The Oscars Won't End. Maybe That's the Point.

The campaign started in September. It is now mid-March.

Awards season has always been long. But this year, shoved back by the Winter Olympics, the 98th Academy Awards ceremony feels less like a destination and more like a hostage situation finally nearing its end. Conan O'Brien hosts Sunday night on ABC and Hulu, starting at 7 p.m. ET—and for many industry observers, the dominant emotion isn't anticipation. It's relief.

And yet: strip away the exhaustion, and what remains is genuinely interesting. Two films have dominated this season in ways that feel almost designed to make the final vote as uncertain as possible. One has collected every major precursor trophy in sight. The other has never left the room.

The Race That Wasn't Supposed to Be a Race

Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another arrived at the fall festivals as the presumptive frontrunner and has never relinquished that status. Adapted—loosely—from Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, Anderson's film is a gonzo family epic that blends rip-roaring comedy with political darkness and old-fashioned melodrama. It has since swept the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild, the BAFTAs, and multiple Golden Globes. Films that collect all of those rarely lose Best Picture.

But Ryan Coogler's Sinners refuses to be the runner-up. The most-nominated film of this Oscar cycle, it's a vampire blues epic set in 1930s Mississippi Delta—a description that barely captures what it actually does. Michael B. Jordan plays twins, one electric and one smoldering, and the film generates the kind of genuine love that polling data can't fully measure. At every industry screening, every guild event, the reaction to Sinners in the room has been something closer to devotion.

The result: a Best Picture race that feels genuinely open in a way that Oscar season rarely allows.

The Big Eight: Final Calls

Best Director goes to Anderson. Fourteen career nominations, zero wins—his "overdue" narrative is the most powerful force in Oscar voting, and it worked for Christopher Nolan two years ago with Oppenheimer. Coogler has an outside shot, but Anderson pulls ahead.

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Best Actor is the tightest category of the night. Timothée Chalamet led early for Marty Supreme—his loud, anxious performance opposite Josh Safdie's direction earned him serious momentum after last year's near-miss with his Bob Dylan biopic. But Michael B. Jordan has taken the Actor Award and the red-carpet narrative in the closing weeks, his quiet, controlled campaign contrasting sharply with Chalamet's unorthodox publicity blitz. The pick leans Jordan. The genuine wildcard is Wagner Moura, whose Golden Globe-winning turn in the Brazilian thriller The Secret Agent has four nominations behind it—a sign of deep support among international voters.

Best Actress belongs to Jessie Buckley for Hamnet. She's been the frontrunner since Telluride in August, and her performance—grief-steeped, intensely felt—is exactly what the Academy rewards. Rose Byrne's spiky, anxious portrait of motherhood in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is the personal favorite of many critics, but the film is too divisive to win.

Best Supporting Actress is Amy Madigan's to lose. Forty years after her first nomination, her terrifying work in Weapons and a wry, beloved campaign trail presence have made her the leader. The risk: Weapons is a genuinely strange horror film, and if voters balk, Teyana Taylor (One Battle) and Wunmi Mosaku (Sinners—BAFTA winner) are both fully deserving alternatives.

Best Supporting Actor has seen the most movement. Benicio del Toro won the critics' prizes. Jacob Elordi took Critics' Choice. Stellan Skarsgård won the Globe. But Sean Penn—playing the pathetically menacing Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw in One Battle—has the BAFTA and the Actor Award, and a potential third Oscar feels like the story the industry wants to tell. If voters feel he's had enough flowers, Skarsgård gets the career-acknowledgment vote.

Best Original Screenplay goes to Ryan Coogler for Sinners. His first Oscar, and a richly deserved one. Best Adapted Screenplay goes to Paul Thomas Anderson—his blending of Pynchon's bones into something entirely his own is the kind of tonal control that this category was built to recognize.

Why Any of This Matters Beyond Sunday Night

Oscar predictions are, on one level, a parlor game. On another, they're a map of where Hollywood's money will flow next.

Studios greenlight challenging projects partly because Oscar recognition changes a film's commercial calculus—its streaming value, its awards-season marketing spend, its cultural staying power. Both One Battle After Another and Sinners were, by any reasonable measure, risky bets: a Pynchon adaptation and a 1930s vampire blues epic aren't the kind of pitches that get easy greenlit in a merger-rattled industry. That both films exist, and that both have generated genuine enthusiasm, is itself the argument for why the Oscars still matter as an institution.

But the five-month campaign season raises its own uncomfortable question. When the race runs this long, with this many precursor events and this much studio lobbying, does the process reward the best film—or the best-campaigned one? Wagner Moura won a Golden Globe and carries four nominations, yet remains a "dark horse." Rose Byrne delivered what many critics consider the year's finest performance, and she almost certainly won't win. The gap between artistic merit and campaign infrastructure is real, and it widens every year.

For global audiences—particularly in markets like South Korea, where Parasite's 2020 sweep opened a door that has proven difficult to walk through again—this gap is not an abstract concern. Running an effective Oscar campaign requires resources that most non-English-language productions simply don't have. The Academy's voting body has diversified significantly in recent years, but the campaign machine remains expensive, English-language-centric, and exhausting.