LOS ANGELES – One Battle After Another dominated the 98th Academy Awards on March 15, 2026, with director Paul Thomas Anderson’s action-thriller winning six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Directing and Best Supporting Actor.
The film also won Best Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay, and received the first-ever Oscar awarded for Best Casting, a new competitive category that formally places casting alongside other core creative disciplines recognized by the Academy.
Anderson, who had previously been nominated for an Oscar 14 times, addressed his long wait for a win while accepting an award.
“You make a guy work hard for one of these, I really appreciate it.”
New Best Casting category elevates a key hiring function
The introduction of Best Casting is a structural change with immediate implications across the production pipeline. Casting decisions shape performance, scheduling, and, in many cases, financing assumptions tied to talent attachments and package value. By adding the category, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – the private, member-governed body that administers the Oscars under its own rules of eligibility and voting procedures – effectively acknowledges a role that sits at the intersection of creative selection and operational execution, and is already central to how the studio system allocates risk.
That recognition comes as major studios and streamers increasingly formalize “talent packages” in development deals, with casting directors often serving as early arbiters of which projects secure bankable ensembles and which do not. The move also aligns the Academy’s awards structure more closely with the way labor is organized across Hollywood’s guilds and unions, whose collective bargaining agreements with producers, coordinated through the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, define how casting and other below-the-line disciplines are credited and compensated.
This year’s first Best Casting Oscar went to One Battle After Another, which also secured wins across the kind of interconnected crafts – editing, casting, screenplay adaptation – that often reflect how a project is built and refined between script, shoot, and final cut. For casting professionals, the new category is likely to function as both symbolic validation and a bargaining chip in future contract negotiations and greenlight discussions.
Sinners earns four awards as cinematography makes history
Sinners also emerged as a major winner, taking four Oscars, including Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan for playing twins Smoke and Stack.
In his acceptance speech, Jordan thanked the Black actors “who came before me,” situating his win in the longer arc of representation debates that have pushed the Academy to expand its membership and adopt formal inclusion standards. The ceremony also marked a milestone in the cinematography category: Sinners cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw was named the first-ever female winner for Best Cinematography, a breakthrough in a branch that has historically remained one of the least gender-diverse in the Academy’s ranks.
Her win follows incremental changes in the body’s composition and voting rules, including the Academy’s adoption of new representation and inclusion standards for Best Picture eligibility, detailed in its own published guidelines on Oscars.org. While those standards do not govern the cinematography race directly, they reflect broader institutional pressure on studios and awards bodies to track who gets to occupy technical and leadership roles on set.
Multiple films land wins across feature and short categories
Beyond the top prize and acting wins, the night’s tally spread across several titles, underscoring the Academy’s ongoing effort to distribute recognition beyond a single juggernaut. Frankenstein won three Oscar statuettes, consolidating its status as a critical and craft favorite. KPop Demon Hunters earned two, including Best Original Song, reinforcing the Academy’s increasingly global-facing music branch and the commercial clout of K-pop as a cross-border export.
In the short-film categories, two projects shared a category outcome: Two People Exchanging Saliva and The Singers tied for Best Live Action Short Film. Ties are rare but procedurally straightforward under Academy rules, which mandate that in the event of identical vote counts, both nominees receive full Oscars recognition rather than triggering a runoff.
In memoriam segment honors 2025 deaths, led by Billy Crystal
A portion of the broadcast was dedicated to actors, writers and filmmakers who died in 2025. Actor and comedian Billy Crystal led a tribute to Rob Reiner, the longtime actor and director who was stabbed to death with his wife, Michelle Reiner, in December 2025 – a crime still resonating in industry conversations about public safety, political rhetoric and the security obligations that studios and awards organizers shoulder during high-profile events.
Set against that backdrop, the 98th Academy Awards balanced spectacle with institutional self-scrutiny, from who is honored on stage to how the industry structures work behind the camera. The ceremony was hosted by Conan O’Brien, marking his second time as host, and concluded on March 15, 2026, with the Academy signaling that categories like casting – once treated as an ancillary hiring function – now sit closer to the center of how Hollywood defines authorship and accountability.
