4 Notes on the 98th Academy Awards
Conan O'Brien carried the show as well as he could, but it struggled under painful presenter banter.
Last night, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held the 98th Oscars, and it highlighted how much the vision of what the ceremony should be continues to hamstring the broadcast. Strangely, for a show that felt like it was firing on all cylinders in 2025, it hobbled along this year despite having pretty much the same creative team. Not only did Conan O’Brien return to host, but Hamish Hamilton returned to direct and the showrunners, Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan, were the same as in 2025. And yet, it’s important to keep in mind that the Academy has a strong say in what they think the show should be, so perhaps the directives were different. In any event, last night you could feel the show’s choices straining against what could have been a more entertaining broadcast.
Conan Did a Solid Job
After years of flailing with underwhelming hosts or no hosts at all, Conan O’Brien has been a bit of a godsend to the Academy Awards. The hardest part of hosting is you have to choose which audience you want to appeal to—the one in the Dolby Theater or the one at home. Jon Stewart chose the people at home; Jimmy Kimmel chose the ones in the theater. O’Brien eludes this choice by making himself the butt of many jokes, so that when he does poke fun at Hollywood, he reserves jabs for himself, thus lessening the tension and ensuring he’s not deflating “Hollywood’s Biggest Night.”
However, he also had a clear point of view, which is that movies—the theatrical experience—is invaluable. He happily took a shot at Netflix head Ted Sarandos (“This is his first time in a theater!”), the way Netflix pushes filmmakers to repeat their plot points because people are looking at their phones while movies play in the background, and how trying to make cinema into something that fills a vertical phone screen is a fool’s errand.
A Nice Collection of Winners
Ultimately, I don’t put too much stock in the outcomes of the categories. It’s fun to play the game, but it’s just that—a game. Still, the Oscars are a way for people in the industry to recognize their peers, so it was nice to see some love for a veteran performer like Amy Madigan for Weapons, and the first woman to ever win Best Cinematography, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, for Sinners. Whether you feel like Sinners deserved to win Best Picture and other awards over One Battle After Another, it’s irrelevant because both films will likely live on as highlights of 2020s cinema as well as their directors’ respective filmographies.
