Here are the takeaways from the Academy Awards. What did we want? “The Secret Agent” is to be a winner. It deserved it more than any other film. At the 98th Academy Awards, Hollywood’s political speeches finally outnumbered its platitudes.
Javier Bardem is wearing a ‘No war’ and ‘Free Palestine’ pins at the 2026 Oscars. AP Photo.You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
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Can't donate? Sharing our work helps more than you think
Gloria Cazares wore a red gown and a button bearing the photograph of a nine-year-old girl. She stood at the podium of the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on Sunday night, flanked by film-makers she had never met before this awards season, and waited for the room to go quiet. ‘My daughter, Jackie, was nine years old when she was killed in Uvalde,’ she said. ‘Since that day, her bedroom has been frozen in time.’
Cazares was not an actress. She was a mother, accepting the Oscar for best documentary short on behalf of All the Empty Rooms, a Netflix film that documents the bedrooms of children who will never come home from school, among them her daughter Jackie, one of nineteen killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022. Her speech lasted barely a minute. Gun violence, she told the room, is now the leading cause of death among American children and teenagers. If the world could see those bedrooms, she said, America would be a different country. She stepped back. The applause went on for a long time.
I watched it from my sofa in Vienna, and I will admit that up to that point I had been half-expecting the usual: three and a half hours of self-regarding glamour with a sprinkling of political sentiment, just enough to make the industry feel noble without actually risking anything. Earlier in the evening, host Conan O’Brien — back for a second consecutive year — had offered a warning. ‘I should warn you, tonight could get political,’ he said. ‘And if that makes you uncomfortable, there’s an alternate Oscars being hosted by Kid Rock. It’s at the Dave and Buster’s down the street.’ It was a good joke, a nod to the far-right counter-programming that Turning Point USA had staged against Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance weeks earlier. I rolled my eyes. Another Oscars promising bravery.
I was wrong about that, or at least mostly wrong. The 98th Academy Awards turned out to be genuinely, sometimes uncomfortably political — less because Hollywood found its backbone than because the world had become impossible to keep offstage. The war in Iran. ICE enforcement is escalating across American cities. Gaza. A travel ban that prevented a Palestinian actor from attending the very ceremony at which his film was nominated. The FBI warned of a possible Iranian drone attack on California, which had led the LAPD to deploy a thousand private security officers around the Dolby Theatre alongside uniformed police, surveillance cameras and drones. None of this was subtle. The ceremony did not address all of it — no awards show could — but it stopped looking away, which for the Oscars counts as a significant development.
The evening’s dominant film was One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s decade-spanning adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which took six awards: best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, best supporting actor for Sean Penn (absent from the ceremony), best film editing and the inaugural best casting prize. The film follows a group of worn-out leftist revolutionaries pursued by a ruthless military officer through an America in which the rounding up of immigrants and the language of national greatness have become state policy. You do not need to squint to see the parallels. Anderson, accepting the screenplay award, seemed to acknowledge as much without quite saying it. ‘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,’ he said. ‘But also with the encouragement that they will hopefully be the generation that brings us some common sense and decency.’
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners offered something different: celebratory, defiant, less interested in apology than in claiming space. The Depression-era blues-and-vampire epic had arrived at the ceremony with sixteen nominations — the most in Oscar history, surpassing the fourteen shared by All About Eve, Titanic and La La Land — and took home four trophies: best actor for Michael B. Jordan, best original screenplay for Coogler, best cinematography for Autumn Durald Arkapaw and best original score for Ludwig Göransson. Durald Arkapaw’s win made her the first woman ever to receive the cinematography Oscar. When she accepted, she asked all the women in the room to stand.
Jordan’s acceptance speech was a roll call. ‘I stand here because of the people that came before me,’ he said, and listed names: Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, Forest Whitaker, Will Smith. There was nothing coded about it. The Academy have, since the #OscarsSoWhite furore of 2015, expanded their membership to over ten thousand — a cumulative increase of nearly forty per cent. In June 2025, forty-one per cent of new invitees were women and forty-five per cent belonged to underrepresented communities, with over half drawn from outside the United States. Jordan was making clear who had built the road that brought Sinners, a Black genre film about vampires and the blues, to the centre of the Academy’s attention.
