In the lead-up to this year’s Oscars, it looked like the Best Actor prize could have gone in one of several directions, after previous wins for Timothée Chalamet, Wagner Moura and Michael B Jordan at various awards shows over the last few months.

At Sunday night’s Academy Awards, it was Sinners star Michael who came out on top, in one of the night’s most memorable and emotionally-charged moments.

The US star was visibly stunned when his name was called by last year’s recipient Adrien Brody, first pausing to share the moment with his mum, who was seated to his right, before being wrapped up in a hug by Sinners director Ryan Coogler.

He and co-star Delroy Lindo then also shared a moment before Michael headed up to the stage to collect his award – but what really came across was just how much love there was for the Black Panther star from the whole auditorium.

Meanwhile, in his acceptance speech, he paid homage to the Black performers who have won Oscars for their leading performances in the past, name-checking Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, Forest Whitaker and Will Smith.

Michael played twins Smoke and Stack in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which made Oscars history as the most-nominated film ever at the Academy Awards.

In the end, it triumphed in an impressive four categories in total, but One Battle After Another was the year’s big winner, picking up six awards including Best Director for Paul Thomas Anderson and the coveted Best Picture prize.

Sean Penn also won his third Oscar on Sunday night for his work in One Battle After Another (but didn’t attend to accept it in person), while the hotly-contested Best Supporting Actress went to Amy Madigan for Weapons, over One Battle After Another’s Teyana Taylor and Sinners’ Wunmi Mosaku, as well as Sentimental Value’s Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas.

Meanwhile, Frankenstein came away with three technical prizes, and family favourite KPop Demon Hunters won two awards in total.

Take a look at our round-up of all the winners from the 2026 Oscars here.

Javier Bardem gave this year’s Oscars its most explicitly political moment while presenting on stage at the awards show.

The Academy Award winner was among the A-list guests at Sunday night’s ceremony, where he made headlines before the event had even begun with his outfit on the red carpet, posing for photographers while sporting a badge with “no to war” written on it in Spanish.

“I’m wearing a pin that I first used in 2003, with the Iraq war, which was an illegal war” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “We are here, 23 years after, with another illegal war, created by Trump and Netanyahu with another lie.”

He also wore an additional badge expressing solidarity with the people of Palestine.

Later in the evening, he and Priyanka Chopra Jonas presented the award for Best International Feature Film, but before getting to his script, Javier declared “no to war, and Free Palestine” to rapturous applause from the Oscars audience.

The Spanish actor has been a vocal supporter of Palestine for some time, previously taking a stand at the Emmys last year.

At the annual TV awards, where he had been nominated for his work in the Ryan Murphy anthology series Monster, Javier walked the red carpet wearing a traditional Palestinian keffiyeh, and also gave an impassioned interview with The Hollywood Reporter as he made his way into the ceremony.

Calling out those in the industry who are scared to speak out, Javier lamented: “I know what I’m doing, I know what it can bring, it’s OK. Me not getting jobs is absolutely [irrelevant] compared to what is going on [in Gaza]. It’s that easy.”

He added: “[People’s] silence, because they are afraid, is their support to the genocide.”

Take a look at our full round-up of must-see moments from the 2026 Oscars ceremony here.

While her sense of humour is perhaps not the first thing that comes to mind when most of us think of Anna Wintour, she certainly managed to raise a smile while presenting at the 2026 Oscars.

Early on in Sunday night’s ceremony, the long-time Vogue editor came on stage to present two awards with Anne Hathaway.

Anne, of course, is the star of The Devil Wears Prada and its upcoming sequel, both of which feature the character Miranda Priestly, heavily rumoured to have been inspired by Anna.

Introducing the Best Costume Design prize, the Oscar winner told the audience: “A character’s costume is key to telling a story.

“One could argue that one’s wardrobe in real life is also key. Does it make one appear elegant and attractive on, say, the most important night in Hollywood, and say when the most important people in fashion will be judging how one looks?”

Turning to her co-host, she continued: “Anna, just curious, what do you think of my dress tonight?”

