The 98th edition of the film industry’s most important awards was held at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles —home of the gala since the beginning of the century— and was presented by Conan O’Brien for the second consecutive year.

Best Picture

Bugonia

From Yorgos Lanthimos

Frankenstein

From Guillermo del Toro

Marty Supreme

From Josh Safdie

One Battle After Another

From Paul Thomas Anderson

The Secret Agent

From Kleber Mendonça Filho

Sentimental Value

From Joachim Trier

Train Dreams

From Clint Bentley

Best Director

Best Actor

Best Actress

Best Supporting Actor

Best Supporting Actress

Best International Feature Film

Best Animated Feature

• Arco (Ugo Bienvenu, Félix de Givry, Sophia Mas, Natalie Portman)
• Elio (Mary Alice Drumm, Adrian Molina, Madelina Sharafian, Domee Shi)
• K-Pop Demon Hunters (Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang, Michelle L.M. Wong)
• Little Amélie (Claire LaCombe, Edwina Liard, Henri Magalon, Nidia Santiago, Maïlys Vallade)
• Zootopia 2 (Jared Bush, Byron Howard, Yvett Merino)

Best Documentary Feature Film

• The Perfect Neighbor (Geeta Gandbhir, Sam Bisbee, Nikon Kwantu, Alisa Payne)
• Mr. Nobody Against Putin
• Cutting Through Rocks (Sara Khaki & Mohammadreza Eyni)
• Come See Me In The Good Light (Ryan White, Jessica Hargrave, Tig Notaro & Stef Willen)
• The Alabama Solution (Andrew Jarecki & Charlotte Kaufman)

Best Original Screenplay

• Blue Moon (Robert Kaplow)
• Marty Supreme (Ronald Bronstein & Josh Safdie)
• Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier & Eskil Vogt)
• Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
• It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi, Nader Saïvar, Shadmehr Rastin & Mehdi Mahmoudian)

Best Adapted Screenplay

• Bugonia (Will Tracy)
• Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro)
• Hamnet (Maggie O’Farrell & Chloé Zhao)
• One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
• Train Dreams (Clint Bentley & Greg Kwedar)

Best Cinematography

• Frankenstein (Dan Laustsen)
• Marty Supreme (Darius Khondji)
• One Battle After Another (Michael Bauman)
• Sinners (Autumn Durald Arkapaw)
• Train Dreams (Adolpho Veloso)

Best Film Editing

• F1 (Stephen Mirrione)
• Sentimental Value (Olivier Coutté)
• Marty Supreme (Ronald Bronstein & Josh Safdie)
• One Battle After Another (Andy Jurgensen)
• Sinners (Michael P. Shawver)

Best Casting

• Hamnet (Nina Gold)
• Marty Supreme (Jennifer Venditti)
• One Battle After Another (Cassandra Kulukundis)
• The Secret Agent (Gabriel Domingues)
• Sinners (Francine Maisler)

Best Sound

• F1 (Gareth John, Al Nelson, Juan Peralta, Gary A. Rizzo, Gwendowlyn Yates Whittle)
• Frankenstein (Greg Chapman, Christian Cooke, Nelson Ferreira, Nathan Robitaile, Brad Zoern)
• One Battle After Another (Jose Antonio Garcia, Christopher Scarabosio, Tony Villaflor)
• Sinners (Benny Burt, Steve Boeddeker, David V. Butler, Felipe Pacheco, Chris Welcker)
• Sirât (Amanda Villavieja, Laia Casanovas y Yasmina Praderas)

Best Original Score

• Frankenstein (Alexandre Desplat)
• Hamnet (Max Richter)
• One Battle After Another (Jonny Greenwood)
• Sinners (Ludwig Göransson)
• Bugonia (Jerskin Fendrix)

Best Production Design

• One Battle After Another (Florencia Martin, Anthony Carlino)
• Frankenstein (Tamara Deverell, Shane Vieau)
• Hamnet (Fiona Crombie, Alice Felton)
• Marty Supreme (Jack Fisk, Adam Willis)
• Sinners (Hannah Bleachler, Monique Champagne)

