Oscars 2026: A Good Night for Film, a Good Night for Conan, and Mercifully Not a Car Crash
- ALT there
- Mar 16
- 6 min read
For once, the Oscars managed the rare trick of being both competent and worth watching.
No slap. No envelope disaster. No desperate attempt to convince us that TikTok sketches are the future of cinema. Just a mostly well-run ceremony, a strong slate of winners, a host who actually understands timing, and enough sincerity to remind everyone that, irritatingly, the Oscars can still matter when they stop trying so hard to look casual. The 98th Academy Awards were hosted by Conan O’Brien on March 15 at the Dolby Theatre, with One Battle After Another winning Best Picture and six Oscars overall, while Sinners followed with four major wins.
That, really, was the key to the evening: the winners felt legitimate. Whatever your personal favourites, this wasn’t one of those years where the ceremony ends and everyone has to perform diplomatic facial expressions while pretending the Academy hasn’t lost the plot. One Battle After Another winning big felt coherent. Sinners taking major categories felt deserved. Michael B. Jordan winning Best Actor gave the night one of its clearest emotional peaks, while Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s Best Cinematography win for Sinners made proper history as the first woman and first Black person to win the category.
And yes, Conan was good. Again.
Conan O’Brien: Still the Right Man for the Job
Conan O’Brien has now done that very irritating thing where he makes hosting the Oscars look almost straightforward. Multiple outlets highlighted his sharp but warm opening monologue, including jokes about Ted Sarandos, Timothée Chalamet, streaming culture, and the increasingly absurd ecosystem surrounding film. He also folded in a more sincere note about the value of movies without turning it into a TED Talk in a tuxedo.
Which is basically why he works.
There’s still a strange modern-Oscars habit where the audience behaves as though laughter needs prior approval from legal, but this year the room felt noticeably more relaxed than last time. Not loose, exactly — this is still the Oscars, not a wedding — but at least recognisably human.
He understands that the Oscars need a host who can be lightly disrespectful without seeming actively embarrassed to be there. Too many ceremonies now operate with the tone of someone apologising for having invited guests to their own party. Conan doesn’t do that. He takes the event seriously enough to protect it, and unseriously enough to stop it from
becoming unbearable.
That balance matters. The Oscars are at their worst when they’re either pompous or panicked. Conan keeps them in the middle: buoyant, self-aware, occasionally silly, and crucially, human.
In Alt There terms: he treats cinema like something worth celebrating, while still recognising the room contains a great many people who desperately need teasing.
A Ceremony That Mostly Remembered What It Was For
One of the strongest things about this year’s show was that it didn’t appear embarrassed by film fandom. There were clips. There were long speeches. There were actual tributes. People were allowed, in moderation, to feel things. For an industry forever flirting with content sludge and algorithmic flattening, the ceremony at least behaved like films are distinct cultural objects rather than branded mood boards.
The In Memoriam segment, in particular, seems to have landed unusually well. Multiple reviews singled it out as one of the classiest parts of the night, with extended tributes to Rob Reiner and Robert Redford, including contributions from Billy Crystal, Rachel McAdams, and Barbra Streisand.
That kind of thing can go wrong very quickly. It didn’t. It felt weighted, considered, and appropriately reverent without becoming self-congratulatory grief theatre.
Which is progress.
The Big Winners: A Rare Case of the Academy Mostly Behaving
The central narrative of the night was the push and pull between One Battle After Another and Sinners, and to the Academy’s credit, it managed to celebrate both. One Battle After Another took Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Supporting Actor, and the new Best Casting award. Sinners took Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, and Best Cinematography.
That split feels about right.
Paul Thomas Anderson finally getting his due has a certain long-overdue neatness to it. There was always going to be something satisfying about the Academy eventually handing a proper haul to a filmmaker who has spent years being admired in increasingly expensive ways. At the same time, Sinners was never ignored. Michael B. Jordan’s win mattered, Ryan Coogler’s screenplay win mattered, and Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s win mattered most of all in terms of historical significance.
Now, because we are Alt There and therefore contractually obliged to remain slightly sceptical even when broadly pleased: Sinners still feels like the film that inspired the most intense wave of cultural coronation. It is a strong film, an ambitious film, and clearly an Academy favourite. But the discourse around it has occasionally sounded like everyone was trying to get in early on calling it eternal. The Oscars rewarded it well. That feels fair. The surrounding canonisation still feels just a touch overeager.
That is not a complaint. It is a mild eyebrow raise.
The Best Bits Beyond the Main Race
Elsewhere, there was plenty to like.
Jessie Buckley winning Best Actress for Hamnet gave the ceremony another warmly received acting victory. Amy Madigan winning Supporting Actress for Weapons added a welcome note of unpredictability. KPop Demon Hunters winning both Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song gave the night one of its more crowd-pleasing victories, and Mr. Nobody Against Putin taking Best Documentary Feature added some political urgency without derailing the room into speech-night at a student union.
There was also a rare tie in Live Action Short, which is the kind of Oscars detail that feels both improbable and deeply on-brand for a category most viewers only discover exists during the ceremony itself.
Meanwhile, Frankenstein cleaned up in the craft categories — Production Design, Makeup and Hairstyling, Costume Design — which seems to have produced the general critical response of: “yes, that tracks.”
© 2026 Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences.
The Problems: Because It’s Still the Oscars
None of this means the ceremony was flawless. Several reports noted sound issues during the broadcast, abrupt play-off attempts during speeches, and the occasional over-produced presenter bit that reminded everyone network television remains committed to sabotaging its own momentum.
And then, of course, there’s the usual corporate awkwardness: franchise tie-ins, brand creep, and that lingering sense that every awards show now has to make room for at least one reminder that the entertainment industry has been vertically integrated into a lifestyle advertisement.
That part remains exhausting.
Still, the important thing is that the nonsense never quite took over. It hovered at the edges, as it always does, but didn’t define the evening.
The Bigger Picture
What made Oscars 2026 feel unusually healthy was not just that the telecast was polished. It was that the show seemed to have some residual faith in cinema at a moment when film culture often feels caught between genuine artistic vitality and total industrial panic.
The Academy didn’t solve that problem in one night, obviously. The ceremony still exists inside a larger atmosphere of streaming anxiety, IP overproduction, political unease, and constant cultural fragmentation. But for a few hours, it managed to do the thing it’s meant to do: make movies feel important without making the audience feel trapped.
That is more than this ceremony often achieves.
Final Verdict
Oscars 2026 wasn’t a spectacular ceremony. It was something rarer and, frankly, more useful: a good one.
The winners mostly made sense. The speeches mostly landed. The tributes were properly felt. Conan O’Brien proved again that the Oscars don’t need reinvention nearly as much as they need someone funny, calm, and faintly mischievous standing at the centre of them.
And perhaps most importantly, the whole thing reminded a simple truth that the industry occasionally loses under its own weight:
people still care about film when you give them a reason to.
Alt There verdict: A polished, intelligent, occasionally very moving Oscars with strong winners, tolerable nonsense, and the continued good fortune of Conan O’Brien being exactly the right level of unserious for a serious night.
Images: Getty Images / AMPAS press photography used for editorial commentary.
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