Oscar season is over at last! Tonight the 98th Academy Awards were aired live on ABC and streamed live on Hulu, once again held at ye olde Dolby Theatre in Hollywood and hosted again by beloved funnyman Conan O’Brien, who didn’t screw up last year, or at the very least kept his screw-ups backstage. This year’s soiree clocked in at 224 minutes, five minutes shorter than last year’s and 27 minutes longer than Avatar: Fire and Ash. O’Brien was his usual uproarious self, taking a couple more political potshots than he did last year, before disappearing for much of the second half.

In all, the field welcomed 50 nominees across 24 categories, not counting the extra Oscars they dropped from the ceremony years ago and henceforth receive only the barest on-air lip service. This year’s appendix of adjunct-award recipients:

• Honorary Oscars to Tom Cruise, renowned choreographer and occasional actor/director Debbie Allen, and production designer Wynn Thomas, who worked on nine of Spike Lee’s films.
• The Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to living legend Dolly Parton.
• The multiple winners of this year’s Sci-Tech awards, most of whom developed improved CGI art-related tools. Their annual dinner will be hosted April 28th by an up-‘n’-coming young actress TBD.

The main awards were divided amongst the following works, all of which we’ve previously reviewed here on MCC. As expected, two Warner Brothers films slightly dominated the field, running neck-and-neck all night until the final half-hour. The 25 winners across 24 categories were:

• One Battle After Another – 6: – Picture, Director (Paul Thomas Anderson), Supporting Actor (Sean Penn), Adapted Screenplay (also Anderson), Editing, Casting Director.
• Sinners – 4: Actor (Michael B. Jordan), Original Screenplay (Ryan Coogler), Cinematography, Score.
• Frankenstein – 3: Costume Design, Makeup and Hairstyling, Production Design.
• KPop Demon Hunters – 2: Animated Feature, Original Song.
• All the Empty Rooms: Documentary Short Film.
• Avatar: Fire and Ash: Visual Effects.
• F1: The Movie: Sound.
• The Girl Who Cried Pearls: Animated Short Film.
• Hamnet: Actress (Jessie Buckley).
• Mr. Nobody Against Putin: Documentary Feature.
• Sentimental Value: International Feature.
• The Singers: Live-Action Short Film (tie).
• Two People Exchanging Saliva: Live-Action Short Film (tie).
• Weapons: Supporting Actress (Amy Madigan).

Nominees in the major categories that walked away empty-handed: Blue Moon, Bugonia, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, It Was Just an Accident, Marty Supreme, The Secret Agent, Song Sung Blue, Train Dreams.

We pause here respectfully to acknowledge the only part my wife Anne ever cares to watch, the annual In Memoriam. ABC hates whenever folks embed that annual video, which is just as well because this year’s installment ran a record-breaking fifteen minutes, which the network posted online in five separate chapters after the full segment aired without commercial interruption.

• Part 1: Billy Crystal remembers his dear friend Rob Reiner at length, and concludes, “What fun we had storming the castle.” Then he’s joined silently onstage by sixteen other cast members from Reiner’s first several films.
• Part 2: The first half of the montage, starting with Isiah Whitlock Jr. from The Wire.
• Part 3: Intermission. Rachel McAdams pays tribute to Italian legend Claudia Cardinale (I had to look her up), Diane Ladd, Catherine O’Hara and “the icon” Diane Keaton.
• Part 4: The rest of McAdams’ presentation dovetails into the second half of the montage, which (to my appreciation) includes movie-poster painter Drew Struzan as well as slightly longer moments for Val Kilmer and Robert Duvall.
• Part 5: In a rare public appearance, special guest Barbra Streisand is given all the time she wants to remember Robert Redford despite opposition from the Dolby’s terrible sound system. With effort, she closes by singing a snippet from “The Way We Were”.

Per MCC tradition, my wife Anne’s annual Roll Call of the Snubbed Dead — actors who died within the past twelve months with films on their resumés and weren’t covered in this year’s In Memoriam montage — will be added in the morning once she’s had time to wake up and get properly indignant.

