Oscars 2026: The movies were political, so why weren’t the speeches?

March 16, 2026 — 3:58pm

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If there’s a key takeaway from this year’s Oscars ceremony, it’s how politics featured – or rather, didn’t.

The two biggest winners were One Battle After Another, which won six awards, and Sinners with four. Both are deeply political films – the former overtly so, the latter allegorically but still unmistakably political.

Throw Jessie Buckley’s win into the mix for Hamnet, a film that is in its own way quite profoundly political, and you’ve got a triumvirate of movies that have a lot to say about some of the biggest issues of the moment: the rise of the Christian right in American politics and the usurpation of democracy; the deep-seated racism in American cultural and economic life; a woman’s right to control her body; and the transformative power of art.

Coupled with the mad state of the world in which we find ourselves, wars raging, economic disparity growing, democracy under assault and the extremist right on the rise seemingly everywhere, you might have expected more than the average round of speechifying at the........

© Brisbane Times