Oscars 2026: The wildest moments from the 98th Academy Awards

The beauty of live television is that absolutely anything can happen, and nowhere is that more reliably, terrifyingly true than at the Oscars. The Academy Awards like to present themselves as the pinnacle of Hollywood elegance, and yet the ceremony has an almost proud history of producing moments that range from the benignly chaotic like the the La La Land / Moonlight Best Picture debacle to the genuinely unhinged, like Will Smith walking up on stage and slapping the hell out of Chris Rock in front of every famous person on earth. The point is: Something is always going to happen. This year, however, was a relatively quiet night, the biggest event being the seventh-ever tie in Oscars history for Live-Action Short Film. To kick things off, Kevin O'Leary, the Shark Tank businessman and supporting star of Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme, arrived on the red carpet and let everyone know he put a $1,000 bet on Timothée Chalamet winning Best Actor through the infamous prediction market site Kalshi. Unsurprisingly, this has now led to a snowball effect of people betting against Chalamet. In what can only be described as a bit that had absolutely no business working as well as it did, Oscars ho