This evening, at a 2026 Oscars ceremony that brought to a close the most up-in-the-air, undecided awards season in recent history, One Battle After Another—Paul Thomas Anderson’s 30-years-in-the-making portrayal/critique/tribute to the American revolutionary instinct—took many of the banner awards and won most of the jump balls with its main competition: Ryan Coogler’s brilliant vampiric genre analogy, Sinners.

One of a few notable exceptions (shout to Autumn Durald!) was the great Michael B. Jordan’s Best Actor win for his performance as twins in the film that almost certainly finished a close second for Best Picture. As both Smoke and Stack in Sinners, Jordan tackles two roles that demand pathos, and humor, and deeply emotional resonance. It’s a performance that’s destined to age well and it deepens with repeated viewings, so it is perhaps not surprising his road to this award was anything but conventional, with little to no precedent in Oscar history. Jordan was the first actor to ever win the award for playing twins, and the sixth Black man to ever win Best Actor. So let’s briefly analyze the tape.

It would have been difficult to predict Jordan as an Academy Award winner two months ago. He has long been one of those actors that make you actually question what great acting actually is, and I’m not alone in that impression. I have long held that he blew the late, great Chadwick Boseman off the screen in Black Panther, making good on the raw, unbridled star power that was there as far back as his days as Wallace.

But as with any Oscar triumph, his win also has to be framed in the language of opportunity and circumstance. At the outset of 2026, in the space of a week, Timothée Chalamet picked up Best Actor at the Critics Choice Awards and the Golden Globes (where he won Best Male Actor in a Musical or Comedy, avoiding the Drama category where MBJ lost to Wagner Moura). Chalamet was coming off a hit performance at the end of 2024 where he essentially remade himself as Bob Dylan in a movie that somehow, miraculously resisted the pitfalls Boomer rock-god biopics always fall into.

Chalamet won the SAG for that performance then lost the Oscar to Adrien Brody for a decision many Oscar voters purportedly regretted by the time Brody’s historically-long speech concluded. Chalamet then followed it up with a once-buzzy $100m original period piece focused on a Jewish LES tenement ping pong player, a project built largely on Chalamet’s charisma. As of January 30th, six weeks ago, the ascendent star held a 93% probability of winning best actor on one venerable prognosticating website.

Since then, several significant events could be pointed to that could arguably explain how events played out for Chalamet and the critically acclaimed Marty Supreme, which went 0-9 at the Oscars. Four days before the nominations were announced, the New York Post relitigated the issue of an incident on the set of the nine-year-old Good Time that allegedly led to a rift between the Safdie brothers. Chalamet himself began to rankle Oscar traditionalists with his conceptual, Marty-like manipulation of the digital-media apparatus; by the end of a too-long awards season desperate for narrative fuel in the home stretch, we were arguing over whether he’d shown sufficient enthusiasm for ballet.

It will apparently take Chalamet a little longer—if not necessarily the decades it took his predecessors—to take home some hardware. We also have to pour out a little liquor here for Leonardo DiCaprio, a beloved lead in the film that largely won the night but took home 0 acting distinctions, and Wagner Moura, a dark horse whose miraculous Secret Agent (along with my beloved It Was Just An Accident) took home nothing.