We’re only a few days away from the 98th Academy Awards. Forward of this yr’s Oscars celebrating 2025 in movie, we’re right here to share how one can watch, plus break down the nominees, host, presenters and performers, and what’s new for the 2026 ceremony.
Going into the present, Sinners leads the manner with a record-breaking 16 nominations, beating the beforehand held 14-nomination file tie between All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land. One Battle After One other takes second place with 13 nominations.
Learn on under for all the pieces else you want to learn about the Oscars.
When are the Oscars?
The Oscars will happen on March 15, 2026, from the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles at the new time of 7pm ET/4pm PT/11pm GMT. The printed is predicted to run for 3 hours, however you may virtually actually depend on it going lengthy.
How can I watch the Oscars?
The Oscars can be be televised in your native ABC station. It is going to even be streaming stay on Hulu. (We’re nonetheless just a few years out from the Oscars on YouTube.) If you happen to’re eager about the pre-show arrivals and purple carpet interviews, ABC’s protection will start at 3:30pm ET/12:30pm PT and E!’s will kick off at 4pm ET/1pm PT.
Who’s internet hosting the Oscars?
Conan O’Brien – who additionally starred in If I Had Legs I would Kick You alongside Greatest Actress nominee Rose Byrne – is internet hosting the Oscars for the second yr in a row. O’Brien was announced as the 2026 host two weeks after the 2025 Oscars, saying in an announcement, “The one cause I’m internet hosting the Oscars subsequent yr is that I would like to hear Adrien Brody end his speech.” To refresh your reminiscence, Brody dragged on for almost six minutes accepting the award for Greatest Actor for his position in The Brutalist.
“There will be some explosions, CGI can be used,” O’Brien advised ABC News about Spherical 2. “I see this second Oscars as a possibility to take issues up a notch,” particularly now that he is well-informed on essential requirements and practices, like all the time protecting an Oscar statuette upright.
What’s new at the Oscars this yr?
The Academy Awards are rolling out a brand new class for the first time since 2001’s addition of Greatest Animated Characteristic Movie: Achievement in Casting will get its debut after being announced in 2024. The award will go to a casting director, however the criteria for winning sounds unexpectedly more complicated than somebody who can put collectively an inventory of top-notch actors. The primary-ever nominees are:
- Nina Gold, Hamnet
- Jennifer Venditti, Marty Supreme
- Cassandra Kulukundis, One Battle after One other
- Gabriel Domingues, The Secret Agent
- Francine Maisler, Sinners
The following new class will come at the 2028 Oscars, when the Academy lastly acknowledges stunts as the bone-breaking artwork kind it’s.
Who’s presenting at the 2026 Oscars?
Presenters embrace: Will Arnett, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Robert Downey Jr., Anne Hathaway, Paul Mescal, Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Evans, Kumail Nanjiani, and Maya Rudolph. Final yr’s winners Adrien Brody, Kieran Culkin, Mikey Madison, and Zoe Saldaña, in addition to 2025 nominee Demi Moore, are additionally amongst the group of presenters. Javier Bardem and Chase Infiniti, who starred respectively in F1 and One Battle After One other however didn’t obtain particular person nominations, may even current. (Infiniti’s omission in the Supporting Actress race is taken into account certainly one of the large snubs of this yr’s awards.)
Who’s acting at the Oscars?
The telecast will embrace two main “moments” that the present producers are calling “extra than simply performances — they develop into cinematic tributes that commemorate the relationship between music and storytelling and why these movies resonated so deeply with audiences round the world.” These are “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters and “I Lied to You” from Sinners, each nominated for Greatest Authentic Music this yr. (The opposite nominated tracks — “Prepare Desires” from Greatest Image nominee Prepare Desires, “Expensive Me” from the documentary Diane Warren: Stressed, and “Candy Desires of Pleasure” from the documentary Viva Verdi! — will not be carried out stay.)
The singing voices behind Huntr/x — Ejae, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami — will carry out “Golden,” accompanied by “a fusion of conventional Korean instrumentalists and dance, celebrating the folklore and cultural inspiration that anchors the story behind this animated blockbuster.”
Sinners’ breakout star Miles Caton and singer-songwriter Raphael Saadiq will carry out “I Lied To You,” formally described as exploring the “position music performs in the movie’s storytelling for a cinematic stay second.” (Hopefully meaning it makes an attempt to replicate the electrical, superb fever dream of the movie’s scene the tune comes from.) Blues musicians Buddy Man and Bobby Rush, rapper Shaboozey, ballet dancer Misty Copeland, and actresses Li Jun Li and Jayme Lawson will be a part of, together with musicians Brittany Howard of the Alabama Shakes, Eric Gales, Alice Smith, and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram.
