Casting Takes the Oscar Stage as Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘One Battle After Another’ Sweeps the 98th Academy Awards

Cassandra Kulukundis walked onto the Dolby Theatre stage Sunday night and did something no one in her profession had done in 98 years of Academy Awards history.

Clutching a gold statuette for the first-ever Oscar in casting, she dedicated it not to herself but to colleagues who never got that chance.

“I dedicate this to the casting directors who never got the chance to get up here,” she said, accepting the Academy Award for Achievement in Casting for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.

Minutes later, that film completed a sweep that defined the 98th Academy Awards in Los Angeles, winning best picture and five other prizes — including best director and best adapted screenplay for Anderson — and turning the 2026 ceremony into both a long-awaited coronation and a quiet reordering of who gets credit in Hollywood.

The Sunday night broadcast on ABC, hosted for a second year by Conan O’Brien, honored films released in 2025 and unfolded under what O’Brien called a cloud of global unease. From the stage, he described the ceremony as a tribute not only to cinema but to “global artistry, collaboration, patience, resilience and that rarest of qualities today – optimism.”

A coronation for Anderson, a record for Warner Bros.

One Battle After Another, a darkly comic political action thriller from Warner Bros., entered the night with 13 nominations and left with six wins, the most of any film.

The movie, written and directed by Anderson and loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a washed-up former revolutionary drawn back into conflict when a long-buried enemy resurfaces. The ensemble includes Chase Infiniti as his daughter, Sean Penn as a hard-line Army colonel driven by white supremacist ideology, and Benicio Del Toro as an enigmatic karate instructor who shelters immigrants.

The film’s best picture win capped an awards-season run in which it topped major critics’ groups and briefly became 2025’s highest-rated film on Metacritic. It has earned more than $200 million worldwide, making it Anderson’s highest-grossing feature.

For Anderson, 55, the night marked a career milestone. After years of nominations for films including Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, he took the stage for his first competitive Oscars, winning for directing, adapted screenplay and as a producer on best picture.

The broader haul cemented Warner Bros. as the studio of the night. Between One Battle After Another, Ryan Coogler’s Southern vampire drama Sinners and the thriller Weapons, the studio collected 11 Oscars, tying the all-time record for most wins by a single company in one year.

Sinners led all nominees with 16 nods, the most in Academy history, and won four awards, including best actor for Michael B. Jordan, best original screenplay for Coogler and best cinematography. Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography victory made her the first woman to win in that category.

Jessie Buckley won best actress for Hamnet, and Amy Madigan took best supporting actress for Weapons, the first award presented on the telecast.

A new Oscar for a long-ignored craft

The night’s most historic development came in a category that did not exist two years ago.

In February 2024, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors voted to establish an annual award for achievement in casting, beginning with films released in 2025. It is the first new competitive Oscar category since best animated feature was introduced for 2001 releases.

“Casting directors play an essential role in filmmaking, and as the Academy evolves, we are proud to add casting to the disciplines that we recognize and celebrate,” Academy chief executive Bill Kramer and president Janet Yang said when the category was announced.

The move followed decades of lobbying by casting professionals. For much of the studio era, casting was treated as clerical work, often uncredited. Casting director Lynn Stalmaster was one of the first to receive on-screen credit, in 1968’s The Thomas Crown Affair, and did not receive an honorary Oscar for his career until 2016. A proposal to add a casting category was rejected in 1999.

The Academy created a Casting Directors Branch in 2013, but until this year it remained the only branch without its own competitive award. Television’s Emmy Awards have long honored casting, and Britain’s BAFTA film awards debuted a casting prize in 2020.

“This is something the casting community has been hoping for 30 years,” branch governor Richard Hicks said in an interview ahead of the show. “We’re finally at the moment where casting is recognized as a craft alongside all of the others.”

Under the new rules, only films eligible for best picture can compete for the casting Oscar. Members of the Casting Directors Branch vote to create a 10-film shortlist, then participate in a “bake-off” process that includes written submissions, cast breakdowns and reels of scenes. The full Academy then votes on the final winner.

