Academy Wars: How did this season’s Oscar rhetoric get so toxic? | Oscars 2026

Around the fifth day of debate over what Timothée Chalamet said and/or meant about opera and ballet, it’s starting to look like the 2025-2026 Oscar season has actually dragged on for the past 17 years.

Voting for the 98th annual Academy Awards ended on March 5, but that didn’t stop the Internet from coming up with a host of attempts to create a buzz; An interview in which Chalamet casually referred to ballet and opera as potentially endangered (and perhaps not particularly relevant) art forms was actually conducted a few weeks ago in a conversation with fellow actor Matthew McConaughey. But it was at the close of voting on Thursday when the clip began to spread quickly online and objections poured in. This was quickly followed by counter-accusations that the majority of people criticizing Chalamet, who are campaigning for Best Actor in Marty Supreme, were not themselves from ballet or opera, especially in recent times.

At least no one asked Chalamet how he felt about the stage show “Cats.” Around the same time that the young actor was enduring hell from the country’s angry mob of alleged opera fans, another clip from earlier in the Oscar season resurfaced. In it, Jessie Buckley, nominated for Best Actress for her role as the grieving mother (and William Shakespeare’s wooden wife) in Hamnet, discusses her supposed hatred of cats — the animal, not the show. She hinted at the latter when she later claimed on the Tonight Show that she was actually a “cat lover,” which didn’t quite line up with her joke about giving her cat-owning future husband a “them or me” ultimatum.

More details: Why on earth do we know any of this? If we must know, why should we discuss it in a circle? Yes, a lot of this fake controversy is happening on social media, which has revolutionized the useless field of quick opinion-forming about short videos. But this has led to a lot of long articles (like this one, in fact!) dissecting these opinions, allowing the absurdities to spill over into the real world.

Chalamet’s comments might attract attention at any time of the year; He is one of the few movie stars under 40 years old. However, Buckley only gets this attention because of her Oscar nomination. Even her new, unrelated movie Bride! It has been largely debated over whether she qualifies as Norbit (named after the Eddie Murphy film, a poor embarrassment released during Oscar season that supposedly stymies the possibility of the star receiving awards for more notable work — something that appears to have happened, at best, once, or, more realistically, never happened). Even praise for something can be an invitation to sniping. Last week, I posted on social media that I admired Leonardo DiCaprio’s understated work in films including Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Killers of the Flower Moon, and current contender Battle After Battle, and expressed mild regret that he wouldn’t get an Oscar for any of them. It broke the containment policy, prompting numerous responses that implied that praising DiCaprio meant depriving Michael B. Jordan of deserved attention (whose potential win she specifically described as “exciting”).

This may not be the most spiteful Oscar campaign season ever; There are fewer (though not zero!) accusations that liking a particular film indicates deep-rooted racism, and there will always be an end to awards-related corruption now that Harvey Weinstein has been jailed for his other, worse crimes. However, it may be the most stressful Oscar cycle in a long time.

Moreover, it is strange that a year in which the two most decorated films of “Sinners” and “Battle After Battle” — films so popular and so accessible — could inspire such endless, depressing rhetoric. Part of that is due to a coincidence of timing: In the early 2000s, the show moved from late March to late February, sometimes extending into early March. In the post-pandemic years, it’s been allowed to slide back into the second half of March, including many recent celebrations since 2003, when the volatility of content hasn’t been as relentless (and even then, the season seemed to swell by arriving around the second quarter of the following year; then moving into February). The combination of extended Oscar season and social media’s tendency to act as an outlet for the stress of a real world burnout will naturally lead to some unhealthy fixations, where pleasant distraction quickly turns into misplaced anger overflowing at the screwed-up state of the world.

But the generally high quality of this year’s nominees also appears to be influencing the discourse in an unexpected way. Most Oscar seasons find some sort of villain emerging once the nominations are over. Last year, for example, the widespread bewilderment that many critics felt about the Academy’s embrace of Emilia Perez was exacerbated when people found damaging social media posts from Best Actress nominee Carla Sofía Gascón; The synergy between the bad emotions was almost perfect. The previous year, star writer-director Bradley Cooper had come under some fire for wanting an Oscar too much. Some ultimately found the overall sweep of Everything Everywhere and Everywhere at Once a bit oppressive, and of course the reactionary goofiness of Green Book made for an ideal Oscar-winning villain. These beefs are often large in size but ultimately understandable. Even the bizarre 2016-era froth that La La Land, by virtue of starring two white people and being released in close proximity to Moonlight, was essentially an expression of Donald Trump-style nationalism, was, if not entirely plausible, at least the product of support for a small-scale indie film taking on a blockbuster Hollywood musical (even if La La Land’s budget and scope were modest by big-studio standards, and it didn’t actually come from them).

Now, faced with a group of nominees that by most standards lack the blatant embarrassment of Green Book, it seems a lot of moviegoers are spoiling the fight anyway. Some of this comes from the Sinners’ online fandom; These days, you can’t become a cultural phenomenon (which Ryan Coogler’s vampire drama certainly is) without attracting hardcore fans who view anything less than complete domination as insufficiently respectful, representative of society’s greater ills. In other words, liking another movie more than Sinners is exhausting. We call it the Swift effect.

But it’s not just sinners who contribute to feelings of exhausting toxicity. I’ve been mystified when I’ve seen some of my fellow critics riffing on films like Hamnet, Frankenstein, and Train Dreams, and trying to create a sense that these are, in fact, blunders on par with the worst Oscar films of years past. Obviously everyone is entitled to their opinion, but the arrangement of these three films in particular to the execution team (especially when the expensive conceit of F1 is in there!) feels like an arched left-wing Letterboxd code that I can’t decipher; I’m just supposed to know that these things look terrible. (Train Dreams in particular inspired not so much the many impressive sweeping cases against it as it inspired a lot of indignation in the back of the classroom after the fact.) Are you guys really mad at the raw scale of Buckley’s grief parody? Or Guillermo del Toro creating a lavish Frankenstein adaptation of his dreams? Isn’t getting angry about the Oscars an option?

And in another week it will be; It’s hard to imagine lasting rage over the potential victory of either One Battle After Another or Sinners (despite the fanbase of the latter). Either would be a top-tier Best Picture pick, and how unusual it is that both come not just from a major studio, but from the same major studio — Warner Bros., which is planning to merge with Paramount. Do this studio’s Oscar nominations count for this year? zero. Don’t expect any more of Coogler or Paul Thomas Anderson doing whatever they want under David Ellison of Paramount; The strangest thing about this year’s endless Oscar rhetoric is its failure to acknowledge how bad the awards might look in a few years. In this sense, Chalamet is not wrong. In a few years, an Oscar-winning box office hit from a major studio may seem more like a celebrity ballet performance than a widespread cultural phenomenon.