Josh Groban and the Los Angeles Grasp Chorale may even carry out, we’ll speculate throughout the In Memoriam phase.
What are this yr’s Oscars nominees?
Learn on for the nominees in a few of the prime classes, however you may take a look at the full checklist of nominees right here.
Greatest Image:
- Bugonia
- F1
- Frankenstein
- Hamnet
- Marty Supreme
- One Battle after One other
- The Secret Agent
- Sentimental Worth
- Sinners
- Prepare Desires
Greatest Actor:
- Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme
- Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle after One other
- Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon
- Michael B. Jordan, Sinners
- Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent
Greatest Actress:
- Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
- Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I would Kick You
- Kate Hudson, Music Sung Blue
- Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Worth
- Emma Stone, Bugonia
Greatest Director:
- Chloé Zhao, Hamnet
- Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme
- Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle after One other
- Joachim Trier, Sentimental Worth
- Ryan Coogler, Sinners
Which nominees are anticipated to win?
Although the poll is quite a lot of the similar films being celebrated in many classes, a transparent winner hasn’t pulled forward in lots of the key races, with just a few exceptions. KPop Demon Hunters positively has Greatest Animated Characteristic Movie in the bag. Greatest Actress will in all probability go to Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare’s grieving spouse Agnes in Hamnet, regardless of the earned fervor round Rose Byrne’s efficiency in If I Had Legs I would Kick You. The screenplay awards will repesctively go to Ryan Coogler and Paul Thomas Anderson for Greatest Authentic and Greatest Tailored. Outdoors of that, different classes are a coin toss, normally between One Battle After One other and Sinners.
Although Timothée Chalamet was virtually the presumptive winner in Greatest Actor as a ping pong hustler in Marty Supreme just a few months in the past, taking the early win at the Golden Globes, that stance has place has cooled; the SAG Award went to Michael B. Jordan for his twin brothers, Stack and Smoke, from Sinners. One other key win from the Actor Awards was Amy Madigan taking the trophy for Supporting Actress as Aunt Gladys in Weapons, which individuals have taken as an indicator of an impending Oscars win over Teyana Taylor’s revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills in One Battle After One other.
What’s the controversy this yr?
There are two, type of. To begin with, that is the first yr the place AMPAS voters should attest to having truly seen all of the movies they’re voting on, a new rule imposed for the first time (!!) just a few months after final yr’s awards. (Voters can log this after watching movies by way of the Academy screening app, which might routinely observe whether or not or not one thing has been performed, or click on a field that pledges they’ve seen it in a theater or by different means.)
The opposite one, closest to the ceremony and due to this fact the one that may stay on in the Discourse up till the occasion, is the incontrovertible fact that Timothée Chalamet dissed opera and ballet, in the context of concern about the state of film theaters.
“I like folks — and I’ve performed it myself — who go on a chat present and say, ‘Hey, we have to maintain film theaters alive, y’know, we have gotta maintain this style alive,” he stated during a Variety and CNN town Hall along with his Interstellar co-star Matthew McConaughey. “And one other a part of me appears like if folks need to see it, like Barbie, like Oppenheimer, they are going to go see it and exit of their manner to be loud and proud about it. I don’t need to be working in ballet or opera or issues the place it’s like, ‘Hey! Hold this factor alive,’ although nobody cares about this anymore. All respect to the ballet and opera folks on the market. I simply misplaced 14 cents in viewership. I simply took photographs for no cause.”
“That is not a shot, I hear what you are saying,” McConaughey responded.
The video clip began going viral late final week, almost two weeks after it was initially posted — after the window for Oscars voting had closed on March 5. It will not immediately impression his probabilities, but it surely’s sufficient to rile patrons and suppliers of the fantastic arts: Many establishments, together with the Metropolitan Opera, the English National Opera, and the Royal Ballet and Opera, posted rebuttals on social media praising their artisans or making a case for him to come to a present. Lots extra have fired again, calling his take shades of “disrespectul”. The feedback made their manner to The View and Saturday Evening Stay’s Weekend Replace, the place Colin Jost quipped that Chalamet “made the touch upon a press tour for his film about… ping-pong.”
Adam Bankhurst is a author for IGN. You may comply with him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst, Instagram, and TikTok, and hear to his present, Talking Disney Magic.
Leanne Butkovic is an Editorial Venture Supervisor at IGN, the place they’ve additionally written about films, TV, and video games.