Oscars Postmortem

The Oscars came; the Oscars went; the Oscars more or less got it right. Try not to faint. They didn’t get everything right, though, and how could they? Even as shifts in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voting body have apparently yielded an overall increase in taste, the very nature of awards season means buzz is a factor in decision making across all ballots. Nobody is immune to hype. But when hype is raised around a handful of largely very good films, its effects are less insidious. 

All that said, we at Cool Material want to add our own notes to the record as we finally close the books on the movies of 2025. What won? We’ll tell you that. What should have won? We’ll share our thoughts in that area, too. What really should have won, as in, what, or who, wasn’t even nominated in spite of being obviously great? Surprise! We have that covered. In some cases, the AMPAS voters really did answer the question correctly, and for that, we applaud them. In others, we feel compelled to give our two cents.

Won: Amy Madigan, Weapons
Should’ve Won: Amy Madigan, Weapons
Really Should’ve Won: Tânia Maria, The Secret Agent

Madigan’s work as Gladys, the wizened, gaudily attired, endlessly evil witch going around nicking the children of Maybrook, Pennsylvania in Zach Cregger’s latest pitch black off-kilter horror comedy, is mortar to its plot; it’s hard to imagine Weapons without the adhesive effects of her performance. Likewise it’s hard to think about The Secret Agent without thinking about Maria, equally wizened but way less evil, and whose role is dwarfed by Madigan’s speaking to screen time. Such is the impression she leaves on us in only a handful of scenes. Adeus, Dona Sebastiana. We’ll never know what you did in Italy, but we’ll happily live our lives wondering.

Won: KPop Demon Hunters
Should’ve Won: Little Amélie or The Character of Rain
Really Should’ve Won: Lost in Starlight

This was about as inevitable a victory, and as easy a category to predict, as any. It’s also a perfectly reasonable choice, even if Little Amélie or The Character of Rain packs great 2D-animated depth into its trim run time. Another reasonable choice? Han Ji-won’s Lost in Starlight, a heartbreaker, a tearjerker, and a wildly unique vision of South Korea’s future tied to struggles of its present: the national plague of social loneliness, and the “Newtro” trend spurred by Gen Z and millennials curious about bygone technology.

Won: Cassandra Kulukundis, One Battle After Another
Should’ve Won: Cassandra Kulukundis, One Battle After Another
Really Should’ve Won: Cassandra Kulukundis, One Battle After Another

As the inaugural chapter in its category, the 2026 Best Casting Oscar is an “everybody wins” proposition. Casting directors are essential to shaping the character of a film; they don’t receive recognition commensurate with their influence over a production. Anybody could have won this award, sans Marty Supreme, and it would’ve felt great. That voters gave honors to Kulukundis, who across the board made genius-level hires for One Battle After Another, feels even better. Who else but Leonardo DiCaprio could’ve rendered Bob so comically inept yet so admirable at the same time? Who other than Teyana Taylor has such depth in their gaze to summon Perfidia Beverly Hills’ wounds and anxieties in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments? Who better than Tony Goldwyn, the erstwhile POTUS in Shonda Rhomes’ Scandal, to play the head of the Christmas Adventurers Club? What man other than Benicio del Toro could be the unflagging and graceful foil to DiCaprio’s twitchy energy? Every name in the cast list comes close to a coup, and they make every second of their relative presences in One Battle After Another foundational to its power.

Won: Sean Penn, One Battle After Another
Should’ve Won: Delroy Lindo, Sinners
Really Should’ve Won: Delroy Lindo, Sinners

Fair’s fair. One Battle After Another sees Penn at his best for the first time this century. To find anything comparable in his contemporary body of work, you’d have to go back to 2003’s Mystic River, and frankly, he’s nowhere near as locked-in as he is playing Colonel Lockjaw, a man who loves Black women but hates Black people, not to mention left-wing notions of freedom and democracy. Penn cuts a repulsive figure and finds ways for us to consider sympathizing with him, which feels gross to write, worse to confront, and sobering to unpack given Penn’s own history with violent impulses.