Enclosed below are highlights from the notes I took along the way, buried here exclusively due to my retirement from live-tweeting. After last year’s trial run on Hulu that pulled the plug seventeen minutes before the telecast actually ended, this time I was perfectly okay watching live on ABC (Indianapolis affiliate WRTV 6). This is not a rundown of every single award handed out or every name of every deserving person. It’s just the tidbits that felt worth sharing or keeping. All stamps are Eastern Daylight Time.

6:59: Traditional pre-taped opener with Conan running Forrest Gump-style through various Best Picture nominees, chased by a pack of angry kids while his hair and makeup have transformed him into the terrifying Aunt Gladys from Weapons. The montage includes a fully animated stop in KPop Demon Hunters and his attempts at speaking Norwegian to Stellan Skarsgard clips from Sentimental Value.

7:04: In one of the night’s first several digs against A.I. (and I am here for them all), he begins the monologue by introducing himself as the Oscars’ “last human host” and jokes about “attacks from the opera and ballet communities”, “the alternate Oscars hosted by Kid Rock at the Dave and Buster’s down the street”, the presence of Netflix head Ted Sarandos in the audience (“his first time in a theater!”), his real supporting role in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, how he refers to the Documentary Shorts as “li’l sads”, and the fact that, unlike several of the past years, Amazon Prime had zero nominees on the docket. (“Why isn’t the website I buy toilet paper from winning more Oscars?”) After a cute pre-arranged CGI gag with an army of Michael B. Jordan clones acting as seat-fillers, he closes in all seriousness by noting the tumult around the world and an optimistic aspiration that artists “work and hope for better”. Then cut to a “what if” segment with Conan winning Best Achievement and accepting in a red cape and too-big crown while walking to the peak of a mountain on stage while Josh Groban sings and a bird puppet rappels down a wire to deliver his fake statuette.

7:18: Last year’s Best Supporting Actress winner Zoe Saldana passes the baton to Weapons‘ big-bad Amy Madigan, forty years after the last time she was nominated. As soon as she’s announced, her husband Ed Harris gives her a loving look and bear hug. First thing she does at the mic is cackle like Aunt Gladys.

7:27: Conan notes the (strange but true!) news that in 2029 the Oscars telecast will be moving from ABC to YouTube. He’s interrupted twice by fake ads for BeamPro super awesome flashlights, each starring Jane Lynch and neither displaying a “Skip” button.

7:29: Will Arnett and Channing Tatum, the voices of Batman and Superman in The Lego Batman Movie, present Best Animated Feature to KPop Demon Hunters, who become the first set of winners to get orchestra’d offstage due to running too long in some bullying producer’s opinion. The World’s Finest heroes stick around to award Best Animated Short Film to The Girl Who Cried Pearls, a stop-motion period piece five years in the making and created by “people, not A.I.” per its creators.

Arnett and Tatum are the first among a noticeable time-saving gimmick: presenter-teams who get to hand out two awards back-to-back. All those ostensibly saved seconds didn’t really add up to much, kinda like that stupid feature on new SUVs that shuts the engine off whenever you’re at a stoplight, thus saving as much as one whole milliliter of gas and one-tenth of a rain-forest animal.

7:36: The first of the evening’s only two musical performances welcomes Sinners runner-up MVP Miles Caton and numerous other performers to recreate that film’s utterly amazing, roof-raising multiversal-nexus sequence. The live camera tracking here is impressive, but the musicianship gets swallowed and gargled by the Dolby’s poor sound system.

7:45: Conan introduces the orchestra and their conductor Michael Bearden, then we cut to a Marty Supreme gag with a “new instrument” in the percussion section called the “Bum Drum”, which is just two ping-pong paddles and a rubber butt. (Don’t ask.)

7:47: Brief pre-taped bit: what if all classic films were slashed down to just the middle sliver so they’ll fit your smartphone vertically?

