Oscars 2026: The stories Hollywood wants to tell about America

The Oscars have always been a peculiar cultural thermometer. They don’t tell us what the best films of the year were so much as what Hollywood feels comfortable celebrating at a particular moment, and the results of the 2026 Academy Awards were revealing in precisely that way.

The big winner of the night was One Battle After Another, which took home six awards including swept Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay - but the deeper story of the night may lie less in what won than in what didn’t.

Several of the year’s most striking American films were deeply preoccupied with the state of the country - its conspiratorial thinking, its economic violence, its widening inequality, its wounded masculinity - yet the Academy’s response to them was strikingly uneven. The pattern that emerged at the Oscars suggests an industry still struggling with how directly it wants to confront the darker aspects of contemporary America.

Take Eddington, perhaps the most viciously satirical film about the Covid era yet produced. The film held up a merciless mirror to conspiracy thinking, political fragmentation, and the ways the pandemic intensified existing cultural fault lines. Few recent American films have captured quite so well the suffocating paranoia and mutual suspicion that defined those years. Yet Eddington received no nominations at all.

Part of the reason may be tonal. The film’s satire is so caustic that it offers little comfort to its audience. For some viewers, its harsh satire that felt bracingly honest, but for others, it felt like a film observing its subjects from a position of almost anthropological disdain. The Academy, historically, tends to reward films that critique America while still holding out the possibility of understanding and improving it, and Eddington’s unforgiving tone didn’t offer the requisite relief.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia also explored conspiracy thinking, but framed it within a broader critique of corporate power and the impunity of the wealthy. Its bleakness resonated, and the ending provided some comfortable emotional distance, but it was hardly a film designed to make voters feel hopeful about the possibility of change.

Perhaps the most fascinating case was Marty Supreme, which arrived with enormous expectations and a formidable awards campaign behind it. The film offered a ferocious exploration of American masculinity, particularly the national obsession with hyper-individualism and competition, arguing that a culture that relentlessly rewards ruthlessness and winners inevitably produces enormous collateral damage.

The film received nominations across multiple categories, but walked away empty-handed. Some observers pointed to the film’s campaign as a possible factor. During awards season, star Timothée Chalamet eschewed humility or gratitude, instead leaning heavily into a performance of competitive intensity that mirrored the very traits the film sought to critique. The campaign often felt less like an interrogation of American individualism than an inadvertent demonstration of it. Whether that perception affected voters is impossible to know, but the irony was difficult to ignore.

In contrast, Sinners emerged as one of the night’s most interesting winners. The horror story from a Black filmmaker set during the Jim Crow era explored the power of music, creativity and cultural expression, while also confronting the long history of white exploitation of Black artistry - and that combination proved potent, as Sinners walked away with four awards. There is something revealing in that outcome. A film about exploitation rooted in America’s past - framed through genre, metaphor and historical distance - proved easier for Hollywood to reward than several films examining the country’s present.

Which brings us back to One Battle After Another. On paper, it hardly seems less political than the films that struggled to win. The story of a failed revolutionary searching for his daughter in a world dominated by billionaire oligarchs who control everything from politics to media, the film openly critiques power, racism and elites, imagining a society where democracy has effectively been hollowed out.

But for all its political anger, the film is also unmistakably a comedy. Its villains are grotesque, exaggerated, sometimes almost cartoonish in their villainy; its hero a disastrous slob on an often farcical rollercoaster chase. The result is a film that skewers oligarchic power while keeping the audience at a safe emotional distance from it.

That may be part of why the Academy embraced it so enthusiastically. It allowed Hollywood to recognise the problems of America without having to sit too directly inside the despair.

The Oscars rarely reward the films that feel most painfully close to the present. They reward the films that transform those anxieties into something stylised, entertaining, and emotionally manageable. This year’s big winner did exactly that.