The Brief

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another took six awards at the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday night, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay — Anderson’s first Oscar wins after 14 previous nominations. Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for Sinners, Jessie Buckley took Best Actress for Hamnet as the first Irish woman to do so, and Conan O’Brien returned as host for a ceremony that produced a record-breaking 16-nomination haul for Sinners and the Academy’s first-ever casting award.

The Report

Paul Thomas Anderson’s black comedy One Battle After Another, adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, dominated the 98th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on Sunday, winning six of its 13 nominations. Anderson personally collected three trophies — Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture as producer — ending a career-long drought that had seen him nominated 14 times without a win.

The film’s haul also included Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn, Best Film Editing for Andy Jurgensen, and the inaugural Best Casting award for Cassandra Kulukundis, who dedicated her win to casting directors who “never got a chance to get up here, who didn’t even get a chance to get their name on the movie.” Penn was absent from the ceremony — reported to be in Ukraine — leaving Kieran Culkin to accept on his behalf with the observation that Penn “couldn’t be here this evening, or didn’t want to.” The win gave Penn his third Oscar, tying Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis for the most acting wins by a male performer.

The evening’s other dominant force was Ryan Coogler’s Depression-era horror film Sinners, which entered the night with a record 16 nominations — surpassing the 14 held by All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land — and converted four of them into wins. Michael B. Jordan took Best Actor for his dual role as twins Smoke and Stack, honouring “the people who came before me — Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, Forest Whitaker, Will Smith.” Coogler won Best Original Screenplay. Autumn Durald Arkapaw made history as the first woman to win Best Cinematography in the category’s 98-year existence, and Ludwig Goransson took Best Original Score.

Jessie Buckley won Best Actress for Hamnet, becoming the first Irish woman to claim the award, and closed her speech with Gaelic. Amy Madigan won Best Supporting Actress for Weapons, 40 years after her first nomination — the longest such gap in the category’s history.

The ceremony carried a subdued political charge. Host Conan O’Brien, back for a second consecutive year, avoided naming President Trump directly while landing jokes about the Los Angeles fires, Netflix, and Timothée Chalamet’s recent dismissal of opera and ballet. Javier Bardem said simply, “No to war, and free Palestine.” Will Arnett declared that “animation is more than a prompt.” The evening’s most sombre moment was Billy Crystal’s tribute to Rob Reiner, who died alongside his wife in December, with some twenty actors from Reiner’s films assembling on stage.

Anderson, in his Best Picture speech, kept it brief: “You guys, let’s have a martini. This is pretty amazing.”

The Angle

The interesting number from Sunday night isn’t six wins or 16 nominations. It is $209.6 million — the worldwide gross of One Battle After Another, a figure roughly $90 million short of its reported break-even point, making the Best Picture winner a financial disappointment by the industry’s own metrics. Anderson’s highest-grossing film is also the one that lost money. This is the condition the ceremony is now calibrated around: an awards apparatus increasingly disconnected from the commercial logic that funds it, honouring work whose primary audience is the voters themselves. Whether that represents the Oscars defending something worth defending or simply talking to itself is the question the ratings, when they arrive, will quietly answer.