The sharpest intake of breath, though, came from a presenter. Javier Bardem took the stage alongside Priyanka Chopra Jonas to announce the best international feature film. He wore two pins on his lapel: one reading ‘No a la Guerra’ — No to War — and another bearing the Artists4Ceasefire emblem, designed by Shepard Fairey. Before reading a single nominee, Bardem leaned into the microphone. ‘No to war, and free Palestine,’ he said. The room roared.
It should not have been surprising. Bardem has been one of the loudest voices for Palestinian rights in the film industry for over two years: a signatory to the open letter criticising the Berlinale’s silence on Gaza, a participant in the Film Workers for Palestine boycott pledge, a man who told Variety at last year’s Emmys that he would refuse to work with any company supporting Israel’s war in Gaza. And yet it landed like a thunderclap, because the Oscars have for decades treated geopolitics as something to be acknowledged in corridor whispers and then kept well clear of the podium. Bardem did not whisper.
The award he presented went to Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, a Norwegian family drama — the least political film in a field that included two profoundly political ones. Among the nominees was The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania’s Tunisian docudrama reconstructing the final phone call of a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza in February 2024, and Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, whose co-screenwriter Mehdi Mahmoudian had been arrested in Iran in January for his support of the protest movement.
Motaz Malhees, the Palestinian actor who plays the Red Crescent emergency dispatcher in Ben Hania’s film, was not at the Dolby Theatre. In December 2025, the Trump administration had expanded its travel ban to include holders of Palestinian Authority passports, alongside nationals of Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan and Syria. An Instagram post, published three days before the ceremony, explained his absence: ‘I am not allowed to enter the United States because of my Palestinian citizenship. It hurts. But here is the truth. You can block a passport. You cannot block a voice.’
Hind Rajab’s mother, Wissam Hamada, was barred from entering the country, too. She watched the ceremony from Greece, where her family had been granted asylum. On the red carpet, the Voice of Hind Rajab team wore the Artists4Ceasefire pins demanding a permanent ceasefire. I kept thinking about the geometry of it: a film about a child’s final phone call, nominated for an award in a country that had locked the door against the people who made it. That absence said more than any speech could have.
Trier, accepting the international feature award, chose his words with care. ‘All adults are responsible for all children,’ he said. ‘Let’s not vote for politicians who don’t take this seriously into account.’
The evening’s other documentary winner, Mr Nobody Against Putin, produced a speech that went further. Co-director David Borenstein told the audience the film was ‘about how you lose your country’ — and then, without pausing, shifted to the present tense. ‘We act complicit when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities,’ he said. ‘When we don’t say anything when oligarchs take over the media and control how we produce it and consume it. We all face a moral choice, but even a nobody is more powerful than we think.’ He was talking about Russia. He was clearly also talking about America. The tense made that unavoidable.
In the shorter categories, where the cameras linger less and the play-off music arrives sooner, speeches tended to be bolder. A rare tie in best live-action short brought both The Singers and Two People Exchanging Salivato to the stage. Natalie Musteata, co-director of the latter, thanked the Academy for supporting a film that is weird and queer and made by a majority of women. It was a good sentence — the kind you hope queer film-makers get to say more often, where strangeness is offered as a credential rather than an apology. Her co-director, Alexandre Singh, fought through the play-off orchestra and simply kept talking until the sound came back. ‘We can change society through art, through creativity — through theatre and ballet — and also cinema,’ he said, landing a pointed reference to Timothée Chalamet’s recent controversial remarks about dying art forms.
There was another queer moment, smaller and in some ways more telling. Mark Sonnenblick, co-writer of the Oscar-winning song ‘Golden’ from KPop Demon Hunters, was cut off mid-speech by the orchestra. He finished backstage, where he thanked ‘my husband, Isaac’ and described the film as being about ‘looking at someone that you’ve been taught to hate and to fear and starting to trust, maybe even love them’. A gay man on the Oscar stage, cut off before he could get to the part about love. If you are attuned to the politics of visibility, there was something brutally apt about it.
KPop Demon Hunters was itself a breakthrough of a different kind. The Netflix animated film — the streamer’s most-watched title ever — took best animated feature and best original song. Co-director Maggie Kang and producer Michelle L.M. Wong became the first people of South Korean descent to win in the animated feature category, and ‘Golden’ became the first K-pop song to take an Oscar. Kang wept through her acceptance speech. ‘For those of you who look like me,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry that it took us so long to see us in a movie like this. But it is here. And that means that the next generations don’t have to go longing. This is for Korea and for Koreans everywhere.’