7:48: To plug the upcoming sequel The Devil Wears Prada 2, Anne Hathaway and former Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour (accompanied by the orchestra playing Madonna’s “Vogue”) present both Best Costume Design and Best Makeup and Hairstyling to the deserving talents from Frankenstein. Wintour is a stand-in for Meryl Streep’s character, but looks like she’d dearly love to be anywhere than here, which may or may not be an acting choice. The Best Makeup winners salute Jacob Elordi, who spent over 400 total hours of his life in their chair to become The Creature throughout production.

7:56: We fans of What We Do in the Shadows are beyond delighted to hear this year’s telecast announcer Matt Berry take us to commercial break by reading Burger King ad-copy in a manner so, so very close to basically being in-character as Laszlo.

7:58: The history-making very first award for Best Casting Director goes on for over ten minutes with five presenters, one from each of the nominated films, all of which are also Best Picture nominees — Hamnet‘s Paul Mescal, Marty Supreme‘s Gwyneth Paltrow (whose praise stretches out the longest), One Battle After Another‘s Chase Infiniti (hers is shortest), The Secret Agent star Wagner Moura, and Sinners‘ Delroy Lindo.

8:10: Conan finally introduces Matt Berry to the Dolby’s audience. He proceeds to list the actors he’s most looking forward to seeing, every name given the full Laszlo special-pronunciation treatment, including Basil Rathbone. Conan has some bad news for Berry.

8:12: Comedian and Eternals superhero Kumail Nanjiani presents Best Live-Action Short Film and, upon opening the envelope and learning it’s a tie, makes it very clear that we understand he, the comedian, is in this case not joking.

8:18: Conan notes the Live-Action Short tie “just ruined 22 million Oscar pools”, then brings out Kieran Culkin to pass on Best Supporting Actor to One Battle After Another big-bad Sean Penn. The moment ends quickly when Culkin reports Penn “couldn’t be here, or didn’t want to,” thus shaving a good two to ten minutes off the evening.

8:26: Still mining the Live-Action Short tie for laughs, Conan goes full arm-swingin’ Mickey Rooney mode and beseeches us, “This thing’s a humdinger! Ya gotta stay tuned!” Then we cut to another comedy bit, this time with him and Sterling K. Brown imagining “What if classic films were remade to insert lots of repetitive exposition for today’s short-attention-span subscribers who only watch movies while folding laundry and need plot points recapped again and again and again?” Their Netflixian riff on Casablanca is my favorite laugh of the night.

8:28: Former Avengers Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. reunite to celebrate the first film’s fourteenth anniversary for some reason, presenting both Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Screenplay. Evans hands Downey a signed screenplay as a gift; between the awards, Downey runs back onstage and hands Evans the just-acquired-five-seconds-ago gift of a Magic Mike man-thong. Out in the audience, Tatum (who’s definitely miked) interrupts loudly “HEY, I’M GONNA NEED THOSE BACK, THOUGH!”

Dignity and relief flood us equally when Ryan Coogler accepts Best Original Screenplay for Sinners, but asks the audience to settle down before he can thank anyone: “I’m very nervous and they’re gonna play me off!” Possibly worried the film might not win anything else, he asks the entire cast and crew to stand during his big moment. For Best Adapted Screenplay, they have the pleasure of telling One Battle After Another auteur Paul Thomas Anderson he’s finally good enough to have an Oscar, though he concedes Thomas Pynchon’s book was a huge help. The updated Oscars wins-to-noms lifetime tally: Anderson is now 1-for-14.

8:42: The In Memoriam segment, as outlined above. Anne went to bed ten minutes earlier and just missed it.

9:00: To lift spirits back up to celebratory mode, Conan offers a (fake) concession to any extremely online youngsters who might “definitely be watching broadcast television” by reading aloud the following dose of maximum on-purpose cringe:

9:02: Pedro Pascal and Sigourney Weaver, stars of the forthcoming blockbuster The Mandalorian and Grogu, give a shout-out to a Grogu puppet sitting in the audience next to Kate Hudson, then get laughs at its expense because its arms are too short for clapping. They present Best Production Design to more Frankenstein makers (whose thanked persons include former comics artist Guy Davis, the film’s concept artist) and Best Visual Effects to the Avatar 3 team, who send love to the series’ original producer Jon Landau, who passed away in 2024.