On the other hand, Delroy Lindo is never less than “good” in every role he takes, and has been for his entire career. The man deserves his flowers. That the industry declined to give him proper recognition for his staggering work in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is a crime of cosmic proportions; the nomination for Sinners makes up for that lapse, but the loss to Penn comes off as injustice. Oscar or not, Lindo remains a living legend, and his work here demonstrates the same casual mastery of his craft as seen in Da 5 Bloods. It’d just be nice to see that mastery recognized by his peers.

Won: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another
Should’ve Won: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another
Really Should’ve Won: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another

Faithfully adapting a Thomas Pynchon novel into a screenplay is a tall order unto itself. Syphoning the “stuff” of his work into a separate entity as wholly original as One Battle After Another, though, is another kind of challenge. There’s no other “correct” choice for this category. What Anderson’s done in appropriating the bits and pieces of Pynchon’s text into an action thriller-cum-slapstick comedy where white supremacy is the villain and the white savior reads like a distant cousin of the Three Stooges is nothing short of miraculous. The film meets its moment and spurs spellbinding work from its cast, just by cracking the nut of 1990s postmodern literature.

Won: Ryan Coogler, Sinners
Should’ve Won: Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value
Really Should’ve Won: Eva Victor, Sorry, Baby 

Coogler gets a lot of points for contrasting one of horror cinema’s longstanding villains, vampires, against the United States’ original sin, white supremacy, but loses others for stretching his imagination to the point of compartmentalizing them; treating them as interchangeable antagonists is, in a word, easy. Nothing that Trier does in Sentimental Value is easy, because contrasting paternal abuse via neglect with creative impulse is a tough sell. The film is ultimately about a woman coming to finally understand her father not as a workaholic, but as a man who works to process childhood trauma, and as such, it’s a nice double feature with Hamnet, another picture that advocates for art as a coping mechanism for grief.

On the other hand, finding humor in a narrative anchored to professorial misconduct and sexual trauma is an accomplishment worth celebrating, too, because nothing about the circumstances of Victor’s lead is funny until it is. Their script is a balancing act between the terraforming effect of assault on their protagonist’s soul and stealth one-liners to lift the atmosphere when all threatens to grow too dark.

Won: Frankenstein
Should’ve Won: Frankenstein
Really Should’ve Won: Frankenstein

…is there any value in justifying our opinion here? It’s Guillermo del Toro. The man can’t help making his movies with fastidious construction and a bottomless investment in the details of his mise-en-scène. Coogler comes very, very close in Sinners to matching del Toro’s attention to set aesthetics, and in another world where Frankenstein isn’t one of the category’s nominees, Sinners probably takes it. But we live in our world, which is del Toro’s world. So it goes.

Won: Mr. Nobody Against Putin
Should’ve Won: Mr. Nobody Against Putin
Really Should’ve Won: The Zodiac Killer Project

Anyone who dares face off with Vladimir Putin in any arena is one in urgent need of praise, applause, and perhaps a security detail, too. The Russian authoritarian strong man’s reach is great, and his rancor is perhaps greater. In short, protect Pavel Talankin at all costs, and watch his and David Borenstein’s wonderful film while you’re at it. Putin wouldn’t like it if you did, which is as good a reason as any to put it in your queue.

Charlie Shackleton doesn’t defy power to the same degree as Talankin and Borenstein do in their film, but he briskly does pull back the curtain on a micro-industry born of the streaming era—the pop culture phenomenon of true crime—and show it for the claptrap that it is. Individual mileage will vary with The Zodiac Killer Project, effectively a one-man show unpacking Shackleton’s own failed series about the infamous, and still to this day anonymous, serial murderer. Regardless, the concept is clever, and his dry, observational humor grants impressive insight into how the true crime sausage is made.

