As a movie lover and keen student of culture, I can say the 98th Academy Awards carry a level of excitement that hasn’t been felt in a long time. Warner Bros.’ arrival with 30 nominations across its slate echoes the old studio‑system era. Those nominations are anchored by “Sinners,” “One Battle After Another,” and “Weapons.”
Ryan Coogler’s dominance this season is not only creative but structural. In a deal described in Hollywood as near‑unprecedented, he secured the final cut on “Sinners,” a share of first‑dollar gross and, most staggering of all, a clause that transfers full ownership of the film’s rights to him 25 years after its release. By 2050, the story and its characters will legally revert to the person who wrote and directed them, a deliberate echo of the film’s own obsession with ownership and control in a world determined to deny both.
“Sinners,” his genre‑bending vampire epic, has 16 nominations — more than any film in the history of the Oscars — spanning best picture, directing, three acting categories, screenplay, cinematography, editing, score, sound, production design, costume design, makeup and hairstyling, and nearly every major craft field. “One Battle After Another,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s war‑time character study, follows with 13 nominations, including best picture, best director and best actor for Leonardo DiCaprio, plus a deep bench of below‑the‑line recognition in writing, image, sound and design. “Weapons” rounds out the studio’s campaign with a cluster of technical nods that push Warner Bros. to that formidable 30‑nomination summit.
For Harlem’s own Teyana Taylor, this season is something else entirely: a first. Taylor has earned her first Oscar nomination for best supporting actress for her turn as Perfidia in “One Battle After Another,” a supporting role that channels uptown steel and softness in equal measure. She has long described herself as “a Harlem girl through and through,” raised in the St. Nicholas Houses and shaped by a neighborhood where, as she’s put it, you learn early to hustle hard, shine bright and never apologize for taking up space.
Taken alone, those numbers tell a familiar Hollywood story of power consolidated around a handful of event movies. “Sinners” has done something the Academy has not often allowed genre films to do in the modern era — blow past the informal line between “prestige” and “popcorn.” By surfacing in essentially every branch where it could plausibly contend, and by surpassing the 14‑nomination high‑water mark long shared by “All About Eve,” “Titanic” and “La La Land,” it has become the gravitational center of this year’s race.
The BAFTA Film Awards, held weeks before the Oscars, seemed to confirm that trajectory. “Sinners” arrived in London with 13 nominations, the most ever for a film directed by a person of African descent at those awards, and left with three trophies: supporting actress for Wunmi Mosaku, original screenplay for Coogler and original score for Ludwig Göransson. Those wins made it the most decorated film by such a director in BAFTA history, nudging past the record once held by “12 Years a Slave.” They also helped set the stage for another milestone: costume designer Ruth E. Carter’s latest Oscar nomination for “Sinners” makes her the most‑nominated Black woman in Academy Awards history, with five nods across her career and two prior wins for the “Black Panther” films.
For all the attention they get, the BAFTAs are more barometer than blueprint. Their winners sometimes line up with the Oscars, but just as often they don’t, especially in best picture, where local tastes and voting rules can tilt toward more British‑leaning choices. What they reliably offer is momentum and framing: a best film/director sweep, as with “One Battle After Another,” signals strength with international and craft voters, while a historic win like Coogler’s screenplay prize for “Sinners” shows how much respect a film commands across the Atlantic. The Academy isn’t bound to follow BAFTA’s lead, but it walks into final voting with those results — and the headlines around them — very much in the air.
But what shook the BAFTAs this year was a scandal that hit like the proverbial reel dropping to the floor. Early in the BAFTA telecast, “Sinners” stars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo walked onstage at London’s Royal Festival Hall to present the first award of the night, for visual effects. As they began their scripted banter, a voice from the audience cut through the hall with the N‑word — sharp, loud, unmistakable. Gasps rippled through the crowd as the slur rang out from John Davidson’s seat, loud enough to be picked up by microphones and cameras scanning the room. Notably, Jordan and Lindo, professionals to their core and front‑facing representatives of “Sinners” and, by extension, Warner Bros.’ record‑setting season, finished their segment without breaking stride. The ceremony moved on, but the room did not; the tone of the evening changed, and the world took a pause, as it should.
