Oscar Blitz 2026 – Postmortem

At the beginning of this year’s Oscar Blitz, I hinted that it might be the last time I’m able to do this annual excursion into cinematic excellence. Obviously, that still remains to be seen. Things haven’t improved for me, but like Marty Mauser himself, I continue to believe that I will come out the other side of all this, and there’s still plenty of time for my world to unfuck itself. However, I can say with certainty that, if this is indeed the swan song for this experiment, we’re going out on a good note.

No, this weekend’s Academy Awards weren’t perfect. There were certainly flaws, most notably some microphone/sound mixing issues, and the introductory bits for several of the presenters were PAINFULLY not funny. But on the whole, this was a strong night. As I frequently do in this space, I’ll offer suggestions for how the ceremony can improve itself going forward, but honestly, there’s not much to point out apart from the obvious.

Let’s start with the positive stuff, because there’s so much of it. First and foremost, Conan O’Brien did a fantastic job in his sophomore hosting effort. The jokes weren’t as strong as last time out, but where it mattered, he nailed it. The opening bit where he’s made up like Aunt Gladys and is chased by the horde of kids through the most notable movies of the year (including a genuinely creative bit where they’re all animated into KPop Demon Hunters) was not only inspired, but it shined a much-needed spotlight on Weapons one of the best films of the year that was criminally underrated by the Academy itself, though Amy Madigan’s win for Supporting Actress eased that pain a little. He also got a few true zingers in, the best of them being the backhanded note that while the UK didn’t have any acting nominees for the first time in over a decade, at least they arrest their pedophiles. He didn’t even need to add that we idiot Americans somehow elect ours President, because every person in that room – and everyone watching at home – knew the implication.

This segues comfortably into the next high point. While I don’t always like it when the Oscars are used as a political platform, sometimes the moment calls for it, and after the last year, it was certainly warranted here. With the exception of Javier Bardem’s blunt, bold, and brilliant pronouncement of “No War. And Free Palestine,” and a few passionate notes from the Documentary winners, most of the commentary worked because it was couched in humor. Conan’s joke was a strong starter, and then his predecessor Jimmy Kimmel, presenting the Documentary categories, came out as if he was the one hosting, only to pivot comedically to the repressive influences of the Trump administration’s attempts to silence free speech and dissent, of which he himself was a target last year. Arguably the most prominent statement of the night came from one who was absent. Kieran Culkin joked about Sean Penn not showing up to accept his award for Supporting Actor, musing that maybe he just didn’t want to be there (despite now winning three Oscars, Penn clearly doesn’t like the Academy as much as it likes him), it turns out he was absent because he was in Ukraine having a meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy about how he and others might be able to help the country continue to defend itself from Russia’s now four-year-long illegal invasion.

We made some history on Sunday night as well. We had the first tie in over a decade – and only the seventh ever – for Live Action Short (which to me means the voters somehow got it wrong twice; literally this is the only result that upset me). The last time it happened was in a category that no longer exists, with Zero Dark Thirty and Skyfall becoming joint winners for Sound Editing in 2013. The most famous tie is obviously when Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand drew for Best Actress in 1969, but this is the second time that we’ve had a tie for Live Action Short, with 1995 being the other instance.

Of course, the biggest milestone was Autumn Arkapaw’s win for Cinematography, making her the first woman and the first person of color to claim victory. This was a genuine surprise, as One Battle After Another and Train Dreams had split the major prizes during Awards Season, with Arkapaw coming up empty. However, this should not be seen as a “statement” win, because the work she did on Sinners was incredible. This is not Ariana DeBose winning despite a mediocre performance because the voters wanted an openly queer champion, nor is it Sam Smith getting Original Song for a terrible Bond theme because there hadn’t been an out gay winner before. On any given day you could flip a coin between Arkapaw, Michael Bauman, and Adolpho Veloso and still end up with a truly worthy result. There will never be an asterisk next to Arkapaw’s name. She earned that shit.