Won: Sinners, Ludwig Göransson
Should’ve Won: Sinners, Ludwig Göransson
Really Should’ve Won: Hedda, Hildur Guðnadóttir

Among Sinners’ many merits, Göransson’s score ranks among the top-most. Crummy journalists call the work he applies to Coogler’s themes and visuals “soulful.” There is, as a matter of scientific fact, plenty of soul to be found in this score. More importantly, though, there’s consideration given to the bridges connecting the past–both the film’s period backdrop and the past evoked in its marquee musical sequence–with the future. Göransson understands matters of ancestry, how blues relates to rap relates to rock ‘n roll, in the same way that Coogler understands how horror and history relate; he carries that relationship through with forward-facing production values.

Hildur’s work on Hedda follows a similar track: her primary influence is the experimental musical group The Scratch Orchestra, founded by Cornelius Cardew in the 1960s, made up of a blend of professional and amateur musicians. Hedda incorporates Nia DaCosta’s crew members into its big band organization, each of them contributing as best as they can to Hildur’s electrifyingly rough work here–producing a sound unlike any other found in 2025’s cinema.

Won: Andy Jurgensen, One Battle After Another
Should’ve Won: Andy Jurgensen, One Battle After Another
Really Should’ve Won: Joe Murphy, Weapons

If we can nominate Madigan for enchanting viewers as Cregger’s antagonist, then why can’t we also nominate Murphy for the care he takes in stitching together moments of high comedy with moments of peak pants-soiling terror? It’s easy to appreciate how Cregger’s background as a founding member of The Whitest Kids U Know informs his horror movies’ senses of humor. Appreciating how important construction is to allowing humor to dovetail cleanly with horror, though, is trickier, because we don’t “know”, per se, the particulars of how Murphy cut the film. We just know that the end result succeeds in tickling our ribs and giving us goosebumps.

Won: Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Sinners
Should’ve Won: Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Sinners
Really Should’ve Won: Kim Woo-hyung, No Other Choice

We’re not about to suggest an alternate timeline where Arkapaw doesn’t make history as the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Her win is an historical moment, and we think one that deserves savoring. All we’ll say is that the shot Kim takes from the perspective of a beer glass’s bottom in No Other Choice is inventive as hell.

Won: Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value
Should’ve Won: Kleber Mendonça Filho, The Secret Agent
Really Should’ve Won: Park Chan-wook, No Other Choice

How many stone-cold bangers does Park Chan-wook need to knock out before he gets his Oscars due? He’s been shortlisted for this category twice in his career: for his 2023 film Decision to Leave, and for No Other Choice, meaning even The Handmaiden, his best film from the 2010s, and Oldboy, his best film period, flew under Academy voters’ radars in 2016 and 2003. If nothing else, a nomination for Park would’ve been nice here. It’s too tough an argument to make that No Other Choice is strictly superior to The Secret Agent, the best film of 2025; arguing that Park deserved representation for succinctly capturing the sensations of working in the era of AI, his tongue firmly in cheek, is much easier.

Won: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another
Should’ve Won: Kleber Mendonça Filho, The Secret Agent
Really Should’ve Won: Jafar Panahi, It Was Just An Accident

Of all the major Oscar categories, the Best Director roster is perhaps the most baffling. To paraphrase Laurence Olivier’s advice to Dustin Hoffman, Josh Safdie should just try directing. Chloé Zhao acquits herself well enough with Hamnet, but nonetheless needs rescuing by Jessie Buckley in the film’s final act. Of the remaining names, Anderson and Mendonça are the standouts. A win would be warranted for either, and picking one over the other feels raw. For parity’s sake, Mendonça ought to have had his name called, but contemporary AMPAS voters seem primed to compensate Anderson for years of being passed over, and besides, One Battle After Another is a new high point for him, coming on the the heels of his infinitely lesser 2021 effort Licorice Pizza.

