What The Oscars Got Wrong
All the snubs, successes, and best dresses of the night.
15 months ago, I saw Train Dreams at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, thus starting a long cavort through the year’s Best Picture nominees that ended, finally, in last night’s Oscar ceremony. This year was fun, because even the weak movies (F1) had merit, and the best of the bunch—One Battle After Another, Sinners, Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value—feel both generationally important and good for cinema. There was a second when we thought Hamnet might be our Oscar villain, but those claims were unfounded, because it had a quiet journey to its one sole, very deserving, win: Irish queen Jessie Buckley for Best Actress.
After all this hearsay of Sinners gaining late stage momentum, with potential to sweep in and win the top prize, One Battle After Another ended up being our Best Picture. We learned that pretty early in the broadcast, when the inaugural Casting prize that was widely expected to be picked up by industry veteran Francine Maisler (Sinners) instead went to Cassanda Kulukundis, who discovered Chase Infiniti for her part in One Battle. Even she looked surprised. Then came the love for One Battle in most major categories: Sean Penn—despite not showing up—won Best Supporting Actor, and the big precursor award, Best Editing, was won by PTA go-to Andy Jurgensen.
Still, Sinners found its triumphs: We got a Ryan Coogler speech, who won Best Original Screenplay, and Autumn Durald Arkapaw made history as the first woman ever to win Best Cinematography.
As i-D’s resident awards expert, here are my highs, lows, and surprises from the Academy Awards.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway of the night is that the Academy is finally cool with straight-up horror movies after a decades-spanning allergy to awarding scream queens. This year, two of the four acting winners had scary roots: Michael B. Jordan’s twin performance in Sinners and the spunky, strange turn by Amy Madigan as Aunt Gladys in Weapons. After snubbing some really remarkable people from that late 2010s cool-horror boom—Lupita N’yongo in Us, Toni Collette in Hereditary—the Academy has gone right for the jugular and made up for its mistakes.
But it comes at an interesting inflection point: After those really great horror movies that carried us through the late 2010s, I feel that genre is, for the most part, on a downward trajectory. The indie horror movie is almost too easy to get financed, so we’ve entered its slop era. I’m one of the folks who thought Weapons was pretty good but tonally inconsistent, who thought Madigan’s turn was fun, if a little hammy…
Did the right person win?
Madigan’s Best Supporting Actress category was surrounded by some of the best performances that category has had in some time. The fire-bellied brilliance of Teyana Taylor in One Battle. The two sides of Sentimental Value’s complex familial coin with Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleeas. Wunmi Mosaku, who is, in my opinion, Sinners’ real deserving Oscar winner. Madigan reaches for the freak, sure, but is that really the performance to crack a decades-long spell of no horror wins? It makes more sense when you realize how much the Academy loves a physical transformation: Charlize Theron becoming serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, Jessica Chastain practically doing drag to play the titular tele-evangelist in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. To lack vanity, and be unrecognizable, is a surefire way to get their attention. But it also bulldozes over the less obvious, and thus more interesting work.
Third time is not a charm when you’re Timothée Chalamet. In the end, the Marty Supreme star became too bullish amongst his peers, and Michael B. Jordan did the thing that the Academy sort of wants you to do, which is meet it at its level. After plenty of “will he won’t he” discourse, Jordan won Best Actor for Sinners. Chalamet’s whole awards campaign was built around prestige: In every country, a legendary filmmaker came out to host post-screening Q&As with him. At the American Cinematheque, he literally lined up Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve to talk to him for a career retrospective—he has barely turned 30. That’s real movie star bravado.
But as I wrote, our most prestigious performers sometimes have to wait until middle age to win Best Actor. Chalamet tried to short the system by acting like he was already mid-career, but while Chalamet was racking up the marketing gags for Marty’s release, Jordan’s movie had already smashed the box office. He had the time to be almost everywhere else. There are luncheons that exist solely for the purpose of hand-shaking, and Jordan was at nearly all of them. Alongside Coogler, he was the beating heart of a film about unity in the face of fear. He plays characters that you root for, and he embodied their spirit in the real rooms where it mattered. Chalamet’s channeling of Marty—a driven, if antagonistic lone ranger—had maybe ostracized him by the time it came for the Academy to tick those ballot boxes.
Around mid-May of last year, we started predicting the movies that would go all the way in the award’s race. Some of them succeeded, dozens didn’t. Hearing the names of those which failed to take flight makes September 2025 feel like it was five years ago. Like:
After the Hunt
A House of Dynamite
Jay Kelly
Christy
Wicked: For Good
We celebrate our wins so we must recognize our flops too. <3
Pour one out for the nation of Brazil today. They had high hopes that, in amongst all of the hoo-haa of the Hollywood battles, their homegrown talent from The Secret Agent would sneak in and pick up some prizes. Alas, no juice. This morning, I spoke to the Brazilian film critic Rafa Sales Ross, while still in mourning, about what happened.