I have watched a lot of acceptance speeches. Most of them fade. What stays with me about Kang’s is the apology at its centre — apology as the frame for a victory speech. She was not sorry for anything she had done. She was sorry it had taken the industry this long. EJAE, the singer-songwriter behind ‘Golden’, struck a similar chord when she accepted the best original song award: ‘Growing up, people made fun of me for liking K-pop, but now everyone is singing our song, and all the Korean lyrics.’
A secondary current through the evening addressed the industry’s other existential worry: artificial intelligence. Will Arnett, presenting the animation awards alongside Channing Tatum, was blunt. ‘Tonight, we are celebrating people, not AI,’ he said, ‘because animation is more than a prompt. It’s an art form, and it needs to be protected.’ Big applause. Earlier, O’Brien had introduced himself as ‘the last human host of the Academy Awards’ and predicted that next year’s host would be ‘a Waymo in a tux’. A satirical advertisement for a fictional company that ‘preserves’ classic films by cropping them into vertical smartphone formats got laughs, but there was a flinch underneath the laughter. These people know their jobs are on the table.
O’Brien himself walked the line he had promised to walk. A crack about Trump’s habit of renaming American institutions — ‘We’re coming to you live from the Has a Small Penis Theatre; let’s see him put his name in front of that’ — and a wounding joke about the Epstein files: with no British actors nominated for the first time in twelve years, he reported, ‘a British spokesperson said: Yeah, well, at least we arrest our paedophiles.’ Jimmy Kimmel, appearing as a surprise presenter, aimed both Donald and Melania Trump and at CBS’s cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s programme. Jabs, all of them, delivered fast and not lingering over, received with the uneasy laughter of an audience that has been calculating the cost of public dissent for years now.
On the red carpet, the Iranian directors of Cutting Through Rocks, nominated for best documentary feature, had spoken about solidarity with the people of Iran. ‘Change is possible from within, not the other way around,’ said co-director Sara Khaki. ‘We are here to stand by the rights of our people.’ The war formed a backdrop that was difficult to ignore: it was the reason for the unprecedented security, the reason the FBI had issued its warning, the reason a thousand private guards were patrolling the perimeter. Cinema’s biggest party was, on this particular evening, also a potential target.
At last year’s 97th ceremony, the political speeches were fewer and more isolated. Adrien Brody, accepting best actor, had spoken about not letting ‘hate go unchecked’. Presenter Daryl Hannah had gone off script to declare ‘Slava Ukraini!’ The team behind No Other Land, co-directed by Yuval Abraham, had called for an end to the Gaza conflict and the release of Israeli hostages. Those were individual acts, tolerated. What felt different about the 2026 ceremony was that the room had shifted. The political temperature was no longer set by the brave outlier at the microphone. It was ambient.
There were, of course, speeches that had nothing to do with geopolitics. Jessie Buckley, winning best actress for Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, burst into tears at the sound of her own name and dedicated her award to motherhood — it was Mother’s Day in the United Kingdom. ‘I would like to dedicate this to the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart,’ she said. ‘We all come from a lineage of women who continue to create against all odds.’ Amy Madigan, winning best supporting actress for Weapons after a career spanning four decades, said she was ‘a little flummoxed’. These were honest moments. They belonged to the ceremony too.
Late in his opening monologue, O’Brien had set down his jokes and spoken to the cameras with a directness that felt, for once, unrehearsed. ‘Everyone watching right now, around the world, is all too aware that these are very chaotic, frightening times,’ he said. ‘Thirty-one countries across six continents are represented this evening, and every film we salute is the product of thousands of people speaking different languages, working hard to make something of beauty.’
It was a good line. But the ceremony’s most eloquent statement was probably not a line at all. It was an empty seat. It was the space that Motaz Malhees should have occupied, watching his film from a room he was barred from entering. It was Mark Sonnenblick, finishing his speech backstage to a cluster of journalists instead of a global television audience. It was Natalie Musteata, thanking the Academy for honouring something weird and queer. It was Gloria Cazares, in her red gown, with her daughter’s photograph pinned to her chest, telling a room full of movie stars about a bedroom that has not been touched since 2022.
Whether this lasts is a fair question. The Academy have a well-documented habit of permitting something on one Sunday night and forgetting it by the next. But for one evening in March 2026, Hollywood’s biggest ceremony acknowledged, with something approaching honesty, that the world beyond the Dolby Theatre was everyone’s problem. That should not have felt remarkable. It did.
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