Oscars Live Blog 2026

2:40 AM GMT:  OMG, a post-credits sequence on the Oscars.  Sean Penn’s glorious final moments in One Battle.  But, now I want to see the alternative ending that goes at the final scene in the jazz club at the end of Sinners.  Can that get leaked.  Please please please please.  For your Live Oscar Blogger for Life.

So, that’s a wrap.  It’s late here in London.

2:37 AM GMT:  I hope that One Battle After Another will not be the last movie I see at the glorious Astor in Melbourne, which is one of the greatest places on all the planet to see a movie.  It’s been showing them for 90 years, and while l kind of would have preferred IMAX Film, I’m perfectly happy that I have the memory of seeing 70mm at the amazing Astor.

2:25 AM GMT: Fuck.I like One Battle After Another.  But repeat after me, not even the best Warner Brothers release of the year  Sinners, Sinners, Sinners, Sinners, Sinners, Sinners, Sinners, Sinners.

2:35 AM GMT: 25 years for Moulin Rouge.  The last, or one of the last, movies that I saw at the UA Astoria. The building and a wee bit of the facade at the main entrance still stand.

2:29 AM GMT: I reckon I’m glad to see Jessie Buckley win, because it’s a win for Hamnet which isn’t shut out which is a win for Chloe Zhao and I am a Chloe Zhao fan.

2:28 AM GMT: Mikey Madison’s gorgeous red gown worth staying up for.

2:25 AM GMT: Michael B. Jordan gave such a great acceptance speech.  And one for One Battle, one for Sinners, the race for Best Picture goes down to the wire.  Whatever it is that’s been winning, in the room the applause edge is a little bit for Sinners.

2:20 AM GMT: Have never watched The Wire, but I’ve been a big fan of pretty much everything Michal B Jordan that came after.

2:19 AM GMT:  As mentioned in my preview post, the Best Actor category is amazing good this year.

2:15 AM GMT nice to see a standing “O” for Paul Thomas Anderson. Even though I’m not rooting for his movie tonight, Paul Thomas Anderson has an amazing CV for someone who, until tonight, has never won an Oscar.  One Battle, There Will be Blood, and most of all Magnolia. Just don’t ask me about The Master.

2::05 AM GMT: not sentimental about the International Film category..  The Secret Agent is a way better film than Sentimental Value.

1:59 AM GMT: tonight’s desserts, which I might not have enough appetite to eat tonight (a sad thing about getting older) come from Kitty’s near the Highbury Islington tube stop, Crumb off the green in Islington, and Primrose Bakery near the Zeno Agency office.

1:52 AM GMT: A nice speech for a category that’s seen very few women nominated, and in fact very few women credited over the course of the industry.  Pretty much any DP whom I can name is a dude, and here’s a woman who’s deservedly won for a gloriously shot composition on film.

1:50 AM GMT: Sinnamatography!  Really happy for this one.  Sinners is a gloriously shot film, every frame.  A lot of the tech categories are full of a lot of good nominees, many of which have now lost to Frankenstein but in this particular category, Sinners was clearly the standout. 

1:48 AM GMT: Approaching three hours. One hour after another.

1:31 AM GMT:  Sinners! Scores!! 

1:19 AM GMT: Just me, or were the winners for Mr Nobody Against Putin a bit surprised? Didn’t catch this one, but I’ll have to see if I can.

1:05 AM GMT: Three f”ing Oscars for f*ranking*stein

1:03 AM GMT: What is Pedro Pascal wearing?

1:00 AM GMT: The Art Director of Superman: The Movie, a major supporting actor in Superman: The Movie and Superman II.  One of the writers on Superman: The Movie. There’s a lot more I can say about the names below from the In Memoriam segment, but one thing’s for sure - 2025 wasn’t a great year for the talent behind the single best superhero movie.

Rob Reiner, Stuart Craig, Terence Stamp, Lalo Schifrin, Robert D. Benton, Catherine O’Hara, Diane Keaton, Stanley  Jaffe, Frederick Wiseman, Con Peterson, Drew Struzan, Frank Price, Alan Bergman, Graham Greene, Val Kilmer, Robert Duvall, Robert Redford, 

12:46 AM GMT;  What a filmography. Spinal Tap, Sure Thing, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men, An American President.

12:36 AM GMT: & Ryan Coogler has his first Oscar. So two of our finest auteurs have each gotten a first Oscar winner in the screenplay category.  But they can’t both go home as the big winner this evening.

