The 2026 Oscars review: tasteful and overly safe

In the best of all worlds, the Oscars are exciting: fun and exciting, moving and meaningful. At their very best, they make you feel like movies matter. In the worst of all worlds, the Oscars are boring: blasé and predictable, overrun with kitsch, with no apparent meaning. But then there is the intermediate version, which we received tonight. This year’s Oscars weren’t boring because the winners felt like they mattered (and were good choices), and the people who put the show together learned — from listening to the complaints about boring Oscar telecasts — how to smooth out the rough edges and avoid the missteps and keep the spectacle moving.

But the Oscars tonight weren’t exciting either. They were a bit rotten. Not because they were poorly executed, or peppered with groan-inducing bits (by my count, there were none), but because they tended to take the safest route possible. The setting, with its high slatted wall through which plants were visible on the other side, looked nothing so much as an open-air steak restaurant in the lobby of a huge business hotel. (After a while, the background shifted to a sushi restaurant.) It was pleasant and comfortable and a bit generic, just like the show itself. Conan O’Brien came out and delivered an amusingly sharp monologue, from his diss of Ted Sarandos (“This is his first time in a theater!”) to his AI shoutout (“I’m honored to be the last human presenter of the Academy Awards!”) to Timothée Chalamet’s inevitable good-natured adjustment (“I’m told there are concerns about attacks from both the opera and ballet communities”) to a joke of pure youthfulness that was just… funny (“Between ‘Hamnet’ and ‘Bugonia’, it’s been a big year for movies that sound like lunch meat from another brand”).

But one reason Conan now rules the Oscars as the new Jimmy Kimmel, if not the new Billy Crystal, is that the jokes have been stripped of the cutting edge that the Oscars have flirted with in the past. Conan struck a tone of gentle winning mockery and made a moving statement at the end of his monologue about the joy and optimism that movies embody. After that it was ‘business as usual’ again.

We went into the show anticipating excitement as there were major categories up for grabs, and that can bring its own horse racing tingle. The best actor category remained a nail-biter: it was one of the few times I can remember feeling to my core, after the names were read, that any of the four nominees (Michael B. Jordan, Timothée Chalamet, Ethan Hawke, Wagner Moura) could win—and, making the whole thing a bit surreal (at least for me), the actor I personally would have chosen, Leonardo DiCaprio, was the only one out of the running. Jordan’s victory provided some much-needed catharsis, as this was in reality the Academy’s deepest recognition of the power of ‘Sinners’. And watching Jordan’s beautiful speech, with his shoutouts to the past and his confidence in the future, you realized how much of the film’s personality came from him.

But there were early signs that “One Battle After Another” would march to victory, starting with the fact that it won the Best Casting award, a new category that many predicted would go to “Sinners.” Sean Penn’s triumph, even though he didn’t show up, only confirmed that feeling. And by the time Paul Thomas Anderson accepted the award for best director, the trajectory of the evening began to become clear. Anderson was, as he has been all season, the soul of pensive, grateful modesty, though it felt like he’d taken a page from the Book of Chalamet when he admitted how much he wanted that director’s prize. And I’d be wrong if I didn’t ask why the director of “Boogie Nights” (still his biggest film, by the way) during his acceptance speeches to rub his golden statues, as if they were magic lamps that he thought would disappear.

The two performances of songs nominated for best song – the transcendent “Golden” from “K-Pop Demon Hunters” and a sort of international revival of the “Pierce the Veil” sequence from “Sinners” during “I Lied to You” – were both killer. The reunion of Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, from “Moulin Rouge!” (a film now 25 years old) was sharp and moving, though the “Bridesmaids” reunion (the cast members gathered to present the best score award and ended with them reading sexist notes “written for them by Stellan Skarsgård”) didn’t float in the same way. The In Memoriam section made room for important statements, from Billy Crystal’s pitch-perfect tribute to the populist artistry of his friend Rob Reiner to Barbra Streisand’s moving tribute to her “The Way We Were” co-star Robert Redford. I have to say though, how could this segment have left out the mention of Brigitte Bardot? She became a right-wing troll, but she is an essential part of film history.

Nevertheless, the crucial element missing from the evening was a more explicit salute to what “One Battle After Another,” as a film, really meant. We didn’t need any obnoxious political sermons – although I did enjoy seeing Pavel Talankin, the co-director of the best documentary winner ‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’, to speak out against the ‘complicity’ that allowed fascism to take root. In contrast, Javier Bardem’s slogan (“No to war. And liberate Palestine!”) felt like a dated throwback to the era when Oscar celebrities turned the stage into a soapbox. But “One Battle After Another” is a film that places the politics of contemporary America at the core of its cinematic DNA. The film was not a piece of ‘resistance’. It was a cathartic piece of political art. On a night when it took home six Oscars, that reality should have been at the forefront of the celebration of its triumph. Instead, if you tuned into the Oscars but didn’t see the movie they greeted most fervently, you might never have had the slightest idea what the movie was about.