The 98th Academy Awards will air live on ABC and stream simultaneously on Hulu on Sunday, March 15, 2026, with Conan O'Brien hosting, and the nominations announced on January 22 already made it a television story: Ryan Coogler's Sinners earned 16 nominations, the most for any film in Oscar history, per the Associated Press, January 22, 2026.
The rest of the field chases it: One Battle After Another took 13 nominations, Frankenstein, Marty Supreme and Sentimental Value took nine each, and Hamnet took eight, per the AP nominees list, January 22, 2026. But for the television business, the more telling number is the simulcast itself — the film industry's biggest night is now jointly owned by a broadcast network and its sister streamer, a bundling logic that has reshaped every major awards telecast.
Why is the Oscars a TV story?
Because the broadcast is the product. The Academy sells a live event; ABC turns it into advertising inventory; and the simultaneous Hulu feed extends that inventory to viewers who no longer touch an antenna. Awards shows are among the last reliably mass-audience broadcasts left — the same logic that pushed the Emmys onto NBC and Peacock and the Globes onto CBS and Paramount+ on January 11, 2026. When the Golden Globes drew 8.7 million viewers that night, down roughly 7 percent year over year, per the AP, the message for the Oscars was that even appointment television keeps shrinking, and the streamer feed is no longer a bonus but the growth surface.
What does the Sinners record signal?
A distribution story, again. Sinners streams on HBO Max, per the AP, January 2026 — meaning the most-nominated film in Oscar history is, for most viewers, a television program you can start tonight. The theatrical window has become the trailer; the streaming catalog is where the audience actually meets the film. That is why the January 22 nominations mattered to two industries at once: Hollywood counts statuettes, but television counts the March 15 audience, and increasingly the two counts describe the same asset.
The bet ABC is making is that a record-setting field and a returning host can stabilize a telecast whose ratings have been a decade-long slide. The answer arrives March 15. Whatever the number, the broadcast will be judged the way every broadcast is judged now — not against film history, but against television's shrinking live median.
For more context, read Emmys 2026: Submission Season Ends and the Storylines Are Set.
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For more context, read golden globes 2026.