We know who won the Oscars: 41 separate individuals in 23 categories. But who won Oscar night? I was lucky enough to be on the ground in Los Angeles for the main event, which is always an invigorating mix of glamour and stress. (Trying to physically enter the Dolby Theatre remains a nightmare: Imagine trying to catch a flight, but half the metal detectors are closed, every TSA employee gives you different directions, and also Ana de Armas is there.) From my vantage point in Mezzanine Two, here’s who came out of Sunday night the biggest winners.
Mikey Madison
The 25-year-old Best Actress winner just became one of the most in-demand young stars in Hollywood, and she was the belle of the ball at the Neon after-party, even before she arrived. Everyone who stepped off the elevator was greeted by dozens of gawking, disappointed onlookers hoping to get the first glimpse of the woman of the hour. A frequently posed question at the party was what she might do next. Madison has yet to book her Anora follow-up, and THR reports that she’s got “offers for a Colleen Hoover adaptation and interest from the likes of Greta Gerwig.” One of those options sounds a lot better than the other to me, but what do I know? Given the range she showed in Anora, whatever she does will be fascinating.
Sean Baker
The quintessential indie auteur now has as many Oscars as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese combined. He enters uncharted territory: Other directors in his position immediately jumped to bigger, more ambitious projects, but that doesn’t seem like the path for a man who seems to value the freedom to work independently. (Which he attributes to his ability to live modestly: When Vulture profiled him in 2017, he was renting a $1,200-per-month apartment in West Hollywood.) Baker doesn’t seem likely to change his ways, and whether he becomes an awards-season mainstay, or the Academy treats Anora as a one-off, he’s proven he can win on his own terms and make Oscar history in the process.
International Voters
By opening with a montage of Hollywood playing itself, and bringing local firefighters onstage to deliver roasts, Sunday night’s ceremony sought to locate these Oscars as a specifically Los Angeles tradition. The results told a different story, as the Academy’s international voters swayed all three of the specialty feature categories. You saw this most obviously in Animated Feature, where the A-list voice cast of The Wild Robot lost out to the micro-budget Latvian entry, Flow, a film with no human voices at all. But the global influence was also felt in Documentary Feature. The Hollywood pick in the race was arguably Porcelain War, which had won the Directors Guild prize and been nominated by the Producers Guild. It lost the Oscar to No Other Land, which had received multiple stateside critics awards, but at the industry precursors was mainly recognized at international ceremonies like the European Film Awards. (As the doc’s rep reminded me in great detail the night before the ceremony, this disparity was slightly misleading, since No Other Land was ineligible at the PGAs and wasn’t submitted for the DGAs.)
It’s a little trickier to pinpoint the influence of non-U.S. voters in International Feature, of course, since all of those films are theoretically operating on equal footing. But even considering all the confounding variables behind I’m Still Here upsetting Emilia Pérez, I do think it’s notable that the film with two huge American stars, whose campaign was bankrolled by Netflix’s deep pockets, nevertheless lost to a movie with none of those advantages. Or, to take it further, that a film with an outsider’s gaze on Latin America lost to a homegrown project that became a cause célèbre. The international lean was also responsible for the surprising results in the Shorts categories, where both the Animated and Live-Action winners overcame the Academy’s traditional preference for English-language nominees.
Those Los Angeles firefighters
I saw more than one Oscars attendee shoot their shot with a first responder after the ceremony had wrapped. But the firefighters stayed professional. At the Governors Ball, I ran into a few who were alarmed by the faint scent of smoke. They relaxed once they determined the source — a coal-fired pizza oven.
Conan O’Brien
Ratings were up. Reviews were positive. Much credit should go to the lanky redhead, who navigated the tricky tone of the post-wildfire Oscars as nimbly as any host of the 21st century could have. They’ve got to invite him back, right? Per the Ankler’s Katey Rich, Academy president Janet Yang seems to agree.
Brazilians
After seeing what happened to the last Oscar hopeful to cross them, contenders will likely keep Brazil’s name out of their mouth from now on. Oscar night gave the South Americans one hell of a Carnival after I’m Still Here took International Feature, and now they’re also getting a new museum.
Georgina Chapman’s Wikipedia page
Once she caught that gum, I’m sure the numbers went through the roof.
Monica Barbaro
The year’s other big discovery, who catapulted from obscurity to arguably the people’s favorite in Supporting Actress. (Give or take an Ariana Grande.) It’s been a long wait for Barbaro, who was cast in Top Gun: Maverick six and a half years ago. Now it’s paid off with, I’ve heard, a higher quote, and seemingly another bonus as well.