Finally, we have to acknowledge how great the In Memoriam segment was. Usually it’s just one block of the broadcast (or half of one) late on, before we lunge into the final four awards (Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Picture). It usually lasts a few minutes, long enough for whoever they booked to sing a mournful song to finish their performance, and there are always a slew of worthy names omitted. This time, the segment lasted for 15, opened with Billy Crystal giving his best monologue this side of 700 Sundays in tribute to Rob Reiner, where he was joined onstage by so many people whose lives and careers were forever altered by the late filmmaker’s work, from Kathy Bates and Carol Kane to Jerry O’Connell and Wil Wheaton. The montage was then interrupted by Rachel McAdams tearfully eulogizing Catherine O’Hara and Diane Keaton, and then it was all capped off by a clearly shaken Streisand reminiscing about Robert Redford before closing things out with a rendition of “The Way We Were” that she could barely get through. In 99% of circumstances I can’t stand Streisand, but here I was on the verge of tears myself. Yes, there were still some glaring omissions, most notably (to me anyway) Brigitte Bardot, Robert Carradine, Loni Anderson, George Wendt, Peter Greene, and Bud Cort (posthumous Best Picture winner Adam Somner was memorialized in last year’s montage), but they also included a lot of names they otherwise wouldn’t, like Jackie Burch (very important to include her in the year we finally introduce Casting as an award), Isiah Whitlock Jr., Mohammad Bakri, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (his soul is all of ours now). It was perfectly imperfect, the sign of so many lives well lived, and an indicator of just how heavy the losses were in 2025.

There’s a lot that the Academy and the Oscars got right this year, but there’s always room for improvement. There were some pretty notable low points that are easily corrected for the future, which I’ll delineate now.

Stop Playing People Off – Once again we had some controversy on when and how winners were either played off the stage or otherwise cut off while accepting their awards, and it just doesn’t need to happen. We had the music chime in early on, when one of the animation winners simply ceded the floor to their colleague so she could give her thanks. We had another where the microphone was not only cut off, but lowered from the stage. The solution is simple. Stop doing this. Yes, some speeches can run long, but this is their moment, not anyone else’s, and it’s only ever applied to the below-the-line categories. As much as I love Jessie Buckley, if you’re going to cut anyone off, make it someone like her. She’ll get to tour the talk show circuit for the next several weeks talking about her well-earned win for Best Actress, but the people who won for Documentary Short get this one and only opportunity. This leads comfortably into the next gripe…

Stop Playing Favorites – This complaint manifests itself in two ways. The first and most obvious was the fact that of the five Original Song nominees, only two of them (“I Lied to You” and “Golden”) were performed live on stage. Notably, these were also the two most popular nominees, and realistically the only ones that had a chance to win (“Golden” swept Awards Season). As much as I abhor Diane Warren’s continued shenanigans, she is 100% right in her indignation in this particular sense, stating that every nominee deserves equal treatment and an equal place on the stage. If she truly believed in this ethos, she’d stop gladhanding and dealmaking to ensure she gets nominated every year, but the point is still sound. By only allowing two performances, the Academy as a body is openly stating that the other three nominees didn’t matter (and they created a very awkward moment when the silent nominees were announced out of order when the category was presented). This is even worse than when “Shallow” got a full performance a few years ago – you know, the one where Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga eye-fucked each other at the piano – while the other four also-rans got reduced to an extended medley. I almost wanted one of them to win just to allow them to give an overt middle finger to coincide with the metaphorical one Timothée Chalamet got by having Misty Copeland do some ballet right in his face at the end of the Sinners performance.