The inaugural nominees were One Battle After Another (Cassandra Kulukundis), Sinners (Francine Maisler), Hamnet (Nina Gold), Marty Supreme (Jennifer Venditti) and The Secret Agent (Gabriel Domingues). Four of the five nominees were women, reflecting a field that is heavily female.

What casting recognition looks like in practice

For observers inside the industry, Kulukundis’ win was as much about a body of work as a single film. She has cast all of Anderson’s features, helping to define his reputation for sprawling, idiosyncratic ensembles.

On One Battle After Another, the assignment was unusually complex. The script demanded a large cast spanning former radicals, soldiers, federal agents and communities affected by state violence, all set against a heightened but politically specific version of the United States.

Kulukundis and her team mixed marquee names with nonprofessionals and lesser-known performers. She sought out real immigrants, skateboarders, tattoo artists and veterans to populate the film’s crowded frames, aiming to avoid what she described in one interview as “overkill” from an overload of recognizable faces.

The search for Willa, DiCaprio’s on-screen daughter, took months. Kulukundis scoured martial arts tournaments, dojos and dance studios before finding a video of Chase Infiniti performing with a K-pop dance group online.

“As great as all those girls were, my eyes just zeroed on her and I was like, that one. That’s the one I want,” she recalled.

The casting community pointed to such decisions as examples of why the job is more than pairing stars with roles. By choosing who appears in crowd scenes, who occupies supporting parts and who is given a chance to break out, casting directors help shape a film’s social and cultural texture and determine which performers are visible in the industry.

Francine Maisler, nominated for Sinners, called the new category “a celebration for all of us and those who came before us, the architects of casting.”

Recognition — and limits — for below-the-line work

For the Academy, the casting Oscar fits a broader reexamination of how it treats technical and craft categories. Along with the new award, the Board of Governors has approved a future Oscar for achievement in stunt design, set to debut at the 100th Academy Awards for films released in 2027.

Those moves come as Hollywood wrestles with how to credit creative labor in an era of technological change. In recent rule updates, the Academy issued guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence and tightened viewing requirements for voters in categories including casting. By elevating professions built on human judgment and coordination — such as casting and stunts — the organization is drawing clearer lines around roles it sees as creative authorship.

Yet Sunday’s broadcast also underscored the limits of that shift. Some viewers and craft workers expressed frustration on social media that speeches from below-the-line winners, including Kulukundis, were cut short to keep the telecast within its time slot while comedy segments and musical numbers ran at length. Critics argued that the editing suggested that even as new categories are added, craftspeople remain secondary on the show’s biggest stage.

Politics, representation and what comes next

The films that dominated the 98th Oscars placed questions of power and identity at their center. One Battle After Another follows multi-generational activists confronting an authoritarian, racist state. Anderson has said he wrote the movie partly as an apology to his children for the “housekeeping mess we left in this world,” citing concerns about political instability and climate.

Sinners, with its Black-led cast and horror framework, pushed a genre that has historically struggled for awards recognition into the middle of the Oscar race.

At the same time, One Battle After Another faced criticism from some commentators over its portrayal of Black women, including a character played by Teyana Taylor. Those concerns surfaced in the press room even on the night of Anderson’s triumph, reflecting ongoing debates over whose perspectives are centered in prestige filmmaking.

For casting directors, the new Oscar is unlikely to resolve those questions. But many see it as a step toward more visibility and leverage in conversations about who gets hired and how stories are populated.

A report from the Women’s Media Center noted that the first year of the casting category added several women to the roster of non-acting nominees, slightly improving overall representation behind the camera even as other craft categories remained male-dominated.

As the audience filed out of the Dolby Theatre late Sunday, Anderson’s thriller had secured its place in Oscar history, and Kulukundis’ name had been etched alongside the first winners in a new branch of the record books. For an industry contending with technological disruption, labor battles and pressure to diversify both stories and storytellers, the 98th Academy Awards suggested that the question is no longer only which films win — but which once-invisible artisans will be seen as filmmakers in their own right.