By way of response, Anna simply donned her sunglasses and declared: “And the nominees are…”

Following this, the duo then announced the winners for Best Makeup And Hairstyling, with Anna intentionally misnaming her co-presenter “Emily” in an even more explicit nod to The Devil Wears Prada.

In the original Devil Wears Prada film and the new follow-up, Meryl Streep plays Miranda Priestly, the editor of the fictitious Runway magazine, whose look and mannerisms have sparked comparisons with Anna Wintour for two decades now.

Last year, the award-winning journalist and Met Gala organised claimed: “I went to the [Devil Wears Prada] premiere wearing Prada, completely having no idea what the film was going to be about.

“I think that the fashion industry was very sweetly concerned for me about the film that it was gonna paint me in some kind of difficult light.”

Praising Meryl’s “fantastic” work in the movie, she then insisted: “I found [the film] highly enjoyable and very funny. It had a lot of humour to it, it had a lot of wit.

“I mean, [the actors are] all amazing. And in the end, I thought it was a fair shot.”

Take a look at the full list of winners from the 2026 Oscars here.

The Oscars may well have set a new bar when it came to “in memoriam” tributes during this year’s ceremony.

Regrettably, because the film world has lost so many iconic performers and filmmakers in the last 12 months, this year’s Academy Awards tributes section was extended, with Billy Crystal leading a star-studded homage to Rob Reiner and Rachel McAdams honouring Diane Keaton.

At the end of the segment, Oscar winner Barbra Streisand came out to remember her The Way We Were co-star Robert Redford.

While it had previously been rumoured that this would include a musical tribute, Barbra is notoriously reluctant to sing live in public these days, so we took the rumours with a pinch of salt.

However, the icon made a rare exception for her beloved co-star, concluding the tributes with a short blast of The Way We Were’s signature song, which won the Oscar for Best Original Song back in 1974.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house after Barbra’s performance, and that apparently includes those watching along at home…

Before her performance, Barbra recalled: “After I read the first script of The Way We Were, I could only imagine one man in the role and that was Robert Redford. But he turned it down because he said the character had no backbone and didn’t stand for anything. And he was right.

“So, many drafts later, Bob finally agreed to do it. He was a brilliant, subtle actor, and we had a wonderful time playing off each other because we never quite knew what the other one was going to do in a scene. And I’m thrilled that The Way We Were is now considered a classic love story – but it’s also about a dark time in our history, the late 40s and early 50s, when people were informing on each other and subject to loyalty oaths.”

She continued: “Bob had real backbone – on and off the screen. He spoke up to defend freedom of the press, protect the environment and encouraged new voices at his Sundance Institute, some of whom are up for Oscars tonight, which is so great.

“He was thoughtful and bold. I called him an intellectual cowboy who blazed his own trail, and won the Academy Award for Best Director. And I miss him now more than ever, even though he loved teasing me. He’d call me ‘Babs’, and I’d say, ‘Bob, do I look like a Babs? I’m not a Babs’. But the way he said it made me laugh.

“Many years later, we were chatting on the phone about the usual – politics, art, our favourites – and as we were hanging up, he said, ‘Babs, I love you dearly and I always will’. And in the last note I ever wrote to Bob, I ended it with, ‘I love you, too’. And I signed it ‘Babs’.”

Check out the full list of winners from this year’s Oscars here.

Before the weekend, there had only ever been six ties at the Oscars.

However, on Sunday night, movie history was made when a seventh occurred.

During this year’s ceremony, Marvel star Kumail Nanjiani was welcomed to the stage to announce the winner in the Best Live Action Short category.

After opening the envelope, he revealed that two of the nominees had received the same number of votes from Academy members, meaning they’d each be awarded an Oscar.

“It’s a tie!” he exclaimed, before assuring the audience: “I’m not joking! It’s actually a tie, so everyone calm down!”

He then explained that he’d be announcing the winners one at a time, first welcoming the producers of The Singers to the stage before the crew behind Two People Exchanging Saliva collected theirs.

