These were the Oscars for a life during wartime. President Trump’s still-to-be-explained attack on Iran meant warnings of a possible retaliatory drone attack from Tehran on the target-rich environment of downtown Los Angeles. The glittering Dolby Theatre was reportedly in the crosshairs.
It didn’t happen. But this was a ceremony aware of the distant politics of threat, and the politics of a nation that is rich enough to afford war and peace at the same time.
Joining the tuxed masses heading towards the theatre felt traditional. But Los Angeles is very different from when I was last here to report on Oscars night, back in 2017.
Last time, I’d had a hilarious conversation with my cab driver, who turned out to be a comedian and actor striving to make it in LA. No chance of that in this year’s driverless Waymo – an apt metaphor for the way that things are changing in life as in art.
This is a town that, judging by everyone I talked to – actors, producers, directors – is dominated by the twin crises of AI and streamers, the ever-present Tweedledum and Tweedledee talking points of concern, even if Hollywood can’t decide if they’re bad or not. (The Oscars themselves are shortly to be handed over to an online streamer: YouTube.) The big controversy was Timothée Chalamet’s facetious and badly worded comment about ballet and opera, which was really, I think, an admissible point about the possibility of movies in cinemas dwindling from a gigantic global pleasure to a niche connoisseur interest. It was a gaffe that soured the pro-Chalamet mood, though he spoke after voting had closed. Yet I’ve heard a very distinguished French director say pretty much the same thing: it was proof, if proof were needed, that Hollywood is cautious and courteous in the way that it talks in public around awards season and the rhetoric of respect – however perfunctory – is very important. Chalamet’s offence was against that.
While the drone attack didn’t materialise, it meant huge new levels of security to police the red carpet. LAPD officers were swarming all over the limo lines approaching the theatre, along with military personnel. A sniffer dog made an exploratory jump into the back of my cab just as we were nearing the entrance. I had to show my passport before being allowed on to the red carpet.
And once I was there, some strange events – part Kafka, part Lewis Carroll – unfolded. I was ushered on to the wrong floor by twitchy attendants and then it proved almost impossible to get back into the main section of the theatre, where my seat was. Eventually, a stressed security operative escorted me outside the building, where the kitchen staff go to have a smoke, past some unglamorous bins and round to the front again, for a Groundhog-Day-style second go at entering the Oscars. At which point my digital ticket beeped to signal that I had already been admitted. This created a crisis and I had to be interviewed in a special “security suite” where I plaintively whimpered in a teeny voice that I had only just interviewed Academy CEO Bill Kramer.
Mollified by this, the security consultants allowed me back beyond the velvet rope, but such was their discombobulation that I was accidentally allowed into the nominees area.
Everything was on the verge of delirium all the time because the onlookers allowed into the bleachers either side were literally screaming at the sight of a celebrity, or the rumour of a celebrity, or the idea of celebrity. And we all turned our heads like weather vanes at each howl. Who is it? Is it Timothée? Is it Timothée? IS IT TIMOTHÉE? AAAAAAARRRGHHHHH!!!! This particular bout of screaming turned out to be incited by the hyperactive and colossally popular figure of comedian Ken Jeong, a genius mischief-maker and cast member of the huge animated hit KPop Demon Hunters. He was bouncing around the red carpet, shamelessly winding up the crowd – who were in any case already on the verge of psychological meltdown at the proximity of any KPop Demon Hunters star.
As before, I was gobsmacked by how vast and glitteringly beautiful the Dolby Theatre is – not at all the vulgar mess that I had been led to believe by others. It is certainly very showy, though, like the Royal Opera House on steroids. Our host for the night was Conan O’Brien (also a cast-member for a nominated film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a doubling of roles that never quite amounted to a conflict of interest). The announcer was a sonorous Matt Berry, a Briton known in the US for his role in TV’s What We Do in the Shadows – although it wasn’t quite clear if he was going to be allowed to get laughs on his own account, or just be a kind of sidekick to O’Brien. He had a gag about modelling himself on Basil Rathbone that I laughed at, but not many others did. O’Brien himself did reasonably well, starting with a spirited impersonation of Oscar nominee and indeed winner Amy Madigan, although a friend WhatsApped me from London to say on TV it sounded as if he was tanking very hard.
