It’s a Sin – Some Comments on the 2026 Oscar Winners

Parts 2 and 3 of my con report about the 2026 Marché Noir convention are coming and I’m also working on a post with seasonal photos. But today, I’m taking a break for current events, because both the finalists for the 2025 Nebula Awards and the winners of the 2026 Academy Awards were announced last night.

I wasn’t awake for either announcement, since I had been out and about all Sunday, so I was tired. What is more, I had to get up early on Monday morning – or so I thought. Since it turned out that the appointment I had on Monday morning was cancelled at the last minute.

Besides, I’ve been feeling somewhat “meh” about the Oscars in recent years. It used to be that I was super excited about the Oscars and would watch live, but nowadays it’s enough for me to just wait for the winner announcement in the morning. And with the Internet you can easily look up all the winners, including the ones in the technical categories, and are not beholden on whatever nonsense German radio chooses to report the next morning.

However, I was a little surprised about how “meh” I felt about the Oscars this year, considering that I’ve actually seen and enjoyed several of the nominated movies, which often isn’t the case. Plus, the 2026 Academy Award nominations showed a lot of love for SFF movies – something which again often isn’t the case. On the other hand, we’ve been here before and have seen great SFF get lots of nominations, only to lose out to far more conventional fare.

And that’s exactly what happened this year. Sinners may have been the most nominated film of all time with sixteen nominations – and it would have been a most worthy winner in all categories – but in the end, it only took home four Oscars – for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Best Original Score. All of these wins are highly deserved – particularly Michael B. Jordan’s win, considering that Jordan has been criminally overlooked by the Oscars in the past. What is more, cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw became both the first ever woman and the first ever black person to win Best Cinematography, which honestly shocked me, because I assumed there had been other women and/or black winners in this category before. Nonetheless, I expected Sinners to take home more Oscars in the artistic and technical categories like production design, costume design, make-up, special effects, editing, etc… However, Frankenstein took many of those categories – and to be fair, it is a highly deserving winner.

However, it’s also notable that many of the major categories went to Sinners‘ hottest rival, One Battle After Another, which had thirteen nominations and took home six Oscars – for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, Best Casting (new category that’s probably of more interest to industry insiders than viewers) and Best Editing. The difference is striking – Sinners won a fourth of its nominations, while One Battle After Another won almost half – especially in the categories where Sinners and One Battle After Another were directly up against each other such as Best Picture or Best Director.

What’s also striking is that at least as far as I’m concerned, it wasn’t even a contest. Sinners is simply a much better film than One Battle After Another.  Sinners is an amazing, genre-transcending film that surprised pretty much everybody with how great it was. One Battle After Another is a lesser adaptation of a lesser Thomas Pynchon novel. In a year, where the main competition was ye olde Oscar bait, I would probably have rooted for One Battle After Another, simply because it could have been much worse. However, Sinners blows One Battle After Another out of the water in every respect.

Now I am a huge Thomas Pynchon fan, ever since I read V. in a class postmodern literature at uni, and have read all of his books.  Now at the time, there only were V., Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland – Mason & Dixon came out about a year later. And of these four, Vineland was by far the weakest to the point that it wasn’t even a contest. When One Battle After Another came out, my first response “Of all the Pynchon novels to adapt, you chose that one? Honestly?” What is more, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson stripped out much of the weirdness and Pynchon-ness of the novel, so we have a lesser adaptation of a lesser Pynchon.

As for why One Battle After Another won Best Picture and Best Director over Sinners, I guess a film about political disillusionment and betrayal set on the US West Coast appealed to more Academy members than a film about blues, racism and vampires with a majority black cast set in the Mississippi Delta during the Prohibition. Perhaps the Academy, in spite of all the advances of recent years, isn’t yet ready to give its top honour to genre film, a horror film at that, with a majority black cast. We have seen films with majority black casts winning Best Picture in recent years, most notably Moonlight in 2017, but Moonlight is a movie about drugs and social issues and in many ways a very typical Oscar bait movie, except that it had a majority black cast. It also didn’t have vampires.

As for why Paul Thomas Anderson won Best Director over Ryan Coogler, Paul Thomas Anderson has been nominated for an Oscar several times (eleven times apparently), yet he never won. So I suspect that many Academy members felt that it was his turn. It wouldn’t be the first time that someone won an Oscar for a lesser film that they should have won for a different film years before. That said, Paul Thomas Anderson’s films never really interested me to the point that I just realised that I attributed two films to him that were actually directed by Alexander Payne. So no, I can’t blame Anderson for The Holdovers. I also only just realised that One Battle After Another wasn’t the first time Paul Thomas Anderson adapted a Thomas Pynchon novel – he also adapted Inherent Vice. So I guess he is a fellow Pynchon fan.

That said, the fact that Sinners got as many nominations as it did, even if it only won a fourth of them, is a win in itself, because only a few years ago, a film like Sinners – a horror film with a majority black cast – wouldn’t even have gotten a look in. 2026 was a good year for horror at the Oscars in general, because in addition to Sinners, Frankenstein also took home three Oscars – for production design, costume design and make-up – and Weapons took home one Oscar for Amy Madigan for Best Supporting Actress. All wins are highly deserved and particularly Amy Madigan’s win makes me super-happy (though I would also have been happy for Wummi Mosaku), because I’ve been a fan of hers since I saw her in Streets of Fire a whopping forty-two years ago. Amy Madigan is one of these actors who are always great, but never really get the recognition they deserve, so I’m glad that she finally got the Oscar she should have gotten long ago. Now can we also agree that Streets of Fire is a fucking masterpiece that was unjustly ignored?