Uncomfortably, during the latter, the Oscars team attempted to cut the team’s acceptance speech short, before the night’s host Conan O’Brien then encouraged them to continue.

The Oscars’ most famous tie came in 1969, when screen icon Katharine Hepburn and then-newcomer Barbra Streisand split the win for Best Actress for their performances in The Lion In Winter and Funny Girl.

Back in 1932, the first tie at the Oscars came during the awards show’s fifth year, when Fredric March and Wallace Beery were both named Best Actor.

Technically, the former had received one more vote than the latter, but at this time, a rule was in place meaning that anyone within three votes of the winner would also receive an award.

So Much For So Little and A Chance To Live then split Best Documentary Short in 1950, while a similar draw occurred 37 years later when the features Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got and Down And Out In America got the same number of votes in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Trevor and Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life were the two winners in the Best Live-Action Short category in the mid-1990s, while the latest tie was just over a decade ago, in 2013, with Zero Dark Thirty and Skyfall winning Best Sound Editing.

Check out the full list of winners from the 2026 Oscars here.

Amy Madigan has gone and done the unthinkable – and actually won an Oscar for a horror movie performance.

The veteran actor well and truly stole the show in the 2025 horror film Weapons, creating an iconic and deeply sinister character in Aunt Gladys and inspiring no end of Halloween costumes in the process.

Following an awards season that’s seen Best Supporting Actress prizes going out in a variety of directions, Amy came out on top during Sunday night’s Oscars – joining a rare group of actors including Anthony Hopkins, Ruth Gordon and Kathy Bates who’ve picked up Academy Awards for their horror characters.

In the past, the Academy has been notoriously reluctant to recognise horror performances, with many undeservedly losing out on the night – and others failing to secure a nomination at all.

As we celebrate Amy’s success, here are 13 more performances that deserved more love from the Oscars…

From the moment we first heard about Demi Moore’s performance in the graphic body horror The Substance, we were already intrigued, and when it finally hit cinemas last year, we couldn’t shout loud enough about how good she was in it.

Over 2025′s awards season, Demi won a Golden Globe, Actor Award and Critics’ Choice Award for her work in The Substance, before finally securing her first Oscar nomination more than 40 years into her career.

In the end, Demi’s work wound up being added to the long list of incredible performances that deserved an Oscar only to miss out – but there’s no question that her nomination marked a huge win for horror recognition at the Oscars.

This is the Oscars snub that horror fans will be banging on about for eternity – and with good reason.

Ari Aster’s first ever feature film Hereditary takes you on a truly wild ride (we’re still recovering from it seven years later, to be honest with you), and at the centre of it all is Toni Collette’s unbelievable performance.

With her role as tortured matriarch Annie Graham, she brings the deeply unsettling story to life, and showcases her unparalleled versatility as an actor with a performance that takes her character through every emotion under the sun, from unsettled to heartbroken to terrified to furious. And let’s not even talk about that iconic dinner party scene.

Frankly, Toni has been snubbed at the Oscars too many times to count at this point – but it’s interesting that her only nomination to date was actually for her performance in a horror film, when she was recognised for her work in The Sixth Sense.

Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall’s work in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining might now be widely considered two of the finest and most unnerving performances in horror history, but they weren’t so well-received at the time.

Though the reception to the Stephen King adaptation grew warmer as the years went on, critics were pretty lukewarm on it at the time, with Shelley even earning a Worst Actress nomination at the Razzies following its release.

In 2022, this was finally rescinded by the Razzies, who apologised publicly to Shelley Duvall, after learning of director Kubrick’s alleged treatment towards her on set.

There are a few things we think of when someone mentions Psycho. Those infamous high-pitched strings during the iconic shower sequence. The image of the Bates Motel looming in the distance. And, of course, Anthony Perkins’ unsettling portrayal of serial killer Norman Bates.

While Psycho itself was nominated for a string of Oscars the year after its release – including an acting nod for Janet Leigh and Best Director recognition for Alfred Hitchcock – curiously, Anthony Perkins did not make the shortlist for his work in Psycho, despite his portrayal of the slowly unravelling Norman Bates playing such a part in what makes the movie so gripping.

