The 98th Academy Awards are being held Sunday night at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Follow along for live updates and analysis from the Star’s culture reporters and critics.
13 mins ago
What to expect from the ‘Sinners’ vs. ‘One Battle After Another’ showdown
Good morning! I’m Joshua Chong, senior arts critic for the Toronto Star and I’ll be with you throughout the day and into the evening for the Star’s coverage of the 98th Academy Awards.
The Oscars mark the culmination of a months-long awards season that many expected to be a coronation for the Black comedy thriller “One Battle After Another,” but which has narrowed in recent weeks into a competitive two-horse race between Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed film and Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” a southern vampire epic starring Michael B. Jordan.
Coogler’s film, which enters the evening with a leading 16 nominations, can become the most awarded film in Academy history if it manages to pick up 12 statuettes. It is, however, expected to face stiff competition from “One Battle After Another,” which received 13 nods, the second-most nominations this year.
Follow this page for live coverage throughout the day. I’ll also be joined later this evening by my colleagues Briony Smith, Kristjan Lautens, David Friend and Annika Lautens, when we’ll be bringing you minute-by-minute news and analysis of the ceremony and red carpet.
13 mins ago
Who is hosting this year’s Oscars?
Academy Awards host Conan O’Brien is interviewed after rolling out the red carpet for Sunday’s Oscars telecast.
Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
Conan O’Brien is set to host the Oscars for the second consecutive year. The American comedian and longtime TV personality is perhaps best known for his former late-night talk shows including “Conan” and “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.”
Last March, he led the awards ceremony to its biggest viewership in five years (19.69 million people tuned in for the show), but received mostly mixed reviews for his performance. Though O’Brien previously said he would not hesitate to wade into politics, he largely played it safe as emcee, poking fun at Netflix price increases and Canadian director Denis Villeneuve for his no-cellphones-on-set policy, but not once mentioning U.S. President Donald Trump by name.
O’Brien, however, was signed on to host this year’s Oscars just two weeks after his performance last year. “I don’t care how long someone has been in the business of making people laugh: getting a laugh is as exciting now at my age as it was when I was 12,” he said in a statement announcing his return. “It’s the same endorphins, the same chemicals, the same sense of ‘Oh, my God! I’m so glad that worked!’”
13 mins ago
How to watch the 2026 Oscars in Canada
The 98th Academy Awards, hosted by American comedian Conan O’Brien, will be held Sunday evening at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. The ceremony will begin at 7 p.m. ET and is expected to run for approximately three-and-a-half hours.
Canadians can watch the Oscars live on CTV and on Bell’s streaming service, Crave. Both will also air a half-hour red carpet show, beginning at 6:30 p.m., and a special edition of “Etalk,” live at the Oscars, beginning at 5:30 p.m.
Viewers looking to catch the entire Oscars red carpet will need to tune into the specialty channel E!, or stream it online at CTV.ca or Crave.
Updated March 12, 2026 at 2:25 p.m.
Oscars 2026: How to watch the movies up for best picture — and what our critics thought of them
By Star staff
This year’s nominees include “Bugonia,” “Marty Supreme,” “Hamnet” and “Frankenstein.”
Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features via AP; A24 via AP; Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features via AP; Ken Woroner/Netflix/TNS
Ten films will square off for Hollywood’s biggest prize on Sunday night during the 98th Academy Awards. Here’s how to watch all the movies nominated for best picture and what the Star’s film critics thought about each.
Bugonia
Stream it on Prime Video. Rent it on Apple TV or YouTube.
“Bugonia” wants to be a movie about a bunch of different things at once: the combatants and casualties of the culture war, the dangers of ideological echo chambers, the ambient despair tied to impending environmental collapse. Will Tracy writes like a nursing student trying and failing to tap a vein; he keeps jabbing until you’re prickly and irritable and wishing for somebody with more precision to show up and draw blood.
Read Adam Nayman’s full review of “Bugonia.”
F1
Stream it on Apple TV. Buy it on Prime Video or YouTube.
Brad Pitt has become Hollywood’s hero in a can, a reliable star who can be called upon to improve any story, like a pantry staple bolstering a weak stew. Once again, Pitt’s services are sorely needed and obligingly supplied in “F1 The Movie,” which plunks him into a vroom-vroom car and a story as messy as a kid’s toy box. The film is more like an extended ad for Formula One racing — and innumerable product placements — than it is narrative drama. But “F1” is a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced summer blockbuster directed by “Top Gun: Maverick” helmer Joseph Kosinski. We know going in that it’s about dazzling the eyes rather than the brain.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “F1.”
