A drone view reveals a big billboard signal that includes this 12 months’s Oscar host Conan O’Brien towering over Hollywood blvd as staff put together for the 98th Academy Awards in Los Angeles on March 9, 2026.
Daniel Cole | Reuters
Hollywood rolls out the purple carpet for Sunday’s Oscars, the movie business’s highest honors, with an unusually open best-picture race that pits vampire hit “Sinners,” the chief in nominations, in opposition to the darkly comedian thriller “One Battle After One other.”
Safety for the ceremony on the Dolby Theatre will likely be tight. Organizers mentioned they had been working intently with the FBI and Los Angeles police after a federal warning of a potential Iranian risk in opposition to California, although authorities have cited no particular or credible hazard to the Academy Awards.
Hosted by Conan O’Brien for a second 12 months, the festivities will function a wide-open contest led by “Sinners” with 16 nominations — a document quantity within the practically 100-year-old historical past of the Oscars — as Hollywood grapples with geopolitical tensions, business consolidation and nervousness over synthetic intelligence.
The present, beginning at 7 p.m. ET (midnight GMT), will likely be televised dwell on Walt Disney’s ABC and streamed on Hulu. Performers will embrace the real-life singers of HUNTR/X, the fictional band in animated movie nominee “KPop Demon Hunters.”
The glitzy celebration, Hollywood’s most over-the-top gala of the 12 months, will happen because the U.S. wages battle on Iran. O’Brien mentioned he deliberate to contact on present occasions however his major mission was to make individuals snicker and really feel relaxed.
“My job is to hit this very, very skinny line, I feel, between entertaining individuals and in addition acknowledging a number of the realities,” he informed a press convention on Wednesday. “All I can say is I am going to use my finest judgment.”
The ceremony masks the unease within the movie enterprise over the place films are being made as studios chase tax incentives and decrease prices elsewhere within the U.S. and abroad, weakening Hollywood’s grip on manufacturing.
Warner Bros., the studio behind “One Battle” and “Sinners,” is within the strategy of being offered to Paramount Skydance in a deal that may slim the ranks of main movie distributors. A media watchdog group, Free Press, circulated a roving billboard round Hollywood over the weekend airing its opposition to the merger.
Employees in entrance of and behind the digital camera are frightened synthetic intelligence will restrict job alternatives and stifle creativity and risk-taking.
Potential for surprises
This 12 months’s awards contest holds an unusually excessive potential for surprises. The race for finest actor is an particularly unpredictable one, pitting Timothée Chalamet in opposition to Leonardo DiCaprio and Michael B. Jordan.
Chalamet had been thought-about a frontrunner for his acclaimed efficiency as a ping-pong hustler in “Marty Supreme,” however his prospects appeared to dim over an awards-season marketing campaign that includes a streetwear line and a big blimp and remarks dismissing ballet and opera.
“One Battle After One other,” starring DiCaprio as a one-time political radical now parenting a young person, was seen because the frontrunner for finest image after stacking up trophy after trophy at latest ceremonies.
The nominees for Greatest Image “Sinners” throughout the 98th Academy Awards nominations announcement on the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, California, on January 22, 2026
Valerie Macon | Afp | Getty Photographs
However “Sinners,” a celebration of blues music and Black tradition within the Segregation-era U.S. South starring Jordan, made a late surge with a win this month on the Actor Awards.
Jessie Buckley is taken into account a lock for finest actress for her portrayal of Agnes Hathaway, the spouse of William Shakespeare, because the couple navigate the dying of their 11-year-old son in “Hamnet.”
Awards specialists say the remainder of the highest classes are up for grabs.
Winners of the gold Oscar statuettes are chosen by the roughly 10,000 actors, producers, administrators and movie craftspeople who make up the Academy of Movement Image Arts and Sciences.
The Academy took steps this 12 months to attempt to make sure voters have really watched the flicks they’re voting on. The on-line balloting system for the primary time tracks whether or not a voter has streamed every film. Voters, nevertheless, can verify a field to say they watched the film elsewhere outdoors the Academy web site.