9:12: Former Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel steps in, noting that Conan needed to step out for some fresh air but “exposed his face to the sun and was incinerated.” He aims his political jokes harder than most of Conan’s, throws a jab at CBS (his friendly rival Stephen Colbert’s bosses), and presides over two awards. The accepters for Best Documentary Short All the Empty Rooms include one of its interviewees, the mother of one of the mass-shooting victims at Uvalde. The seven people showing up for Best Documentary Feature Mr. Nobody Against Putin include its star and chief guerilla filmmaker Pavel Talankin (with his Russian translator), who did indeed escape the country alive — frankly, I was wondering — and asks the watching world, “In the name of all our children, in the name of our future, stop all of these wars now.”

9:25: Conan alleges he and F1: The Movie star Brad Pitt are the same age. MCC fact-check: Conan is eight months older.

9:26: It’s a 15-year Bridesmaids reunion starring Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph and Ellie Kemper. I’ve never seen it, but they do a cute comedy bit involving fake notes from audience members. They give Best Original Score to Sinners composer Ludwig Goransson (whose dad’s life was changed in 1963 by a John Lee Hooker album, which in turn would lead to Dad changing his) and Best Sound to the crowd-pleasing F1, whose techs implore us all to go to the movies.

9:43: Because every Oscars telecast writing team must produce at least one dismal flop of an exchange, the father/son duo of Bill and Lewis Pullman are possibly forced by offstage snipers to read a Best Film Editing intro proposing that an editor “shaping the story” is kindasorta remotely like how being the son of a famous actor shapes their actor-child’s own life story. Or something. They do what they can, though Pullman the Younger seemingly has to keep reminding himself it’s an honor to be here in any capacity and he does not in fact possess the superpowers of either Sentry or The Void that would allow him to exact revenge upon the writers.

On the less excruciating side, the winning editor, One Battle After Another‘s Andy Jurgensen, honors his aunt Barbara Hall, who worked for 25 years as an Academy archivist. (While checking social media during commercial breaks, I noted extra-special gratitude from entertainment writer Mark Harris, who fondly recalls Hall “took an interest in my research and, miraculously, found me George Stevens’s pocket diary. A miracle. Five Came Back [which I loved] would not have been what it was without her.”)

9:47: Demi Moore presents Best Cinematography to Sinners‘ Autumn Durald Arkapaw, now officially The First Woman Ever to Win Best Cinematography (and only the fourth ever nominated). Before her historic moment at the mic, the camera cuts to Coogler out in the audience rushing her kid back to his seat before she begins. She also asks all the women in the theater to stand: “I really feel I don’t get here without you guys.”

9:52: In the most highly anticipated Oscar moment tonight for viewers under 16, the trio of singers behind KPOP Demon Hunters‘ HUNTR/X finally get to come up and sing a wee bit of their nominated song “Golden”. Giant glowing lightbulbs have been handed out to the audience for waving only during this performance. (Personally I thought “Takedown” was robbed, but I realize I’m outnumbered.)

10:00: Best International Feature is presented by Priyanka Chopra Jonas, star of the recent Prime Video actioner The Bluff (no, I’ve never heard of it till just now, either), and F1 costar Javier Bardem. Giving exactly zero flying figs, he comes wearing a great big card on his suit that says “NO A LA GUERRA” and a slightly smaller Palestine button, and begins by declaring to anyone not watching in HD, “No to all wars. Free Palestine.” Chopra, accessorizing with a very expensive necklace, just smiles along. They proceed to announce the winner is Sentimental Value, the only nominee containing zero wars.