12:33 AM GMT: Battles, battles, battles.  The screenplay’s as good as any in the category, and it’s fine that Paul Thomas Anderson has finally won an Oscar for something.  

12:21 AM GMT:  It all balances out; an extra speech for the short film, no speech for the Supporting Actor.  Sean Penn’s good in One Battle, but I’m Team Sin, not Team One.

12:16 AM GMT: “Ironic that the short film Oscar’s going to take twice as long.”

12:15 AM GMT: A tie!  I don’t recall another tie in my decades of watching Oscars.  Has there ever been a tie for a Hugo or Nebula?

12:04 AM (Monday 16 March) GMT: Really loving having the actors explain something about the significance of the casting.  Though I don’t love that the award’s going to One Battle - not that the movie isn’t as deserving as any other but I’m not team One Battle tonight, but team Sinners. But it means something to have the Supporting Actress nominee saying “this is the person that put me in the movie”

11:55 PM GMT: I sell books that are often published with marketing budgets with actual third party hard costs that don’t get out of the low three figures.  And then Netflix lavishes until millions on award campaigns for the likes of Frankenstein.  But they too have their buckets of things they support and the vast majority of movies that they don’t.  Glenn Close gives an Oscar-worthy performance in the third Knives Out movie, and I said in my pre-show post that this year there weren’t a lot of glaring omissions, but I’ll say there was one.  Glenn Close could be nominated for that movie over any of the other nominees and the category would be stronger, but the Knives Out movie wasn’t in the Netflix awards bucket and for all the money they did put into promoting it, once the movie isn’t in the awards bucket it absolutely isn’t in the awards bucket.  But two Oscars for that Frankenstein mess?

11:51 PM GMT:  Really?  All sorts of great costumes and the sludge called Frankenstein wins the Oscar mover Marty Supreme and Sinners and etc.  Really really?  Putting on the Fritz.

11:50 PM GMT: How very Cerulean! Anne Hathaway and Anna Wintour.

11:35 PM GMT:  And you can’t possibly duplicate at home the experience of seeing K Pop Demon Hunters in a theatre with hundreds of passionate fans singing along.  Will it last, like DIrty Dancing, which I saw in Sing-a-long a couple nights ago, 39 years after its release?  Well, I probably won’t be around in 39 years to know.

11:31 PM GMT: So, K Pop Demon Hunters is the only animated movie I’ve seen in the past couple lyears that I haven’t actively disliked.  Haven’t yet added Hoppers to my Letterboxd diary, but that one, at least when I dozed off, I woke back up for the end of the movie rather than staying asleep.  But, I couldn’t stayed sleeping, wouldn’t have missed much.

11:25 PM GMT: Conan O’Brien’s opening monologue didn’t land the way last year’s did.  It managed to be surprisingly political without being political.  The joke about the Epstein files is less political than it seems because you’ve got the MAGA MTG crowd that aren’t any happier with the protection of the Epstein crowd than the DSA bunch.

11:23 PM GMT: Places in the Heart, 1984, with Sally Field. The first time I saw Amy Madigan in a movie. And then the thankless wife role in Field of Dreams, and the forgettable Uncle Buck a few years later.  And here she is, with an Oscar, some forty years later. For a weird and wacky and memorable performance in Weapons.

11:22 PM GMT: A standing “O” for Amy Madigan.

11:20 PM GMT: I love Zoe Saldaña’s dress. Attention-grabbing understatement. Not easy to do.

11:17 PM GMT: I find it really distracting to see the video screens in the Dolby when they pan the crowd.

11:13 PM GMT: “At least we arrest our pedophiles” It’s quite something the way we immunize elites in the US.

11:10 PM GMT: There’s a lot more variety in diet soda in the UK. There’s a sugar tax on fizzy drinks, and they don’t want to fiddle much with differential pricing but do try and encourage people to buy the drinks without the sugar.  I’m sipping on a can of Coke Zero Zero with snazzy James Bond packaging, which will never be seen in the US.  The movie theatres have a lot more diet options.

11:07 PM GMT: Ted Sarandos runs the company that left millions of dollars on the table just this week by not putting the Peaky Blinders movie in a full run in British theaters, just like a year ago it was Comcast doing the same with the Bridget Jones movie that didn’t get a theatrical release in the US.  Movies should go into movie theatres.  If it doesn’t it’s the same schlock as a 1990s direct to video sequel.

10:05 PM GMT: Have a look at my Top Ten for 2025, with Honorable Mentions noted in the list annotation, while you wait for the Oscar fun to begin in an hour. https://boxd.it/TewnU