The only outcome more exciting than Anderson winning would have been Mendonça winning, and the only outcome more exciting than that would have been Panahi winning as a commemoration of his years spent making movies like a rogue cop stripped of his badge by his captain. Mendonça knows oppression; his own government sabotaged his 2016 film Aquarius’ Oscar campaign. Panahi’s work is a product of his oppression. The fact that he works at all is itself a miracle. Maybe that’s not a good reason to award him Best Director, but it isn’t a meaningless one, either.

Won: Michael B. Jordan, Sinners
Should’ve Won: Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent
Really Should’ve Won: Joshua Burge, Vulcanizadora

No one is prepared for what happens halfway through Joel Potrykus’ Vulcanizadora, including Marty, his protagonist, played by Burge, his longtime collaborator. The shock provoked by the film’s bleak first hour never wears off. He’s excellent at communicating male detachment, and here, he shows that he’s just as good at conducting an emotional spiral. The U.S. is full of men like Marty. Watching Potrykus orchestrate the grimmest consequences of their societal malaise, and being unable to stop it, is a uniquely painful experience in 2025’s movies.

Jordan pulling double duty is unique, too, an opportunity for him to make the case for himself as one of America’s few modern movie stars. But Moura, in his way, manages a similar feat to Jordan, though he’s playing one man wearing bifurcated identities. There are two distinct performances in his work, depending on his character’s contexts from moment to moment. Altogether he’s extraordinary, subtle, and sensitive, an open wound carelessly wrapped in too little gauze.

Won: Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
Should’ve Won: Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
Really Should’ve Won: Luisa Guerreiro, The Toxic Avenger

Macon Blair’s take on the hero of Tromaville is about as disreputable as films funded by mini-majors like Legendary Pictures can hope to get, so you may salt the hell out of this choice and taste be damned. Guerreiro has a difficult technical task to accomplish in her role as the physical stand-in for Peter Dinklage’s mutated antihero. For one, she has to lip-sync to his voice. For another, she has to find the right facial expressions and body language to match whatever he might have done had he been the one in the bodysuit for the role, which basically means imagining a performance he never actually gave. That’s asking a lot. Of course, Guerreiro nails the ask, and even if her achievement isn’t on the same level as Buckley’s, it’s worth applauding nonetheless.

Buckley, you see, spurs Hamnet’s coherence. She’s the reason the movie ends up being about anything apart from self-evident observations of how child loss tears parents apart. Ultimately, Hamnet is an endorsement for art, both as a lens viewers can use to reconcile with the world around them and the sensations within them, and as a tool for processing complicated, painful feelings, like, say, the grief of said child loss. Buckley singlehandedly coaxes that thesis out and powerfully articulates its conclusion in Hamnet’s climax. Suddenly, a film that up to that point feels so minor takes on a new, awesome dimension through Buckley’s wholly vulnerable gaze.

Won: One Battle After Another
Should’ve Won: The Secret Agent
Really Should’ve Won: One Battle After Another

As with Best Director, Best Picture is a tug-of-war between a pair of absolute stunners from 2025. The Secret Agent better suits what I’m looking for when I go to the movies than One Battle After Another, but One Battle After Another still suits me, and that, on top of Anderson’s reputation as the greatest American filmmaker of his generation, is the mathematical proof necessary to tilt this contest in its favor. To be honest, though, for all my misgivings about Sinners, a Sinners win would have felt great, too–for Coogler, a man who was born for the movies, for Black American cinema writ large, because even in 2026 the industry still doesn’t take these stories terribly seriously, and for horror, with the caveat that as horror gains in prestige, its status as a locus for outsider artists falls increasingly under threat. Best Picture is the most consequential category of the night. In 2026, more so than ever, a mere nomination may have consequences, too. One of the three worthiest nominees took the prize home, and that matters more than the “right” nominee taking it home. As long as we’re not calling any of the other seven nominees the best film of 2025, especially not F1, Bugonia, and Marty Supreme, we’re doing it right.