The Brief

The 98th Academy Awards take place tonight at the Dolby Theatre with Conan O’Brien returning as host, headlined by a Best Picture contest between Ryan Coogler’s Sinners — which shattered the all-time nominations record with 16 — and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which carries 13 nods and the weight of nearly every major precursor award. The two films compete head-to-head in 11 categories, and both hold combinations of prior wins that have historically guaranteed Best Picture — meaning one unbroken streak ends tonight.

The Report

The 98th Academy Awards ceremony begins at 7 p.m. ET on ABC, with Conan O’Brien hosting for the second consecutive year after last year’s broadcast drew 19.69 million viewers — a five-year high. The ceremony arrives amid enhanced security, with the United States at war, and an unusually unresolved Best Picture race.

Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s supernatural thriller set in 1932 Mississippi, broke a record that had stood for 76 years. Its 16 nominations surpass the 14 held jointly by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997), and La La Land (2016). The film spans nearly every competitive category, from Michael B. Jordan’s first Best Actor nomination for his dual role as twins Smoke and Stack, to Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography nod — the first for a woman of colour in the category’s history. Delroy Lindo received his first nomination at 73. Ruth E. Carter, already the most-nominated Black woman in Oscar history, could become the first Black artist to win three Academy Awards.

One Battle After Another, Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, arrived with 13 nominations and an awards-season résumé that includes the Critics’ Choice, Golden Globe, BAFTA, Directors Guild, and Producers Guild prizes. No film in Academy history has won all five and lost Best Picture. Anderson, who has accumulated 11 career nominations without a single win, is given a 90 percent chance of taking Best Director by Gold Derby.

But Sinners holds its own precedent wall. It won the SAG ensemble, Writers Guild, and ACE Eddie awards — a combination that has also never lost Best Picture. One of these historical streaks will break tonight.

The acting races have their own turbulence. Michael B. Jordan’s surprise SAG victory over Timothée Chalamet upended what had been a settled Best Actor contest, with betting odds now favouring Jordan between 49 and 68 percent. Jessie Buckley remains the most consistent frontrunner in any category for her lead performance in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet — where Zhao could become the first woman to win two Best Director Oscars. The supporting actress race, split between Teyana Taylor, Amy Madigan, and Wunmi Mosaku, is considered the least predictable acting category in recent memory.

The ceremony also introduces the Academy’s first new competitive category in 25 years: Best Casting, bringing the total to 24. Musical performances include Miles Caton and Raphael Saadiq performing Sinners’ nominated song “I Lied to You,” and a KPop Demon Hunters number. The In Memoriam segment will feature Barbra Streisand paying tribute to Robert Redford, and Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan reuniting to honour Rob Reiner.

O’Brien, who rated his own debut hosting performance “15 on a scale of 1 to 10,” has promised adjustments for the sequel. “What’s happening in the world will be reflected in the show,” he said, while teasing explosions, singing, and dancing. The ten Best Picture nominees — rounded out by Frankenstein, Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value, Hamnet, Bugonia, The Secret Agent, F1, and Train Dreams — represent the broadest spread of studios, nationalities, and genres the Academy has nominated in a single year.

Beginning in 2029, the Academy will end its five-decade relationship with ABC and stream the ceremony exclusively on YouTube. Tonight’s broadcast is among the last of an era.

The Angle

The interesting structural fact about this year’s ceremony is that both frontrunners arrived at the same door through mechanisms the Academy has never had to reconcile. One Battle After Another won the institutions — the guilds, the critics’ bodies, the foreign academies. Sinners won the rooms — the actors who watched it together, the writers who recognised the screenplay, the editors who cut the reels. One path measures consensus among gatekeepers. The other measures enthusiasm among practitioners. The Academy has spent decades pretending those are the same thing.

What Coogler actually did with Sinners is worth isolating from the nominations count. He made a $90 million original horror film about Black life in the Jim Crow South, cast no one the algorithm would have recommended for the lead, set it in a genre the Academy has spent its entire existence treating as furniture, and produced the biggest original opening weekend in six years. The 16 nominations are not the achievement. The achievement is that the 16 nominations became plausible — that a film this structurally hostile to every assumption about what wins Oscars forced the Academy to either nominate it everywhere or explain why it didn’t. Coogler chose a fight the institution couldn’t refuse without revealing its own limitations.

Anderson’s position is different but equally diagnostic. Eleven career nominations and no wins is not a streak — it is the Academy telling you something about itself. Anderson makes films that cinephiles canonise and voters admire from a respectful distance. One Battle After Another may break that pattern tonight, but if it does, the question worth asking is whether the film won or whether Anderson’s accumulated debt finally came due. The Academy has a habit of awarding the person rather than the work, and calling it merit.

The ceremony proceeds under enhanced security, with a host who has promised to acknowledge “the realities” of a country at war, and a nominated international slate that includes a film shot clandestinely without Iranian government approval and a Tunisian documentary about a five-year-old killed in Gaza. The Academy would prefer to be a celebration of craft. The world it operates in has other plans. That tension is not new, but the gap between the stage and what lies beyond the theatre doors has rarely been wider — and rarely less possible to paper over with montages and standing ovations.