The man who shouted the slur was not a random heckler. He is John Davidson, a Tourette’s syndrome activist from Scotland whose life story inspired “I Swear,” a film that was itself in contention that night. A public face of the condition in Britain, Davidson has lived for decades with severe Tourette’s syndrome and earned an MBE in 2019 for his work supporting people with Tourette’s and their families. BAFTA invited him as a guest in connection with “I Swear,” and before the show, organizers and the film’s team had discussed the likelihood that he would vocalize involuntary expletives, including potentially offensive language, as part of his tics. Throughout the evening those tics flared: he shouted “shut the f— up” and other obscenities at various points, drawing uneasy laughter and visible discomfort from attendees who had been warned in the abstract but were still unprepared for the reality of hearing those outbursts ricocheting around a room built for composure.
The next morning, Davidson issued a statement describing himself as “deeply mortified” that anyone might think the slur was intentional. He emphasized that his use of the word was an involuntary vocal tic, part of what clinicians call “complex tics” that can latch onto phrases he does not choose and does not endorse. He said he had left the ceremony early because he could see the distress around him and that the incident was “the opposite” of what he has tried to do with his life’s work — promoting understanding and dignity for people with Tourette’s syndrome rather than causing harm.
There’s a childhood saying that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” That has always been nonsense of the highest order. Words, when they lodge in the minds of racists and the willfully ignorant, can become as deadly as the bullet, the gun and the finger that pulls the trigger. That is why the world’s response to this slip of the “N” word is not overblown; it is warranted. We should treat it with the same urgency as a child sprinting through the house with something sharp in their hand. You don’t wait for the blood to prove the danger. You recognize the risk and move — fast.
BAFTA and the BBC then made decisions that pushed the moment from excruciating to emblematic. Host Alan Cumming returned to the subject later in the broadcast, thanking the audience for their “understanding” and referring again to the involuntary vocalizations of a guest with Tourette’s, but he did not name Davidson or explicitly acknowledge that a racial slur had been shouted at two African American actors onstage.
Hannah Beachler, the “Sinners” production designer, later wrote that the slur, or similarly charged tics, occurred three times over the course of the evening, including once directed at her, and that the apology offered from the stage “made it worse” by flattening what had happened into a generic aside. In the hours between taping and broadcast, representatives of Warner Bros. raised the alarm with BAFTA officials, voicing concern about the slur and “other incidents” involving Davidson, and asked that the N‑word be removed from the BBC’s delayed telecast. When the edited ceremony finally aired, the word was still there.
The BBC has since said the outburst was not clearly audible to producers in the truck at the time and that they only fully understood what had been said after the broadcast, when clips and accounts made the slur unmistakable. The corporation issued a statement acknowledging that “strong and offensive language” associated with Tourette’s tics had been broadcast and apologizing “for any offense caused.”
In a longer written response, BAFTA took “full responsibility” for placing guests “in a very difficult situation,” explicitly named Jordan and Lindo as people to whom it owed an apology, and pledged to review its procedures around accessibility, inclusion and crisis response at live events. Davidson, for his part, has questioned why he was seated so close to microphones and said that both BAFTA and the makers of “I Swear” knew in advance about the likelihood of severe tics and had indicated that any offensive outbursts would be edited out.
Final Oscar voting for the 98th ceremony runs from Feb. 26 to March 5, 2026. The 98th Academy Awards will be held on Sunday, March 15, 2026, at the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood, with the ceremony scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. Eastern / 4 p.m. Pacific. In the United States, the show will air live on ABC and stream on Hulu, and will also be available through live TV services that carry ABC, including Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV, DirecTV Stream and Fubo. Internationally, the broadcast will reach more than 200 territories via local partners and streaming platforms.
The Academy’s long‑running domestic broadcast partnership with Disney/ABC is set to continue through the 100th Oscars in 2028, with Disney’s Buena Vista arm maintaining international rights over that period. After that, a new multi‑year deal will give YouTube exclusive global digital rights to the Oscars beginning with the 101st ceremony in 2029 and running through 2033. Official information, full nominee lists and updates are available at the Academy’s website, Oscars.org, which also hosts nomination footage and an ASL livestream of the show.