Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters stars set for major performances at 2026 Oscars

Tonight's 98th Academy Awards will feature two of the most anticipated live performance segments in recent Oscar ceremony memory. Miles Caton, who plays the young blues musician at the center of Sinners, will perform alongside songwriter and producer Raphael Saadiq in a musical tribute that expands into a multi-artist sequence featuring Brittany Howard, Shaboozey, and ballet dancer Misty Copeland. Separately, HUNTR/X, the K-pop group from the animated film KPop Demon Hunters, will take the Dolby Theatre stage in what will be a rare live K-pop performance at the Academy Awards.

Ceremony producers described both segments as cinematic tributes designed to extend the storytelling of the films into a live format rather than function as standalone concert performances. That framing matters for how to understand what tonight's performances are intended to do. They are built around the films they come from, not disconnected showcases for the performers. Whether that distinction holds up in a 3,400-seat theater with a live television audience is a different question, and one that the assembled talent will answer in real time.

The Sinners performance and what it involves

Miles Caton plays Sammie, a young Delta blues musician whose voice becomes a point of supernatural power in Ryan Coogler's film. Coogler and composer Ludwig Goransson built the film's score around original blues compositions, and Caton performed his own vocals throughout production rather than lip-syncing to pre-recorded tracks. Raphael Saadiq, who contributed original songs to the film alongside Goransson, will join Caton for the ceremony performance. Saadiq produced landmark albums for Mary J. Blige, Joss Stone, and D'Angelo before turning his attention to film work, and his presence alongside Caton gives the segment credibility as a musical event rather than a promotional one.

The expansion of the Sinners segment to include Brittany Howard, Shaboozey, and Misty Copeland suggests the producers are treating it as something closer to a concert tribute to American blues and roots music than a conventional nominated song performance. Brittany Howard is the lead singer of Alabama Shakes and has released two well-regarded solo albums. Shaboozey's country-soul crossover hit A Bar Song spent 19 consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2024, the longest run for a country song in chart history. Misty Copeland is the first Black woman to be named principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, a position she held from 2015 until her retirement in 2023.

What KPop Demon Hunters brings to the Oscars stage

KPop Demon Hunters is an animated film following a fictional K-pop group called HUNTR/X that hunts supernatural creatures between performances. The film was nominated for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song. The group's fictional members are voiced and performed by a combination of Korean and American artists, and Sony Pictures Animation worked with actual K-pop choreographers and music producers to make the group's performances in the film feel authentic to the genre rather than a Western approximation of it.

Having HUNTR/X perform at the Oscars is a production decision that requires bringing the fictional group to life on a real stage, which means the performers who voiced and motion-captured the characters in the film will be performing live in the personas they created. The Academy last hosted a K-pop adjacent performance when BTS appeared as presenters at the 2020 ceremony, but a full live K-pop group performance at the Dolby Theatre is something the ceremony has not previously featured. The show's producers confirmed the segment will include the full choreographic and visual production design elements seen in the film.

Why the Oscar performance segments matter beyond the awards

Oscar viewership has been on a slow recovery path since the ceremony hit a record low of 9.85 million viewers in 2021. Last year's broadcast with Conan O'Brien hosting pulled 19.5 million viewers, the best performance since 2020. Performance segments are one of the few parts of the show that can generate genuine social media conversation during the broadcast and drive tune-in from audiences who are not closely following the awards race. A Shaboozey performance at the Oscars, given the scale of his 2024 commercial success, will reach a different audience than a standard Oscar telecast traditionally captures.

The decision to give both Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters extended performance segments rather than a single nominated song slot each also reflects the ceremony's approach to using its two biggest nominated films as entertainment anchors for the broadcast. Sinners leads all nominees with 16 nominations. KPop Demon Hunters is not the front-loaded awards contender that Sinners is, but its youth audience and global K-pop fanbase give it a different kind of broadcast value. Between the two performances, the ceremony has a built-in reason for viewers who came for the music to stay through the awards.

The nominated songs and how the performances connect to them

Both films have songs nominated in the Best Original Song category. Sinners received a nomination for a blues composition performed by Caton in the film's climactic sequence, which is expected to anchor the live tribute segment tonight. KPop Demon Hunters received a nomination for a song from HUNTR/X's fictional discography within the film, written by a production team that includes actual K-pop songwriters who work with groups including BLACKPINK and EXO.

The Best Original Song category has five nominees tonight. The other three nominated films are not receiving performance segments of equivalent scope, which signals the ceremony's production team made a deliberate choice about which songs to invest in as television spectacle. That choice will be tested against actual viewership numbers when the overnight ratings are released on Monday, March 16.