It was a strange event in some ways – although there was nothing approaching the shock-horror of the Smith-Rock slap heard around the world. Sean Penn simply didn’t show up to get his award and there was no one to come up on stage on his behalf. Presenter Kieran Culkin just shrugged and went off. The cast of KPop Demon Hunters seemed genuinely upset when their speeches went on too long and they were played off: in fact, they looked as if their great triumph had turned to chaos. Presenter Adrien Brody grossed out the entire theatre by spitting some gum into his hand, pretending to throw it into the audience, putting it back into his mouth and announcing that he had swallowed it. Eeeeuuuuwww.
But easily the most gripping – and perhaps extraordinary – part of the evening was that section of the In Memoriam montage devoted to Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner. This has been a year when many Hollywood titans died, including Diane Keaton, Robert Redford and Robert Duvall, but the Reiners’ death took a strange pride of place, with a moving speech by Oscar-night veteran Billy Crystal (a longtime friend of Reiner and famously the star of the director’s Nora Ephron-scripted When Harry Met Sally), with cast members of many of Reiner’s great films lining up alongside Crystal when he finished. But of course, the Reiners hadn’t died like everyone else on the In Memoriam reel – they had been murdered, and there seemed no way to acknowledge or absorb this awful truth. Yet Crystal’s speech was dignified and heartfelt, and it was moving to see this Hollywood legend speak at a moment when something so real, so painful and so unresolved was at stake.
Once the ceremony was over, we all flooded into the Governors Ball, an official event that I suspect is a lot more fun than the supposedly super-exclusive events such as the Vanity Fair party. The Governors Ball is such an enjoyable event, with a weird high school bop energy to it, and I found myself chatting to Chase Infiniti and Renate Reinsve, whose gown was the most gorgeous of the night. Culkin sportingly corrected my selfie-grip as I tried to get a picture of us. Jafar Panahi was genially tolerant of the whole surreal circus. Alana Haim was as impeccably cool as she is on screen. The brilliant Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho was philosophical about not winning. Paul Thomas Anderson was a study in gracious calm.
The winners can get their statuettes engraved at a special “bar” area – like a very posh version of somewhere you’d get keys cut and your shoes mended. And it was here that I had a historic experience. The writer-directors of the Oscar-winning live action short Two People Exchanging Saliva, Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata, rushed up to me in a state of euphoria, clutching their statuettes and beaming. I had been chatting with Alexandre before the show and had wished him luck. Now they had won! (Actually they tied with another film called The Singers, but won nonetheless.) I blurted it out. Could I please hold their Oscars? Pleeeeease? Without hesitating, they let me hold their precious items, one in each fist – a grotesque and pathetic parody of Anderson’s actual and deserved double-fisted Oscar holding happening in another part of the room – while Alexandre and Natalie gigglingly photographed me. And yes, they are indeed heavy. But other party guests looked at me warily. This sort of thing isn’t really done. It is said to be an Oscar superstition that if you touch an Oscar statuette that isn’t yours by right then you will never win one yourself. So if the Academy ever brings in a new Oscar for best review, I’m stuffed.
The extraordinary thing is that this Oscars ceremony really was … different. It is customary to mock the chuckleheaded Hollywood liberals for frolicking in their make-believe land while the uncool Washington grownups deal with the real world. Now, with Trump saying he wants to bomb Iran for “fun”, it seemed to me that, frankly, it’s Hollywood that has the real grownups, the real leaders, and not this administration with its big-shoed courtiers and manosphere-style war videos. Perhaps these winning films will continue to be admired in years to come and perhaps they won’t. But Oscars night 2026 had something that I never expected to attribute to it: a certain quiet dignity.