Daniel Kaluuya managed a rare feat for the lead in a horror film in 2017 and actually got nominated for an Oscar, which is a testament to the strength of both his performance and the strength of Get Out in general.

But despite getting awards love from the Golden Globes, Baftas, SAG Awards and Academy Awards, none of these translated to a win.

Absolutely no offence to Gary Oldman, or his performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, but as the years go on, it’s becoming clearer which performance is most likely to stand the test of time…

Daniel did eventually pick up an Oscar of his own just three years later, though, thanks to his work in Judas And The Black Messiah.

Like Daniel, both Sissy Spacek and her on-screen mum Piper Laurie were both nominated for Oscars for their work in the horror classic Carrie.

Neither of their nominations transferred into a win, but there’s no denying that with her performance, Sissy created an iconic movie character for the ages that we’re still talking about 50 years after the film’s original release.

We’ve already touched on Toni Collette’s much-lauded performance in Hereditary, but there’s another female lead in an Ari Aster project that deserves to be shouted about, too.

In fact, Florence Pugh’s Midsommar performance could well be considered the “yin” to Toni in Hereditary’s “yang”. Both films centre around women who suffer traumatic life events, and struggle to cope as the world around them becomes increasingly more unsettling, although while the latter is shrouded in darkness and shadow, the former takes place in broad sunshine, making the unfolding horror all the more jarring.

The year after Midsommar, Florence did score an Oscar nomination for her performance in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, which probably scuppered her chances of a Best Actress nod for the horror film, which is a bit of a shame, as her emotionally-charged work in Ari Aster’s film was every bit as deserving, if not more.

Often cited as one of the best horror films of all time, Rosemary’s Baby landed two Oscar nominations following its release, including a Best Supporting Actress win for Ruth Gordon.

But given everything she had to do in the title role, it feels a little surprising in the present day that the Academy would go as far as celebrating Rosemary’s Baby back in 1969, without actually giving its leading star Mia Farrow a nomination.

By the time Jordan Peele’s follow-up to Get Out came along, the world was ready for more from the Oscar-winning screenwriter, particularly as Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o was on double duty playing two halves of the same whole.

Now, we appreciate that audiences and critics didn’t quite take to Us in the same way they did to Get Out, but we stand by it being an excellent film, and for everything Lupita was able to do with two completely opposing characters, we still think it’s a shame she never secured her second Oscar nomination for it.

Interestingly, her peers in the Screen Actors’ Guild did nominate for her performance that year, though the Best Actress title would ultimately end up going to Renée Zellweger for Judy, as did the Oscar.

Say what you want about Heretic (to be honest, we still think of it as one of our biggest cinema disappointments of 2024, after a trailer that promised so much), but there’s no arguing with Hugh Grant’s transformative performance as the chilling Mr Reed, putting his charm to work in ways we never saw in his many rom-coms of yore.

While Hugh did secure recognition at the Baftas and Golden Globes earlier this year, that Best Actor category was especially stacked in 2025, meaning plenty of deserving actors missed out on a place, including the former Love Actually star.

The Fly may have won an Oscar in the Best Makeup category back in 1987 (which, interestingly enough, was fellow sci-fi body horror The Substance’s only win in 2025), but its Saturn Award-winning lead performance from Jeff Goldblum did not transfer to an Oscar nomination.

We get it, a film about a half-man, half-fly was always going to be a hard sell to the Academy, but Jeff’s performance is still being talked about almost 40 years later.

Despite his expansive career, the Wicked star has, in fact, never been nominated for an Oscar for acting, although he was nominated as the director of the short film Little Surprises in the mid-1990s.

It’s been seven years, and we’re still not sure we understand exactly what went on in Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria. But what we do remember is that Tilda Swinton played about 20 different characters, disappearing into each role as flawlessly as you’d expect, and received absolutely zip the following awards season.

Despite four Golden Globe nods and three from the Baftas, Tilda has just one Oscar nomination to her name, which was the same year she won for Michael Clayton.