The Oscars crowned a competitive awards season dominated by two dazzling original films. It has been a year in which the future of the company that backed them has been flung back and forth, at times feeling as if the entire future of the film industry rested on the outcome.
However, it was generally agreed that a surprisingly good-humoured ceremony met the moment, throwing up a few surprises, making history at times, and creating a well-received reworked In Memoriam section to honour the desperately long list of those legends who have died in the past year.
Screen collects a few final Oscar talking points.
Predictable but classy…
… is how the ceremony could be described in a fitting ending to awards season. Conan O’Brien delivered an assured performance and succinct observations about geopolitics, combined with zany jokes, plus one zinger about paedophiles that referred to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Andrew Mountbatten Windsor without mentioning them by name.
The show was impressive throughout, with dazzling set design and speeches that emphasised family and love.
There was no shortage of political commentary running through the show, from Javier Bardem’s remarks as presenter to former show host Jimmy Kimmel’s comments about CBS and Donald Trump.
Read more on the best speeches from the ceremony here.
Competitive until the last minute
One Battle After Another was the early frontrunner, but it wasn’t quite an Oppenheimer scenario this year. The race felt genuinely competitive, especially in the closing days and weeks. Leonardo DiCaprio was an early favourite for best actor until Marty Supreme and Timothee Chalamet’s attention-grabbing campaign began to steal the momentum, before the triumphant late surge by Michael B Jordan. In a tight three-way race, Jordan’s dignified response in the face of events at Bafta may have provided added momentum – not to mention nearly 10 days of global media headlines – prior to the final Oscar voting window opening.
Going into the ceremony, many categories were too close to comfortably call, but in the end, the big Warner Bros titles dominated in all the most likely ways, given all the indicators provided by Bafta and the guild awards.
Surprises
In the feature documentary category, Mr Nobody Against Putin beat the hot favourite, The Perfect Neighbor, in an echo of its win at the Bafta Film Awards a month ago, perhaps a signifier of the socio-political backdrop against which this year’s Oscars took place.
And One Battle After Another won the inaugural casting award, where most had expected Sinners to prevail.
History makers
Remarkably, Sinners’ Autumn Durald Arkapaw was the first female cinematographer to win the award for best cinematographer in Oscars’ history, while Jessie Buckley’s lead actress prize for Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet is the first time an Irish woman has picked up this prize.
In the live-action short category, the winners, Sam A. Davis’ musical comedy The Singers and Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh’s French-language dystopian drama Two People Exchanging Saliva, were tied – only the seventh tie in Oscars history.
Triumph for Warner Bros film group heads
One year after reports began to circle that Warner Bros film group co-heads might be on their way out, Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy triumphed on the night, capping a 2025 of box office successes and critical acclaim with 11 wins for One Battle After Another, Sinners and Amy Madigan’s supporting actress victory for Weapons. De Luca and Abdy were thanked multiple times across the night, while the name of Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav wasn’t mentioned once.
The fact that Warner Bros tied the studio record for most Academy Awards in a single night (alongside MGM in 1959, Paramount in 1997 and New Line Cinema in 2003) will feel bittersweet in the wake of Paramount Skydance’s $111bn acquisition of the company, and the uncertain future that brings. (Paramount Skydance didn’t score a single nomination this year.)
Unique in memoriam section
A remarkable number of cinema legends died in 2025, and the Academy accordingly conjured up a special tribute section that deviated from the traditional format. Billy Crystal began the section reminiscing about his good friend, the late Rob Reiner, and was then joined on stage by cast members from some of Reiner’s greatest hits, including Meg Ryan (When Harry Met Sally), Kathy Bates (Misery) and John Cusack (Stand By Me, The Sure Thing).
The traditional montage of images honouring those who died was next, with Rachel McAdams coming on to pay tribute to Diane Keaton, before Barbra Streisand closed the section with a short rendition of the theme song from the 1973 romantic drama The Way We Were and a personal tribute to her co-star in that film and Sundance founder Robert Redford.
Read more on the stand-out moments from the ceremony here.
How Bafta compared this year
As always, the position in the awards race of the Bafta Film Awards, with a significant overlap in voting membership, was interesting this year. The Baftas took place three long weeks before the Oscar ceremony and fell within the crucial final Oscar voting period.
Of the 20 matching categories this year, 15 were the same, a number that has waxed and waned over the past five years.
But what felt like a surprise win at Bafta for Sean Penn in best supporting actor for his portrayal of a corrupt military man in One Battle After Another arguably created a frontrunner, rubber-stamped by the US Academy’s voters. And when Chalamet lost the lead actor Bafta to hometown favourite Robert Aramayo, it blew the category wide open, creating a glittering path to success for Jordan.
Sean Penn
After choosing not to attend the Baftas or the Actors’ Awards, the two-time Oscar winner for Mystic River and Milk similarly skipped the Academy Awards, unbothered to discover if he picked up his third. He reportedly chose to head to Ukraine instead.
Opinion is divided over whether he should have at least written down his thank-yous for stand-in picker-upper Kieran Culkin or if Penn is to be commended for living his beliefs. After all, this is the man who handed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy one of his Oscar statuettes to be “melted down to bullets”.
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