The Night One Battle Won the War
Paul Thomas Anderson's epic claims Best Picture while Sinners writes history. Every winner from Hollywood's biggest night — all in one place.
The 98th Academy Awards belonged, above all else, to Paul Thomas Anderson. His portrait of aging leftist revolutionaries chased by a brutal military officer — One Battle After Another, adapted from Thomas Pynchon's “Vineland” — took home six Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn, and Best Casting. It was a coronation years in the making for a filmmaker many consider the greatest working in American cinema.
But the story of the evening can't be told without Ryan Coogler's Sinners, the genre-bending vampire saga that arrived with a record-shattering 16 nominations and left with four — including historic wins for Michael B. Jordan as Best Actor and Autumn Durald Arkapaw as Best Cinematographer, the first woman and first Black cinematographer ever to claim that prize. Jessie Buckley, radiant in Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, claimed Best Actress in what has become one of the award season's most celebrated performances in years.
“The best part about being on a film crew is being with people, because we need each other.” — Paul Thomas Anderson
Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein swept the technical and craft categories, claiming Production Design, Costume Design, and Makeup & Hairstyling — a hat trick that speaks to the film's extraordinary visual ambition. Meanwhile, the Korean pop animated feature KPop Demon Hunterssurprised the room with wins for both Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song for “Golden.” It was a night of deserved coronations, hard-fought upsets, and at least one tie in the Short Film categories.
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When Arkapaw walked to the podium for Best Cinematography, she became the first woman and the first Black cinematographer to win the award in Oscar history. Her words — asking every woman in the Dolby Theatre to stand with her — turned a technical award into one of the night's most powerful moments.
Paul Thomas Anderson had previously been nominated for directing There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread, and Licorice Pizza — and never won. Tonight, finally, the industry's top directing prize arrived alongside a second statuette for Adapted Screenplay. Few standing ovations in recent Oscar history felt more earned.
Ryan Coogler's vampire epic arrived with 16 nominations — a new all-time record — and left with four wins. Falling just short of Best Picture, Sinners still proved itself one of the defining films of the year, with history-making performances and a score that dominated the season.
Guillermo del Toro's long-gestating monster film took no prizes in the major categories but cleaned up on craft, winning Costume Design, Makeup & Hairstyling, and Production Design. A reminder that sometimes the most immersive films are built from the ground up.
The Academy formally recognised casting directors for the first time, awarding Cassandra Kulukundis for One Battle After Another. The award was presented by Paul Mescal, who starred in Hamnet. A long-overdue acknowledgement of a craft that shapes every film before a single frame is shot.