What an absolutely glimmering field of writing we had this year. Robert Kaplow’s chamber-piece self-immolation in Blue Moon; Jafar Panahi’s moral-pressure cooker It Was Just an Accident; Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie’s feral ambition machine Marty Supreme; Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt’s exquisitely bruised family drama Sentimental Value; and Ryan Coogler’s mythmaking, genre-splicing Sinners. All such that when the winner was read, as a statement about which kind of cinematic imagination the Academy most wanted to reward: the barbed and intimate, the politically exacting, the manic and destabilized, or the grandly world-building.
The 98th Academy Awards aired live from the Dolby Theatre on Sunday, March 15, at 7 p.m. ET on ABC.
What was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 2026 Oscars?
Blue Moon
It Was Just an Accident
Marty Supreme
Sentimental Value
Sinners
What won Best Original Screenplay at the 2026 Oscars?
Sinners won Best Original Screenplay at the 2026 Oscars.
When Sinners won Original Screenplay, the Academy would have rewarded the script that built the largest, most seductive, and most fully inhabited movie-world in the category. Ryan Coogler’s premise—twin brothers returning home only to find a greater evil waiting for them—was just the doorway. The screenplay’s real force was that it treated genre as cosmology. Horror, Southern Gothic, period drama, musical inheritance, racial memory, religious dread: all of it moved through the same bloodstream. That is what would have made the win feel so decisive. Sinners felt original in the older, more thrilling sense: a film that arrived with its own weather, its own mythology, its own internal music. Had it won here, the category would have gone to the script that most convincingly turned invention into a total environment rather than a premise.
Best Original Screenplay 2026 Oscars FAQ
What won Best Original Screenplay at the 2026 Oscars?
Sinners won Best Original Screenplay at the 2026 Oscars.
What was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 2026 Oscars?
Sinners, Marty Supreme, It Was Just an Accident, Blue Moon and Sentimental Value were nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 2026 Oscars.
