Photo by Harald Krichel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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Sean Penn achieved maximum impact at the 98th Academy Awards with minimum effort — at least in terms of attendance. Penn won Best Supporting Actor for One Battle After Another, tying the all-time male acting record with his third career Oscar, while being entirely absent from the Dolby Theatre. Presenter Kieran Culkin accepted the award and delivered a one-liner about Penn’s non-attendance that the crowd found both amusing and strangely fitting.
Penn’s three wins place him alongside Jack Nicholson, Walter Brennan, and Daniel Day-Lewis — the only male actors in Academy history to have won three acting awards. His previous victories came in the Best Actor category: Mystic River in 2004 and Milk in 2009. His shift to the supporting category for this latest win demonstrates a performer for whom labels and categories are secondary to the quality of the work.
In One Battle After Another, Penn gives what many critics described as the performance of the year — an obsessive, fanatical military officer whose certainty becomes a kind of madness. Director Paul Thomas Anderson built the film with precision and dark wit, and the Academy recognized that with both Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director. Anderson’s two wins were his first-ever, completing a landmark personal achievement to match the film’s success.
Conan O’Brien hosted the evening with a confident blend of humor and thoughtfulness. His opening monologue tackled artificial intelligence, global uncertainty, and the unifying power of cinema. He noted that nominees came from 31 countries across six continents — an unprecedented level of international diversity — and framed the evening as a global gathering rather than a Hollywood industry event.
Michael B. Jordan’s Best Actor victory for Sinners over Leonardo DiCaprio was one of the most talked-about results of the night. But the most iconic image of the 2026 Oscars was not a winner at the podium — it was the empty space where one should have been standing.
