Oscars 2026: How to Watch and Everything Else You Should Know

We're just a few days away from the 98th Academy Awards. Ahead of this year's Oscars celebrating 2025 in film, we're here to share how you can watch, plus break down the nominees, host, presenters and performers, and what's new for the 2026 ceremony.

Going into the show, Sinners leads the way with a record-breaking 16 nominations, beating the previously held 14-nomination record tie between All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land. One Battle After Another takes second place with 13 nominations.

Read on below for everything else you need to know about the Oscars.

The Oscars will take place on March 15, 2026, from the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles at the new time of 7pm ET/4pm PT/11pm GMT. The broadcast is expected to run for three hours, but you can almost certainly count on it going long.

The Oscars will be be televised on your local ABC station. It will also be streaming live on Hulu. (We're still a few years out from the Oscars on YouTube.) If you're interested in the pre-show arrivals and red carpet interviews, ABC's coverage will begin at 3:30pm ET/12:30pm PT and E!'s will kick off at 4pm ET/1pm PT.

Conan O'Brien – who also starred in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You alongside Best Actress nominee Rose Byrne – is hosting the Oscars for the second year in a row. O'Brien was announced as the 2026 host two weeks after the 2025 Oscars, saying in a statement, "The only reason I’m hosting the Oscars next year is that I want to hear Adrien Brody finish his speech.” To refresh your memory, Brody dragged on for nearly six minutes accepting the award for Best Actor for his role in The Brutalist.

"There'll be some explosions, CGI will be used," O'Brien told ABC News about Round 2. "I see this second Oscars as an opportunity to take things up a notch," especially now that he's well-informed on crucial standards and practices, like always keeping an Oscar statuette upright.

The Academy Awards are rolling out a new category for the first time since 2001's addition of Best Animated Feature Film: Achievement in Casting will get its debut after being announced in 2024. The award will go to a casting director, but the criteria for winning sounds unexpectedly more complicated than someone who can put together a list of top-notch actors. The first-ever nominees are:

• Nina Gold, Hamnet
• Jennifer Venditti, Marty Supreme
• Cassandra Kulukundis, One Battle after Another
• Gabriel Domingues, The Secret Agent
• Francine Maisler, Sinners

The next new category will come at the 2028 Oscars, when the Academy finally acknowledges stunts as the bone-breaking art form it is.

Presenters include: Will Arnett, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Robert Downey Jr., Anne Hathaway, Paul Mescal, Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Evans, Kumail Nanjiani, and Maya Rudolph. Last year's winners Adrien Brody, Kieran Culkin, Mikey Madison, and Zoe Saldaña, as well as 2025 nominee Demi Moore, are also among the group of presenters. Javier Bardem and Chase Infiniti, who starred respectively in F1 and One Battle After Another but did not receive individual nominations, will also present. (Infiniti's omission in the Supporting Actress race is considered one of the big snubs of this year's awards.)

The telecast will include two major "moments" that the show producers are calling "more than just performances — they expand into cinematic tributes that celebrate the relationship between music and storytelling and why these films resonated so deeply with audiences around the world." These are "Golden" from KPop Demon Hunters and "I Lied to You" from Sinners, both nominated for Best Original Song this year. (The other nominated tracks — "Train Dreams” from Best Picture nominee Train Dreams, “Dear Me” from the documentary Diane Warren: Restless, and “Sweet Dreams of Joy” from the documentary Viva Verdi! — will not be performed live.)

The singing voices behind Huntr/x — Ejae, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami — will perform "Golden," accompanied by "a fusion of traditional Korean instrumentalists and dance, celebrating the folklore and cultural inspiration that anchors the story behind this animated blockbuster."