10:06: Academy Award Winner Lionel Richie reminds us it’s been forty years since he won for “Say You, Say Me” from White Nights (the very same year Amy Madigan was last nominated, in fact). His presentation for Best Original Song plays snippets of the other three nominees who couldn’t be here, or didn’t want to, or weren’t invited. So we get no Nick Cave, no Kesha, and no Grammy Award-winning international soprano Ana María Martínez on behalf of Vida Verdi! (I’ve seen it, but yes, I had to look that up.) Setting aside the jokes about Timothee Chalamet’s recent mouthing-off about opera and ballet, I presume ABC decided having any actual opera in the show would be ratings death.)

Anyway, KPop Demon Hunters picks up a second Oscar and is now tied with Suicide Squad. Only one of its six reps is allowed to speak before they’re orchestra’d off, despite one guy on stage pogo-ing in protest. For those keeping track at home, nominee Diane Warren’s lifetime Oscar scorecard is now 0-for-17.

10:14: Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, dramatic dramatists of the upcoming drama The Drama, which is about some drama, bestow Best Director upon OBAA‘s Anderson. Quoth he to the Academy: “You make a guy work hard for one of these.” Our updated scorecard: Anderson is now 2-for-14; Diane Warren is still 0-for-17.

10:17: Adrien Brody fumbles through a handful of scrawled-upon notebook pages, only for the orchestra to threaten to play him off. He moves on and passes the Best Actor baton to Michael B. Jordan from The Wire, which I will never, ever stop mentioning every time I watch him in something. “God is good, God is good,” he opens. His parents are in different places in the audience (Mom has the better seat). He thanks a few other Black acting winners of recent vintage by name (Poitier, Denzel, Halle, Forest Whitaker, Jamie Foxx, at least one more). While he’s talking, he catches Coogler telling him “I love you” in ASL. Fun trivia: Coogler’s wife Zinzi has experience as a deaf interpreter — as does my own sister-in-law! — and Jordan learned ASL for the Creed series.

10:26: Conan warns the audience before introducing Mikey Madison, “Our next presenter might bring back painful memories of accidentally watching Anora with your parents.” He makes way for her, and she makes way for our latest Best Actress, Hamnet star Jessie Buckley, who immediately cries when Madison calls her name. She’s understandably all over the place on stage, thanking her husband profusely (“I want to have 20,000 more babies with you!”), acknowledging the film’s centering of “the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart”, and, in a bit of cosmic timing, teaches us American viewers that this very Sunday was in fact Mother’s Day in the UK.

10:32: Time to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Moulin Rouge with Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, who reprise the famous “how many ‘love’ song titles can we string together in a row instead of talking” scene before giving Best Picture to OBAA. Anderson opens with the fun trivia, since that’s a thing these reunions have been offering all night anyway, that fifty years ago the Best Picture nominees were Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville, and Barry Lyndon. He also apologizes for forgetting to thank any of the cast in his last two acceptance speeches, “especially Chase Infiniti.” Our updated scorecard: Anderson is now 3-for-14; Diane Warren is still 0-for-17.

10:38: Conan signs off for the evening, with one final shout-out: “We love you, Marty Short!” (Here’s the full story, for those who haven’t heard.)

10:39: To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there is indeed a Scene Right Before the 98th Academy Awards End Credits! The evening’s final pre-taped sketch is a One Battle After Another parody, in which Conan is informed he’s just been named Oscar Host for Life. They show him to his new corner office, pump poisonous gas in through the ducts, take his corpse down to the incinerator, and replace the nameplate on his door with one for MrBeast.

The credits also feature one last straight-faced ad reading by Matt Berry, this one for United Airlines. I was really hoping he’d sign off by yelling, “BAT!”

10:43: Official sign-off, after the rest of the credits are split-screened with four commercials for ABC shows and Berry reads the official closing boilerplate.

And now, back to watching junk that’s bad for us all. Let’s get back out there and enjoy the magic of movies an’ stuff! Maybe now I’ll finally have time for that recent Momoa/Bautista slugfest on Prime Video.