The 2026 Academy Awards revealed a striking contradiction. Many of the winning films grapple with urgent contemporary issues, or difficult questions of historical memory. Yet their makers avoided following up on that political character in their acceptance speeches.
This paradox is revealing of the current political mood in Hollywood: filmmakers are willing to engage with politics in their work, but reluctant to raise their own voices.
It makes for a puzzling irony that contrasts with the attitude of, for instance, the music industry in the Grammy Awards. In a year of tariffs, Epstein files, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) shootings and military interventions in Venezuela and Iran, the show’s host, comedian Conan O’Brien, kept the political references contained to harmless jokes.
