supposed to make things more inclusive, more representative of what audiences actually watch. Instead, it feels like the cinematic equivalent of a film festival lineup curated by three grad students and a sociology professor.
Take Train Dreams, which dives into the life of an Idaho logger in the early 1900s. Riveting stuff if you’re deeply invested in early frontier lumber economics, I suppose. Then there’s The Secret Agent, a Brazilian drama set in the 1970s, spoken entirely in Portuguese, and clocking in at a breezy two hours and forty minutes. Nothing screams “Sunday night entertainment” like subtitles and a runtime longer than most cross-country flights. And let’s not forget Bugonia, the story of two conspiracy-obsessed men who kidnap a corporate CEO because they believe she’s an alien bent on destroying Earth. Somewhere along the line, Hollywood stopped asking whether audiences might want to see these movies.
Compare that slate to the legendary 1976 lineup — Rocky, Taxi Driver, Network, and All the President’s Men all battling it out. That was cinema with gravity. This year felt more like a collection of niche streaming recommendations.
But the movies themselves were only part of the spectacle. The show, as usual, leaned heavily into the idea that Hollywood celebrities are not merely entertainers but also our cultural philosophers. Conan O’Brien hosted, and before the show, he suggested he’d avoid going after the president. That promise lasted roughly the length of a commercial break. Early in his monologue, he warned the crowd the night might get political, joking that anyone uncomfortable with that could check out an “alternate Oscars hosted by Kid Rock at Dave & Buster’s.” The joke landed exactly as you’d expect — the room laughed, because of course it did.
Then came a line about the absence of British acting nominees and a quip about Britain at least arresting its pedophiles. The audience roared. That moment carried a certain irony, considering the entertainment industry delivering the joke has spent decades navigating its own uncomfortable scandals.
Political commentary rolled in steadily throughout the night. Javier Bardem stepped up to present and couldn’t resist delivering a quick geopolitical statement: “No to war, and free Palestine.” The applause was immediate and enthusiastic, which tells you something about the room. What it doesn’t tell you is whether anyone in that room has a particularly detailed understanding of the conflict they’re applauding about.
Bardem was also celebrated for wearing an anti-war patch he first displayed more than two decades ago. Which raises a mildly awkward observation: if that patch was supposed to end wars, the results so far have been…mixed.
Javier Bardem is wearing a patch protesting the war in Iran—“No a la Geurra,” it reads—that he said is the same patch he wore in 2003 to protest “the illegal war of Iraq.”
“And here we are, 23 years after,” he said on the #Oscars red carpet, with another war “[led] by Trump and… pic.twitter.com/prEqEY9Qu7
— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) March 16, 2026
Another recurring theme was the supposed threat of censorship, which might have carried a little more weight if it weren’t being delivered from one of the largest broadcast platforms on Earth. Nothing quite captures the urgency of suppressed speech like celebrities lecturing millions of viewers on live television. The irony reached peak comedy when one winner started giving an acceptance speech, and the production literally lowered his microphone to cut him off. So much for the passionate defense of expression.
“I know we’re tight, but to retract a microphone on a man while he’s speaking… is hilarious”—Conan O’Brien at the Oscars pic.twitter.com/mmiTPE1RFZ
— LateNighter (@latenightercom) March 16, 2026
Jimmy Kimmel popped up as well, tossing out a jab about countries that silence their citizens and including the CBS network in the joke. Moments later, he pivoted, once again, to complaints about Donald Trump. At this point, it’s practically a ceremonial requirement.
Yet perhaps the most remarkable contradiction of the evening came when presenters and winners spent time condemning gun violence, only for the same ceremony to celebrate One Battle After Another, a film overflowing with violent imagery. Director Paul Thomas Anderson even dedicated the movie to his children, which is certainly one way to frame a project that includes Sean Penn getting shot in the face.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s acceptance speech for his first-ever Oscar.
“I wrote this movie for my kids, to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left in this world we’re handing off to them. But also for encouragement…” pic.twitter.com/zDXzeL7lFq
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) March 16, 2026
And that’s really the Oscars in a nutshell these days: a marathon of self-congratulation, moral lectures, and cultural signaling delivered by an industry that seems increasingly disconnected from the audience it once captivated. Ratings keep sliding, the movies grow more obscure, and the speeches get longer.
The irony is that while Hollywood debates its own importance on stage, technology is rapidly changing the entertainment landscape around it. AI tools, new distribution models, and shifting audience habits are already reshaping the industry. If that trend continues, these grand Oscar ceremonies may eventually feel less like the pinnacle of filmmaking and more like the annual meeting of a once-powerful guild trying to remember when everyone else stopped paying attention.
