98th Academy Awards tonight: Sinners leads with record 16 nominations

The 98th Academy Awards take place tonight at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, with Conan O'Brien returning as host for the second consecutive year. The ceremony airs live on ABC and Hulu. Ryan Coogler's supernatural thriller Sinners enters the night with 16 nominations, the most any film has received in Oscar history, surpassing the previous record of 14 nominations held jointly by All About Eve and Titanic. Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another follows with 13 nominations, setting up a two-film contest for Best Picture that has dominated awards season conversation since January.

Neither film fits neatly into the categories that typically produce Best Picture winners. Sinners is a period horror film set in 1930s Mississippi, blending blues music mythology with vampire folklore in a way that has divided critical opinion while generating genuine box office heat. One Battle After Another is a three-hour character study set across several decades of one family in the American West, the kind of patient, demanding film that Anderson makes roughly once every seven years. The Academy's preferring one over the other will say something about where the membership's taste sits in 2026.

What Sinners is up against and where its strength lies

Sinners' 16 nominations span nearly every technical and craft category in addition to the major awards. The film is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director for Coogler, Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan, Best Supporting Actress for Hailee Steinfeld, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Visual Effects, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Original Song, Best Animated Short, and Best Live Action Short.

The breadth of that nomination list suggests the film connected with Academy voters across different branches, not just the directors and actors who tend to dominate Best Picture discussion. Films that win Best Picture typically need votes from the entire membership through the preferential ballot system, and cross-branch appeal is often more predictive of a Best Picture win than strength in any single category. Sinners' technical nominations give it voters from the sound, visual effects, and makeup branches that a conventional drama might not reach.

One Battle After Another and what Anderson needs to win

Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another received nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis in what the actor has described as his final screen performance, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Sound. Day-Lewis, who came out of retirement for the project, is the heavy favorite in Best Actor and has won that category three previous times, for My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood, and Phantom Thread.

Anderson has been nominated for Best Director five times previously without a win. His films There Will Be Blood and The Master both received nominations without converting to Director or Picture wins. One Battle After Another is his most commercially accessible film in over a decade, which may help with the broader Academy membership, but the film's 188-minute runtime and non-linear structure are the kind of qualities that tend to inspire admiration rather than the affection that typically produces preferential ballot wins.

The acting races and who is favored in each category

Best Actor is the clearest category of the night. Daniel Day-Lewis won the SAG Award, the BAFTA, the Critics Choice Award, and the Golden Globe in a sweep that has not been matched in any acting category this cycle. Michael B. Jordan received strong precursor support early in awards season but has not converted to wins at the major precursors, leaving Day-Lewis as the strong favorite.

Best Actress is considerably more open. Demi Moore, nominated for her performance in a psychological drama that critics have compared to Black Swan in its physical and psychological intensity, won the Golden Globe and the Critics Choice Award. But Cate Blanchett, nominated for a period film in which she plays a concert violinist navigating the collapse of her marriage and career simultaneously, won the BAFTA and the SAG Award, splitting the major precursors and leaving no clear frontrunner heading into the evening.

In the supporting categories, Zoe Saldana, nominated for Emilia Perez, was the early frontrunner for Best Supporting Actress but has faced a crowded field that includes Hailee Steinfeld for Sinners and Isabella Rossellini for a drama set in rural France. Best Supporting Actor has seen Jeremy Strong, nominated for his work in One Battle After Another, maintain consistent precursor support since the start of awards season.

How to watch the 98th Academy Awards tonight

The 98th Academy Awards ceremony begins at 7 pm Eastern, 4 pm Pacific on ABC and streams simultaneously on Hulu. The red carpet pre-show begins at 6 pm Eastern on ABC. Conan O'Brien hosted last year's ceremony to generally positive reviews after several years of the Academy rotating through different host configurations, and his return suggests the Academy was satisfied with the results. Last year's broadcast drew approximately 19.5 million viewers on ABC, the best ratings for the ceremony since 2020.

The International Feature Film category this year includes nominations for films from France, Germany, Brazil, Senegal, and Denmark, with the Brazilian entry having won the Golden Globe for Best Non-English Language Film. The Documentary Feature race is considered wide open, with five films covering subjects ranging from climate migration to a portrait of a legendary jazz musician who died during production.

The Best Picture preferential ballot and what it means for tonight's winner

The Academy uses a preferential ballot system for Best Picture in which voters rank all nominees in order of preference. A film does not need to be anyone's first choice to win. It needs to be preferred over every other film when lower-ranked films are eliminated and their votes redistributed. This system historically favors consensus choices over films that inspire strong passion among a minority of voters, which is why films with broad, if moderate, appeal sometimes beat films with intense but narrower support.

Sinners' cross-branch nomination breadth and its strong box office performance, having grossed $312 million domestically, gives it a profile that historically correlates with preferential ballot success. One Battle After Another, which earned $89 million domestically on a $60 million budget, was a genuine commercial success by art house standards but not the kind of broad popular reach that tends to help in a preferential ballot environment. The Producers Guild of America Award, won this year by Sinners, has correctly predicted the Best Picture winner in 22 of the past 27 years.