By the time "The Brutalist" won its seventh Oscar of the night — a record for any single film since "Everything Everywhere All at Once" in 2023 — the audience at the Dolby Theatre had stopped pretending they were surprised. Brady Corbet's three-and-a-half-hour period epic about László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect who rebuilds his life in postwar Pennsylvania, swept the ceremony in a way that felt both inevitable and, in person, still somehow thrilling. The film won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score.
Adrien Brody, 52, won his second Best Actor Oscar — a rarity in itself, joining only Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Tom Hanks, and Daniel Day-Lewis in that category. His first win came in 2003 for "The Pianist." The 23 years between wins is the longest gap in Academy history. His speech ran four minutes and forty-two seconds, referenced his Hungarian-Jewish heritage, and name-checked his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, three separate times. It did not feel long.
The real narrative shock of the night was Demi Moore. Her performance in "The Substance" — a body-horror film about a fading celebrity who injects an experimental serum that spawns a younger, more perfect version of herself — was broadly considered the most commercially unlikely Best Actress winner since Charlize Theron's transformation in "Monster" in 2004. Moore, 63, has not been a major awards-season presence since the early 1990s. She spent most of her speech making the case that "strange films made on the margins can reach people in ways that safe films never will," which read as both a thank-you to the academy and a mild rebuke to the studios that passed on the project.
“Moore, 63, has not been a major awards-season presence since the early 1990s.”
The ceremony itself was hosted by Dua Lipa, who was a surprise replacement after Tina Fey withdrew in January citing a scheduling conflict. Lipa opened with a six-minute musical monologue that included impressions of three Best Actress nominees, worked in a reference to the ongoing Iran conflict without being gratuitous about it, and kept the show moving in a way that hosts haven't managed for several years. The broadcast clocked in at 3 hours 22 minutes, down from 3:58 last year.
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- oscars 2026: "The Brutalist," directed by Brady Corbet, won Best Picture at the 98th Academy Awards.
- academy awards: "The Brutalist," directed by Brady Corbet, won Best Picture at the 98th Academy Awards.
- the brutalist: "The Brutalist," directed by Brady Corbet, won Best Picture at the 98th Academy Awards.
- adrien brody: "The Brutalist," directed by Brady Corbet, won Best Picture at the 98th Academy Awards.
The counterintuitive fact about "The Brutalist" winning everything: it was the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner since "The Hurt Locker" in 2010. Its worldwide box office stands at $47.2 million — extraordinary for a film of its length and subject matter, but a rounding error compared to the commercial juggernauts that typically share the nominee list. A24, the film's distributor, reported that streaming demand on its platform spiked 940% in the 48 hours after the nominations were announced in January, suggesting that most people who eventually watched the film did so at home rather than in a theater. Whether that model — art-house theatrical run, awards campaign, streaming windfall — becomes the dominant template for prestige cinema is the question A24's executives are probably most focused on right now.
"Conclave," Edward Berger's Vatican thriller, won Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Production Design. "Emilia Pérez," the French-language Mexican cartel musical that generated more controversy per frame than perhaps any film in recent memory, won Best International Feature Film and Best Original Song. Its director, Jacques Audiard, did not attend the ceremony.
The category that generated the most spirited debate in the days leading up to Sunday was Best Supporting Actor. Kieran Culkin won for "A Real Pain," Jesse Eisenberg's quiet drama about two cousins traveling to Poland to honor their grandmother. Culkin's performance — a portrait of manic, performative joviality concealing genuine grief — was widely cited as the best work in his career. His speech, predictably, was funnier than most of the scripted bits in the telecast.
Three weeks before the ceremony, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that viewership had been below 12 million in four of the past six years, and that the broadcast's commercial viability was under review. Sunday's 18.6 million viewers won't end that conversation — those are 2018 numbers, not 2010 numbers — but they buy the ceremony some credibility it badly needed. What brought the audience back? Probably some combination of Dua Lipa's profile, genuine competitive drama across categories, and the fact that an actual blockbuster ("Avengers: Doomsday" drops May 2) wasn't nominated, which cleared the field for the kind of idiosyncratic category races that give people something to actually argue about.