“Once The Secret Agent won the Globe and the Critic’s Choice, while Sentimental Value struggled to land any wins at major awards, a delicious atmosphere of hope and possibility was established in Brazil,” she tells me. “Then, when Timothée Chalamet misstepped on his very boisterous, all-or-nothing campaign, something that seemed even more unlikely started to reveal itself as a maybe: Wagner Moura as Best Actor.” The gregarious people of Brazil started their own guerrilla campaigns online, and leaned into their skills as meme masters to lift up their own stars. “Brazil has long struggled with what the writer Nelson Rodrigues coined Stray Dog or Mongrel Syndrome: this post-imperialistic reverence to everything foreign (especially North American and European) at the expense of valuing our own national output and cultural identity,” Sales Ross pointed out. “But Brazil’s last two years in cinema have been a truly beautiful balm to that notion.” Though it doesn’t look like we’ll get a 2027 Brazil Oscars comeback quite yet, there’s enough talent in the pool there for the prize to Come to Brazil™ in future. “Those films have opened up major doors for Brazilian filmmakers and producers,” Sales Ross thinks. “We’re savvy people. I’m sure we’ll find a way to get in once more.”
One of the early winners at last night’s ceremony was Frankenstein’s costume designer Kate Hawley, and sat next to her was her daughter, the photographer Ruby Hawley. She was wearing a custom look by Abadi, the Buenos Aires brand helmed by young designer Sofia Abadi. After seeing Abadi’s first take on evening wear, Ruby reached out to Abadi directly, asking if she could wear the dress herself on what would become her mom’s big night.
Hey Sofia! Congrats on the Oscars look. Can you talk us through what the preparation was like, getting the gown ready for the ceremony?
It was insane, between Ruby hopping on and off 16-hour flights and opposite time zones, all while managing the entire process without in-person fittings. My team and I worked through the night for a week to meet the strict deadline for shipping from Buenos Aires to LA. Despite the stress and the sleepless nights, Ruby was an absolute pleasure to work with. It was an honor. I can’t wait to hopefully meet her someday!
Your work feels like it’s in continuous conversation with your home city. Do you feel like that feeds into what you’ve made here?
Buenos Aires is a constant inspiration for me, but not necessarily in my design aesthetic. Rather, it’s a fuel source. I see my hometown as a beacon of light that the world is turning a blind eye to. This opportunity may bring me the spotlight, but it may also give it to Argentinian designers and our creative community as a whole, and that’s something I strive for.
How does the context of dressing someone for the Oscars affect how you approach it?
We had to make some tweaks for it to be protocol-appropriate—the bust had to be covered and the hemline had to be lowered. Still, even if it’s slightly more conservative than the original design, I believe it carries the feminine, punk, yet playful aura that I want the Abadi woman to radiate.
It’s exhilarating to think about my first-ever dress being seen by so many people; of course, it made the entire team annoyingly detail-oriented during the construction of the garment. Even the 17-year-old son of my modéliste (pattern maker) looked at us and said, with the most dead-serious face: ‘It’s the Oscars—the gown must be perfect.’
Do you have any filmmakers that inspire you?
This might sound really strange, but anyone who knows me knows that I don’t watch movies at all. There’s just something about having to commit to sitting down for two hours… I get too anxious at the thought of it. A friend of mine once said, ‘Sometimes I remember Sofia doesn’t watch movies and I think, “Woah, she’s just rawdogging having ideas.”’ I loved that, but it also made me realize how films have inspired every great designer ever. So, one of my goals for 2026 was to get over that movie-induced anxiety. I watched 15 films in January—more than I have watched in my entire life. Hilariously enough, I always feel alienated during awards season. All my friends discuss the movies and nominees and I never know what they’re talking about. There’s a tweet of mine from 2023 that says, ‘How can I make the Oscars about myself?’ I wish I could travel back in time to tell her: ‘Guess what? You finally did it.’
The best time to start your Oscar predictions for next year is right now. The movies that should be on your radar for 2026 are:
Project Hail Mary: Out this weekend, a sci-fi studio epic in the same vein as Sinners.
The Odyssey: The One Battle of 2026. Large scale auteur cinema from past winner Christopher Nolan.
All of a Sudden: A dour-sounding nursing home drama set in Paris, from the director of Oscar nominee Drive My Car.
Fjord: Renate Reinsve’s next movie is a tough-sounding family drama—this time with Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu.
Wild Horse Nine: A CIA comedy-drama from The Banshees of Inisherin director Martin McDonagh.
The Magician’s Nephew: The Academy loves Gerwig, so don’t be surprised if her foray into kids movies still manages to hit.
Dune: Messiah: If Dune: Part Two was mostly snubbed, expect a more embracing response—a la Return of the King—for the final instalment in the franchise.
Jack of Spades: Josh O’Connor klaxon! He leads the new movie from the serious Coen Brother, a gothic mystery movie co-starring Frances McDormand.
Digger: Tom Cruise best actor sneak?