Frankenstein
Stream it on Netflix.
With “Frankenstein,” monster maestro Guillermo del Toro finally gets to tell the Mary Shelley horror story of his boyhood dreams. The Toronto-filmed epic is a thing of grotesque beauty, body horror of such operatic spectacle and emotional impact, it makes you want to applaud with two severed hands. A teenage Shelley wrote in the preface to her 1818 novel that her tale of a lonely humanoid pieced together from stolen corpses is more than “merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors.” Indeed it is, much more.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “Frankenstein.”
Hamnet
Rent it on Prime Video or YouTube.
Directed and co-written by Chloé Zhao, and adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel of historical imagination, “Hamnet” finds its soul in the story of Shakespeare’s lost son, whose name, interchangeable with Hamlet in the 16th century, echoes with grief and artistic realization. You want a challenge? Try keeping your eyes dry as the plague known as the Black Death casts its shadow and love yields to mourning, building to a third-act catharsis like no other movie in recent memory. Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal anchor an awards-worthy ensemble, conjuring magic, anguish and whispered secrets in a world trembling between history and legend.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “Hamnet.”
Marty Supreme
Rent it on Apple TV, YouTube or Prime Video.
Think of classic movie grifters, such as the characters played by Paul Newman in “The Hustler,” Robert Preston in “The Music Man” and Richard Dreyfuss in “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.” They’re mere shrimps of scamming compared to Timothée Chalamet’s title swindler in “Marty Supreme,” a pleasing tale of hubris in motion from Josh Safdie (“Uncut Gems”), a director who, both as a solo filmmaker and with his brother Benny, never saw a scoundrel he didn’t want to get to know better.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “Marty Supreme.”
One Battle After Another
Stream it on Crave. Rent it on Apple TV or Prime Video.
“One Battle After Another,” freely riffing on Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Vineland,” is a political satire-turned-urban warfare epic. If “The Master” was about spiritual combat and “There Will Be Blood” chronicled economic ruthlessness, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest plunges headlong into literal battle, punctuated by rat-a-tat gunfire, shouted recriminations and constant generational and ideological crossfire. It may be Anderson’s best film; it’s certainly his most violent.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “One Battle After Another.”
The Secret Agent
Stream it on Mubi. Rent it on Apple TV or Prime Video.
The title card at the beginning of Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent” identifies the film’s backdrop of Recife circa 1977 as a place of “great mischief.” Like everything else in this vivid period thriller, the phrase is laced with a wry and devastating understatement. “Mischief,” in this case, is a euphemism for widespread and dangerous institutional corruption, for the corrosion of the social order under an increasingly venal military dictatorship. It also serves, more happily, as a description of the director’s sensibility: if it’s possible for a movie to somehow be grave and playful simultaneously, “The Secret Agent” fits the bill.
Read Adam Nayman’s full review of “The Secret Agent.”
Sentimental Value
Stream it on Prime Video. Rent it on Apple TV.
Renate Reinsve and Elle Fanning are like two sides of a golden coin in Joachim Trier’s tangled family drama, in which a celebrated filmmaker (Stellan Skarsgård) tries to use his art to reconnect with the family he abandoned long ago. When his daughter (Reinsve), a stage actress, turns down a role in the film she deems too close for comfort, it’s taken up by an American star (Fanning), who doesn’t realize the doppelgänger dynamics she’s getting into. Fantastic performances across the board — especially by Reinsve and Fanning — and a keen sense of the meaning of the title make this film a bittersweet pleasure to watch.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “Sentimental Value.”
Sinners
Stream it on Crave. Rent it on YouTube, Apple TV or Prime Video.
“Sinners” was filmed in Louisiana, an appropriate locale given that it’s a gumbo of music and ideas. The movie takes its time getting going and then seems in a bit of a rush during its blood-soaked finale, but at no point is it just another vampire tale. This is horror with a sense of purpose and an appreciation of music and history, grooving the body and gnawing at the conscience even as it nibbles on the neck.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “Sinners.”
Train Dreams
Stream it on Netflix.
Clint Bentley, co-writer of the Oscar-nominated “Sing Sing,” returns with a bold, ravishing reimagining of Denis Johnson’s Pulitzer-nominated 2011 novella. What begins as a classic Western steadily deepens into frontier myth. The film breathes both tragedy and wonder, echoing hard truths and aching beauty of Thomas Hardy novels. Joel Edgerton gives a deeply felt portrayal of an ordinary man, Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker, who is caught between the wild and the civilized, watching his world transform faster than he can reckon.
Read Peter Howell’s full review of “Train Dreams.”