Sinners' breakout star Miles Caton and singer-songwriter Raphael Saadiq will perform "I Lied To You," officially described as exploring the "role music plays in the film’s storytelling for a cinematic live moment." (Hopefully that means it attempts to replicate the electric, glorious fever dream of the film's scene the song comes from.) Blues musicians Buddy Guy and Bobby Rush, rapper Shaboozey, ballet dancer Misty Copeland, and actresses Li Jun Li and Jayme Lawson will join, along with musicians Brittany Howard of the Alabama Shakes, Eric Gales, Alice Smith, and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram.

Josh Groban and the Los Angeles Master Chorale will also perform, we'll speculate during the In Memoriam segment.

Read on for the nominees in some of the top categories, but you can check out the full list of nominees here.

• Bugonia
• F1
• Frankenstein
• Hamnet
• Marty Supreme
• One Battle after Another
• The Secret Agent
• Sentimental Value
• Sinners
• Train Dreams

• Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme
• Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle after Another
• Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon
• Michael B. Jordan, Sinners
• Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent

• Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
• Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
• Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue
• Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value
• Emma Stone, Bugonia

• Chloé Zhao, Hamnet
• Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme
• Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle after Another
• Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value
• Ryan Coogler, Sinners

Though the ballot is a lot of the same movies being celebrated in many categories, a clear winner hasn't pulled ahead in many of the key races, with a few exceptions. KPop Demon Hunters definitely has Best Animated Feature Film in the bag. Best Actress will probably go to Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare's grieving wife Agnes in Hamnet, despite the earned fervor around Rose Byrne's performance in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. The screenplay awards will repesctively go to Ryan Coogler and Paul Thomas Anderson for Best Original and Best Adapted. Outside of that, other categories are a coin toss, usually between One Battle After Another and Sinners.

Though Timothée Chalamet was practically the presumptive winner in Best Actor as a ping pong hustler in Marty Supreme a few months ago, taking the early win at the Golden Globes, that stance has position has cooled; the SAG Award went to Michael B. Jordan for his twin brothers, Stack and Smoke, from Sinners. Another key win from the Actor Awards was Amy Madigan taking the trophy for Supporting Actress as Aunt Gladys in Weapons, which people have taken as an indicator of an impending Oscars win over Teyana Taylor's revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills in One Battle After Another.

There are two, kind of. First of all, this is the first year where AMPAS voters must attest to having actually seen all of the films they're voting on, a new rule imposed for the first time (!!) a few months after last year's awards. (Voters can log this after watching films through the Academy screening app, which would automatically track whether or not something has been played, or click a box that pledges they've seen it in a theater or by other means.)

The other one, closest to the ceremony and therefore the one that will live on in the Discourse up until the event, is the fact that Timothée Chalamet dissed opera and ballet, in the context of concern about the state of movie theaters.

"I admire people — and I've done it myself — who go on a talk show and say, ‘Hey, we've got to keep movie theaters alive, y'know, we've gotta keep this genre alive," he said during a Variety and CNN town Hall with his Interstellar co-star Matthew McConaughey. "And another part of me feels like if people want to see it, like Barbie, like Oppenheimer, they're going to go see it and go out of their way to be loud and proud about it. I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive,’ even though no one cares about this anymore. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership. I just took shots for no reason.”

"That's not a shot, I hear what you're saying," McConaughey responded.

The video clip started going viral late last week, nearly two weeks after it was originally posted — after the window for Oscars voting had closed on March 5. It won't directly impact his chances, but it's enough to rile patrons and providers of the fine arts: Many institutions, including the Metropolitan Opera, the English National Opera, and the Royal Ballet and Opera, posted rebuttals on social media praising their artisans or making a case for him to come to a show. Plenty more have fired back, calling his take shades of "disrespectul". The comments made their way to The View and Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, where Colin Jost quipped that Chalamet “made the comment on a press tour for his movie about... ping-pong.”

Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst, Instagram, and TikTok, and listen to his show, Talking Disney Magic.

Leanne Butkovic is an Editorial Project Manager at IGN, where they've also written about movies, TV, and games.