The Relevance of The Oscar Race

By Amruta Srinivasan

On the 15th of March, a muggy almost-spring day, stars and starlets gleamed and glistened with riches, sequins, and sweat as they made their way in to the Dolby Theater. Celebrities streamed in wearing their (borrowed) finest, and beamed and flounced and posed in front of the horde of cameras. It was Oscar’s night. Oscar’s night is the culmination of a tense and sometimes melodramatic race of the past year’s movies, each with award campaigns more theatrical than the next. The nominated actors all lead their award campaigns in a variety of ways—Timothée Chalamet (Marty Supreme) balanced on the Las Vegas Sphere, Jessie Buckley (Hamnet) needlessly professed her hatred for cats, and Sean Penn (One Battle After Another) slinked away from the public eye. But once those in show-biz entered the Dolby Theater, every controversy and remark in poor taste faded into the background. The only thing that mattered now was to win.

To anyone following the race, Jessie Buckley’s Best Actress win did not come as a surprise. In Hamnet, Buckley depicts a mother’s grief and rage with such power and sensitivity—a performance that would bring even the most steely viewer to tears. Buckley outshines her star-studded cast (a cast that included Paul Mescal and Joe Alwyn) with her raw performance, and portrays motherhood in its most brutal and uninhibited form. Hamnet is an adaptation of Maggie O’ Farrell’s book of the same name, and follows a fictionalized version of the Shakespeare family’s life, and how they navigated the loss of their son, Hamnet. Hamnet focuses on Agnes Shakespeare, Hamnet’s mother, and Jessie Buckley embodies her with such passion. The winner for Best Actor, conversely, was not as easy to predict. By mid-March, the race had narrowed down to two of the nominated actors—Michael B. Jordan and Timothée Chalamet. Michael B. Jordan portrayed the twins Smoke and Stack in Sinners, a musical horror movie set in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1930s. In Marty Supreme, Chalamet portrayed (or, some might say, embodied) the ambitious and piggish Marty Mauser, a fictionalized version of Marty Reisman, a very real ping-pong player. Both performances were generational, and the best of their careers yet, but there could only be one winner. 

If we just looked at the campaigns of our two Best Actor leads, we would see a world of difference. Timothée Chalamet’s Oscar campaign mirrored the character he played—a deeply ambitious sprint to the top, culminating in a grand sort of loss. Marty Mauser won his match in the climax of the film, but the victory was empty, and shriveled into nothingness. Timothée Chalamet did not get the opportunity to feel the same crushing hollowness—instead, he just lost in the regular way. Despite the coveted jackets, the ridiculous stunts, and constant interviews, Marty Supreme walked away with a grand total of zero awards. Michael B. Jordan’s journey to Best Actor was more gradual, and much more subdued. He let the strength of his performance guide him to the top, with a win at the Actor Awards (formerly known as the Screen Actor Guild Awards) solidifying his position. 

The Academy Awards, however, were not solely for the winning and losing and hobnobbing. Many stars attempted to make a statement about the state of the world through either a tiny pin or a brief line in their speech. To see celebrities make brief, pithy statements about the state of the world among the glitz and glamour of the Oscars feels disingenous at times. When poverty and injustice plagues our world and country, how does a tiny message from, say, Mark Ruffalo fix anything? It sobers us, maybe, and tells the viewer that there is war and strife in this world. There is a world beyond the tie for best short film, a world that we force ourselves to look at or away from. Should the Oscars then serve as a reprieve from our world, or a representation of the injustices that plague it? And therein lies the importance of the arts—all arts, regardless of what Timothée Chalamet tries to tell you. They are more than just an escape from trying times, or a distraction from our troubles. They are a representation of us at our core—human struggle, strife, pain, joy, and everything in between. The arts splay out the ugliest parts of humanity, and decorate those innards with human goodness. The movies at the 2026 Oscars depicted this humanity beautifully—Marty Supreme and ambition, Hamnet and grief, One Battle After Another and the tenacity of human spirit. These movies were all tied to a core tenet of humanity, and were a depiction of an aspect of our world today. All art is a form of communication, and that was exactly what the movies did this year. They spoke to audiences, they conveyed a message, and they brought cinema back to the silver screen.