On a more subtle level, we need to stop letting Disney – or any corporate entity – use the Oscars as an advertising platform. Strangely, there weren’t many trailers playing during the commercials, but half of the guest presenters during the telecast were there as direct marketing for upcoming Disney projects. Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans did a cringeworthy bit about the “anniversary” of the first Avengers film, which is just a thinly veiled ad for the next one (who celebrates a 13th anniversary?), while Sigourney Weaver and Pedro Pascal were brought on stage to plug the Mandalorian and Grogu movie, with Baby Yoda himself in the seats being manhandled by Elle Fanning. This kind of crap is just transparent capitalism in a ceremony meant to celebrate art. Hopefully when the show goes to YouTube in three years it will alleviate the pressure to satisfy any studio’s bottom line, but even if another network eventually picks it up, the Oscars should never be used as a billboard. That’s what the rest of Hollywood Boulevard is for. It just comes off as disingenuous when you let Kimmel roast CBS, but then pull this crap. Speaking of which…

Put Up or Shut Up – Throughout the night, there were several clever jokes and japes about the state of the film industry, how tech monopolies are ruining art and society, and how pathetic it is to try to pander to a youth audience that simply doesn’t care about the Oscars or anything else on terrestrial TV because they’re on their phones. There was a lot of insight in these bits, but all of it was undercut by the reality of what went on during the broadcast. You want to appeal to young people, but you somehow held the performance of “Golden” until the final hour of the show. You rage against tech bros, but allowed advertising from crypto brokers. You railed against the use of generative AI, and yet there’s about to be a movie with an AI-generated Val Kilmer, because the Academy still hasn’t come out with a solid rule banning its use in films wishing to be considered for the Oscars, and you literally nominated the digital drawings from Avatar for Costume Design. You can make all the gags you want about Jane Lynch interrupting the show with YouTube ads (at least hers were skippable), but unless you take meaningful action to stop this chicanery, you’re just pissing into the wind. In a time where the Academy is desperate for a statement of purpose and relevance, it needs to take a stand and kibosh any practices that denigrate artistic integrity, whether it’s an explicit prohibition against AI or reigning in Diane Warren’s obviously dubious campaigning tactics. Comedy heals, but it isn’t cold hard action. You want to trim the fat in the ceremony, start with getting rid of all the extraneous nonsense that bloats the runtime and brings down the collective conversation. And the best way to trim said fat is to…

Go Back to Five Best Picture Nominees – I’ve said this many times, but there was never a need to expand the Best Picture field to 10. The reason it was done in 2009 was because that year’s field was so woefully underwhelming and omitted true greats like The Dark Knight, The Wrestler, and WALL-E. We don’t care how many nominees there are, just that the right films get the nod. This cognitive dissonance sprang to mind again during this year’s show, spotlighted when Paul Thomas Anderson mentioned the Class of 1975 after One Battle After Another won. As he pointed out, that year was an all-timer list – Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville, and eventual winner One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – where you could make a solid case for any of those films to win on any given day. We had a similar Murderer’s Row in 1994 when Forrest Gump won out over Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pulp Fiction, Quiz Show, and The Shawshank Redemption. The problem isn’t that there aren’t enough great films each year, it’s that the Academy nominates the wrong ones, and 2008 was the nadir thanks to some truly disgusting campaigning. Harvey Weinstein was one of the most notorious figures in this grift, and while he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison for his disgusting crimes, the culture in Hollywood that he helped create and foster hasn’t really changed despite his meteoric fall from grace.

If nothing else, consider the evidence of your own eyes and ears during this year’s ceremony. Of the 10 nominees, seven of them received fewer awards than KPop Demon Hunters. This is in no way to say that the film is somehow better than 70% of the field, because that’s just a ludicrous proposition, but it’s clear that there weren’t that many true contenders for the top prize, so why bloat out the broadcast to humor them? It’s not like this was even a high bar to clear. KPop got just two wins. TWO! And yet, only One Battle After Another, Sinners, and Frankenstein managed to beat its haul. Of the other seven, only three even got one win (Best Actress for Buckley and Hamnet, Sound for F1, and International Feature for Sentimental Value). Four of the 10 nominees, nearly half of what Academy voters suggested were the best films of the year, left empty-handed. Not to be results-oriented, but objectively they weren’t among the best, because they were beaten at every turn.