2026 was also a good year for SFF films in general, because KPop Demon Hunters also got to take home two Oscars, for Best Animated Film and Best Original Song. Both are well deserved and KPop Demon Hunters is a great film, though personally it made me sad that Jem, which was my generation’s animated girl-aimed pop star fantasy, never got even an inch of the acclaim KPop Demon Hunters got. Personally, I also preferred “I Lied to You” from Sinners to “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters (and “Rocky Road to Dublin” from Sinners was also really, really good), though both are great songs in their own way. It’s also telling that two of the best film songs of 2025 are both songs with supernatural effects. “I Lied to You” pierces the veil between past, present and future and attracts vampires, while “Golden” repels demons and strengthens the mystic barrier that keeps them out of our world. Come to think of it, Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters are actually a lot more similar than you’d assume, since both are films about the power of music and how it can attract or banish monsters.

Diane Warren was also nominated for a song called “Dear Me” from a film called Relentless, making this her seventeenth nomination without a single win. I do feel a bit sorry for her, but her since her songs neither repel demons nor pierce the veil of time and attract vampires, she had no chance this year.

We even had two more SFF films winning Oscars, because Avatar: Fire and Ash won Best Special Effects (probably deserved, though I really, really don’t like Avatar and haven’t watched any of the sequels) and the very sweet The Girl Who Cried Pearls won Best Animated Short.

As for the other two acting awards, Jessie Buckley won Best Actress for her performance as Ann Hathaway (not the actress, but William Shakespeare’s wife – and yes, I saw someone who apparently thought Buckley was playing Hathaway, the actress) in Hamnet. I’m not happy about this, because I just don’t like Jessie Buckley very much. She’s one of these actors who seemingly pop up out of nowhere to be in everything, even though there’s very little about them that’s interesting. The fact that she said in an interview that she hates cats and forced her partner to give up his cats didn’t endear her to me either. However, the Oscars love movies about the life of William Shakespeare. That said, I’m not sure whom I would have preferred to win in that category, since I really hate Yorgos Lanthimos (if you wonder why I never link to reviews of and articles about his films at the Speculative Fiction Showcase, that’s why), so Emma Stone was out. And have no idea what the films the other nominated actresses were in even are about. I guess 2025 was just a dud year for leading roles for women or at least what Hollywood considers leading roles.

Best Supporting Actor went to Sean Penn for his role in One Battle After Another. In this category, I would have vastly preferred Delroy Lindo for his role in Sinners or Jacob Elordi for his role in Frankenstein. Not to mention that Sean Penn didn’t even bother to show up for the ceremony, apparently preferring to hang out with Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine. Which is his good right, but nonetheless I’d rather see the Oscar go to someone who doesn’t already have one and actually appreciated it.

Coincidentally, one of the silliest reactions to the 2026 Oscar winners I saw on social media was someone complaining that Michael B. Jordan won an Oscar for killing white people. First of all, those white people were murderous KKK members and/or vampires and secondly, they’re not really dead. It’s just a movie and the blood was Kryolan. As for people on social media having problems telling movies from reality, I also saw several people complaining that One Battle After Another is a film about Antifa and a celebration of far left radicalism, which again made me wonder if they actually watched the movie. Especially since you know that those same people would have complained bitterly, if Sinners had won Best Picture instead.

Predictably, the “In Memoriam” segment left out several people who should have been included such as James Van Der Beek, Brigitte Bardot, Eric Dane, Bud Cort, Dharmendra. Malcolm Jamal Warner, Prunella Scales, etc…. James Van Der Beek, Eric Dane, Malcolm Jamal Warner and Prunella Scales probably fell victim to the fact that they are best known for their TV roles, though all of them also had movie credits. And while Hollywood may still strictly divide between films and TV, the average viewer really doesn’t and particularly James Van Der Beek and Malcolm Jamal Warner meant a lot to an entire generation, as did Shannon Doherty and Michelle Trachtenberg, who were also excluded in the respective years. There also really is no excuse for omitting Brigitte Bardot, Bud Cort and Dharmendra, since they were all primarily film actors. Brigitte Bardot was probably excluded because of her later in life far right turn (and when the Césars included her in their “In Memoriam”, as they absolutely should have, there were boos), but excluding people for their political views is a slippery slope and plenty of US rightwingers would have been included and have been in previous years. That said, the Academy also excluded Alain Delon, who was not far right, from last year’s “In Memoriam”, though maybe they just have issues with French actors. Dharmendra was probably excluded for being a Bollywood star, though I really have no explanation for Bud Cort. Though at least they remembered Drew Struzan, the artist who painted all of your favourite movie posters back when movie posters were still painted.

That said, I always have massive issues with who is and isn’t excluded in the “In Memoriam” segment for years. I remember how furious I was when George Nader, who was a huge star in Germany due to his performance in the Jerry Cotton movies and who actually won a Golden Globe, was excluded in 2002, whereas people I found a lot less memorable were included. Last year, the Academy excluded Tony Todd, even though he absolutely was a movie actor, though he likely appeared in the wrong kind of movies for the Academy. And let’s not forget that they omitted Bill Paxton twice – first, because he died very shortly before the Oscars, when the “In Memoriam” segment was likely already finished and then again the next year.

This has gotten longer than expected, so I’ll discuss the Nebula finalists in another post.