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If you pay attention to movies throughout the year, the Oscars aren’t just an awards show. They’re a journey.
Over the last several decades, an industry has taken shape within Hollywood exclusively devoted to frenzied campaigns. Talent on both sides of the camera spend tireless months rehashing their accomplishments or simply navigating a slew of red carpet interrogations.
Small armies of publicists and cold-blooded strategists scheme to position their candidates as most worthy of votes from the roughly 11,000 voters that comprise the Academy of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It’s…a lot.
And after all that, it all comes down to a few dozen envelopes and a three-hour-plus ceremony. Then, everybody just goes back to work — at least until the Emmys race takes flight in June.
Oscar season has grown longer on both ends. Three of the four most recent winners for Best Picture — CODA, Anora, and Everything Everywhere All at Once — premiered at film festivals during the first half of the years prior to their wins. The other one, Oppenheimer, opened over the summer. The record-breaking 2026 nominee Sinners, which holds an unprecedented 16 nominations, first screened for press and industry a year ago.
During the pandemic years, the Oscars moved from February to March, and they’ve remained there ever since. For some pundits and industry insiders, the sprawling timeline has become interminable. I wouldn’t mind an earlier endpoint either, but more Oscar talk also means more movie talk in general, and more opportunities for movies that might otherwise lack the platform to gain much attention at all.
Despite the air of luxury associated with the event, many Oscar nominees are gatecrashing the epicenter of Hollywood prestige. Others have navigated the boundaries of a vast commercial industry with passion projects that no other artist could have made. In an industry defined by a battle for attention, that matters.
In more recent years, the increasingly international voting body responsible for the winners has led to a more global set of contenders, and this year is no different. Alongside blockbusters F1, One Battle After Another, and Sinners, you’ll find the enigmatic thriller The Secret Agent from Brazil and the Norwegian family dramedy Sentimental Value, both of which have representation in several other categories.
The directors, Kleber Mendonça Filho and Joaquim Trier, advocate for their achievements through self-promotion that doubles as an excuse to elevate their profiles. They have both accumulated sizable bodies of work, and the longer they campaign, the more likely new audiences will discover the riches that preceded these latest accomplishments. It’s no easy feat to get any movie seen on a large scale these days, much less an original one from another country, and they’re often just as worthy. This year’s Oscars certainly help make that case.
Meanwhile, the Best Picture category comes down to an undeniably tight race between two maverick visionaries.
Sinners is a vivid musical journey that transforms the overly familiar trope of vampires into a cogent metaphor for assimilation. Writer-director Ryan Coogler performs more than a few cinematic magic tricks to blend horror motifs with the Mississippi Delta circa 1932 and a staggering array of musical references that stretch from the past to the future. Paul Thomas Anderson’s action-comedy One Battle After Another follows a bumbling revolutionary with a wry tone that both satirizes and celebrates the rebellion and recklessness that defines modern-day advocacy.
In all likelihood, both Coogler and Anderson will win Oscars on Sunday (for Best Original and Adapted Screenplay, respectively). Anderson’s movie is the slight favorite for Best Picture and Best Director, though recent speculation has centered on a late-period Sinners surge. Real or not, the hype has ensured that one movie’s buzz doesn’t eclipse them all until the very end.
These movies are unforgettable to anyone who sees them and the extensive Oscar race has made clear that the culture hasn’t forgotten them yet. If we must have an interminably long awards season, it may as well be this one, the best Oscar race in years.
Now consider the strange case of Marty Supreme, a brilliant dark comedy that erupted as an end-of-the-year sensation. It may not win much of anything at this year’s ceremony. The season ended with a last-minute media brouhaha around ill-timed remarks by star Timothée Chalamet about his desire to star in movies rather than ballet and opera where “no one cares about this thing anymore.” Notably, this so-called “controversy” kicked off after Oscar voting ended, so it certainly won’t be the cause if Chalamet loses Best Actor, but it does cap off the legacy of this particular campaign.
If I’m reading Chalamet’s casual remarks correctly, he wasn’t actually dismissing these storied art forms so much as the challenge of advocating for them to a mass audience. Ballet and opera have thrived for generations on the backs of philanthropy, whereas movies rely on a capitalist system of profits and loss, and thus require a far more powerful form of advocacy from the arts reliant on that system. If Chalamet feels more valuable putting his efforts into the latter field, fair enough.
OK, so maybe that nuance wasn’t as explicit as it might have been. But consider this: Why is there a public debate about the ongoing relevance of ballet and opera? Even Oscar season controversies can benefit the culture. Like I said: Best race in years.
The 98th Academy Awards telecast airs this Sunday at 7:00 p.m. ET.