This isn’t a novel occurrence, either. Last year saw Nickel Boys and A Complete Unknown come up empty (the former only nominated for its screenplay outside of Best Picture). The year before that it was Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, and Past Lives. Before that, half the field got goose eggs (The Banshees of Inisherin, Elvis, The Fabelmans, Tár, and Triangle of Sadness) while the non-nominated The Whale got two wins, including a major in Best Actor. In fact, since the field was expanded in 2009, it’s only happened twice that every Best Picture nominee won something, and in both of those cases, there were only eight nominees instead of the currently required 10. Every year otherwise, at least one film was left out in the cold, sometimes as many as four or five.

So clearly, there are never 10 legitimate contenders, and it’s okay to admit that. It doesn’t mean that these aren’t good films, or even great ones. Some of them are among my personal favorites, in fact (I take it as a personal insult that Lady Bird, The Irishman, and The Wolf of Wall Street all blanked). But those are the breaks sometimes, and it’s foolhardy to a) pretend they had a chance, and b) to attempt to spread the wins around like participation trophies to try to justify their inclusion. Part of the reason why 2008’s class was so bad was because the Academy’s voting membership was older, whiter, and much stodgier than it is now. With a younger and more diverse group of people voting – not to mention just more people voting in general – the odds are that you’ll get a proper five (hell, I’ll even allow a sixth just to set the category apart) more often than not. Sure, there will be odd ducks like Wicked or Barbie getting through when they don’t have a reasonable path to victory, but it will still be an honest indication of where the industry stands at a given moment, as the voters acknowledge their impact on the cultural zeitgeist.

Because the other side of the equation here is that in a lot of cases, the expansion renders other categories moot. The first two years we had 10 nominees, they included the likes of Toy Story 3 and Up, both of which are fantastic pictures and pantheon-level Pixar works. However, all their presence did was end the Animated Feature contest before it started. The same goes for Amour, Roma, Parasite, Drive My Car, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Zone of Interest, all of which were the sole International Feature nominees to get into the Best Picture field in their respective years, and all of which were rubber-stamped victors in the foreign contests. The only reason the category had any competition the last two years was because there were two nominees that made it to Best Picture consideration. This is concrete proof that having more nominees creates less intrigue, not more, and with the exception of Parasite winning it all and Roma and All Quiet getting several wins of their own, the rest are rendered as historical footnotes at best, regardless of your personal enjoyment.

I’m not saying that going back to five will work out perfectly. Of course there will be controversy when certain films are snubbed. There always is. Hell, there are some who still argue that Argo only won Best Picture because Ben Affleck was left off the Best Director list. I don’t agree with that opinion, but the fact that a dozen years later people are still making it speaks to this fact. You cannot please everyone, but you can at least make a concerted effort not to patronize. We all knew this year it was down to Sinners and One Battle, so why crowd the affair with eight films that have no hope instead of three? It dilutes the competition rather than enhancing it, and we have more than a decade of evidence to support this thesis. Given that literally every Academy voter can nominate for the top prize, why not trust your membership to get it right? If they do royally fuck up in a clear and public manner, you can call it out and take punitive and corrective action. But genuinely ask yourself the question. Are you really honoring or celebrating a film by including it in a 10-nominee field when its only other nod is for the screenplay, which has happened three times already? Are you really fostering a conversation when films with double-digit nods are still shut out? In so many years, the best films become self-evident, so why not just use common sense, especially when the industry itself is facing an existential crisis?

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I hope you all enjoyed this year’s Blitz. It’s a labor of love to do it every year, and with every fiber of my being I pray that I’ll be in a position to do it all again next year. If this is the end, then it’s been a good run. If there’s more to come, I’ll be chomping at the bit and grateful for every last piece of it, even the stuff I bitch about. Thank you all so much for taking the ride with me.

Join the conversation in the comments below! What was the best part of this year’s Oscars for you? What was the worst? How come the worst written comedy bits always precede the Screenplay categories? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!