TweetDeleter.com
For this and similar services, the Karla Sofía Gascón scandal was the best advertising money couldn’t buy.
Me
The writer Paul McLeod once told a story about a Canadian journalist who happened to be in Manhattan on 9/11. Unfortunately, she was a style reporter in town for Fashion Week, which meant the copy she filed was light on human interest, and heavy on details about which retail stores were closed. I must confess that, at times this season, I could relate to that poor woman. Assessing the cultural impact of the L.A. wildfires? Adjudicating the ethics of artificial intelligence? I wasn’t built for this!
The Gascón controversy put me on firmer ground, since if there’s one thing I’ve learned from 15 years in digital media, it’s how to write about bad tweets. But I was not alone in feeling the heaviness of this season. Many of those I spoke to in Los Angeles last weekend felt similarly exhausted from the mess that overtook the race sometime around January. I spent Phase Two emailing so many awards strategists asking for comment on various internet backlashes that I began to feel like those political reporters who used to trail Mitt Romney asking “What about your gaffes?” For the first time in my career, a publicist I met at a pre-Oscar party mentioned that I seemed much nicer in person. Grim stuff.
Sunday night washed away all this. The mood was positive in the Dolby from the moment Ariana Grande stepped out to perform “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and the good feelings continued at the Governors Awards afterward: The show had run smoothly, no one got slapped, and the season had ended with the triumph of Anora, a movie that everyone seemed to have been rooting for. The vibes were immaculate at the Neon after-party, held at the Soho House off Sunset Boulevard, which I’m told is the place you book when you think you’re gonna win. (Oppenheimer’s party was there, as was La La Land’s.)
As those in attendance waited for Baker to finish walking his dog, I wound up on the dance floor with some journalist friends, alongside actors Yura Borisov, Mark Eydelshteyn, and Lindsey Normington. The DJ played “Greatest Day (Robin Shultz Rework)” by Take That ft. Calum Scott as Eydelshteyn pogoed like his life depended on it. Light up! She played it a second time. Then a third. Then a fourth. “It’s too bad the movie doesn’t have a second song,” I told my friends — at which point the DJ switched to the movie’s second song, t.A.T.u’s “All the Things She Said.” I danced like no one was watching, only to find out later that multiple people were watching.
More of What You Didn’t See on TV
One thing you’re reminded of when you attend the Oscars in-person is just how much of a TV production they are. I’ll always remember how the 2022 ceremony opened with Venus and Serena Williams addressing the camera with the crowd behind them — which meant that, for the Dolby audience, Hollywood’s biggest night kicked off with two women’s backs. The gap between the TV Oscars and the IRL Oscars felt particularly noticeable this year. Conan’s pre-commercial bumpers sounded really funny; we had no idea they were occurring. Deep into the show, Colman Domingo strode onstage for a toast. He did some pretty blatant Don Julio product placement, then commanded everyone in the room to get up and dance. Many of them did, though not without a little awkwardness. This must make for some weird TV, I thought, but then it turned out we were in a commercial break and none of it was being televised. The bit was purely for the benefit of us in the room.
Even more intriguing was something I learned from attending the Oscars rehearsals Saturday afternoon, an event that played out under levels of security fit for a sensitive government briefing. Journalists were allowed to report who was rehearsing, but — with two exceptions — not in which pairings, or which categories they were presenting. But we did get to see Da’Vine Joy Randolph run through her Supporting Actress presentation. There were two major takeaways: (1) Randolph was rocking a floral jumpsuit that looked incredibly comfy, and (2) while Sunday’s broadcast didn’t feature any clips for the supporting categories, the version we saw did include them. Here’s what they were:
Monica Barbaro: The “House of the Rising Sun” performance.
Ariana Grande: Spilling her big secret, that she was going to marry Fiyero.
Felicity Jones: Revealing that Guy Pearce’s character had gotten her a job interview.
Isabella Rossellini: Take a wild guess.
Zoe Saldaña: The beginning of “Todo y Nada.”
Why the producers seemingly decided to scrap these clips at the last minute will have to go in the file of unsolved Oscar mysteries, next to why the song “Pig Foot Pete” was nominated for Hellzapoppin’ despite not appearing in the film, and why Matthew McConaughey used his Best Actor speech to shout out a quote from the late Charles Laughton that no one is sure Laughton ever said.
Relive the Memories
➽ The Highs, Lows, and Whoas of the 2025 Oscars
➽ Why the Oscars Put a Ring on Anora
➽ How Demi Moore Lost to Mikey Madison
➽ The Oscars’ Most Pressing Cause Was the Movies Themselves
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