Best Costume Design

• Frankenstein (Kate Hawley)
• Hamnet (Malgosia Turzanska)
• Mary Supreme (Miyako Bellizzi)
• Sinners (Ruth E. Carter)
• Avatar (Deborah L. Scott)

Best Makeup & Hairstyling

• Frankenstein (Mike Hill, Cliona Furey, Jordan Samuel)
• Kokuho (Kyoko Toyotawa, Naomi Hibino & Tadashi Nishimatsu)
• Sinners (Ken Diaz, Mike Fontaine, Shunika Terry)
• The Smashing Machine (Kazu Hiro, Glen Griffin, Bjoern Rehbein)
• The Ugly Stepsister (Anne Catherine Sauerberg, Thomas Foldberg)

Best Visual Effects

• Avatar: Fire and Ash
• F1
• Jurassic World: Rebirth
• The Lost Bus
• Sinners

Best Original Song

• Dear Me, from Diane Warren: Relentless (Diane Warren)
• Sweet Dreams of Joy, from Viva Verdi (Nicholas Pike)
• Golden, from K-pop Demon Hunters (EJAE & Mark Sonnenblick)
• I Lied to You, from Sinners (Ludwig Göransson & Raphael Saadiq)
• Train Dreams, from Train Dreams (Nick Cave & Bryce Dessner)

Best Live-Action Short Film

• Butcher’s Stain
• A friend of Dorothy
• Jane Austen’s Period Drama
• The Singers
• Two People Exchanging Saliva

Best Documentary Short Film

• All the Empty Rooms (Joshua & Conall Jones)
• The Life and Death of Brent Renaud (Craig Renaud & Juan Arredondo)
• Children no More (Hilla Medalia & Sheila Nevins)
• The Devil’s Busy (Christalyn Hampton & Geeta Gandhi)
• Perfectly a Strangeness (Alison McAlpine)

Best Animated Short Film

• Butterfly (Florence Miailhe & Ron Dyens)
• Forevergreen (Nathan Engelhardt & Jeremy Spears)
• The Girl Who Cried (Pearls Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski)
• Retirement Plan (John Kelly & Andrew Freedman)
• The Three Sisters (Konstantin Bronzit)

Many of the “sold out” signs displayed in Spain are debatable. This perception cannot be understood without observing how the live music industry operates today: “sold out” is an internal advertising tool within the music industry. In Madrid, the most paradigmatic example is the Movistar Arena (formerly the WiZink Center), which has operated as a modular venue for years. Although its maximum capacity is around 17,000 people, it allows for configurations starting at just over 3,500 spectators and other intermediate sizes of between 5,000 and 10,000. In these latter configurations, tickets sell out, but the building, in physical terms, is far from full. Promoter and event programmer Javier Domínguez (Madrid, 43 years old), better known as Ferrara, sums it up like this: “They try to sell an image of constant growth to justify numbers that often do not correspond to the reality of the artist.”

In this context, announcing a sold-out concert at a major venue serves as a legitimizing argument for festivals, public programmers, or local promoters, even when the event’s financial viability has been precarious or even negative. Ferrara, programmer for events like Mazo Madrid and Sound Isidro, recalls an example that illustrates just how normalized this logic has become: “Once at [Madrid venue] Joy Eslava, with a capacity of 900, they had sold around 270 tickets, had a guest list of 600, and declared it sold out.” This isn’t an isolated incident, but rather a recurring practice in markets where the narrative of growth carries as much weight as actual attendance.

None of this can be explained without considering how the music industry has changed since the early 21st century. The expansion of the festival model (between 900 and 1,000 festivals were held in Spain in 2025) has altered how artists are compensated. Unlike concerts in venues, where income depends largely on ticket sales, at festivals musicians receive a fixed fee agreed upon in advance. In this scenario, posting a “sold out” sign, whether genuine or not, becomes a negotiable asset: it serves not so much to generate revenue for that specific concert as it does to increase the price of their appearance at the festival.

For Juan Santaner (Mallorca, 59 years old), who currently manages Industrias Bala and has worked for decades in promotion companies, agencies, and record labels, this inflation has clear limits: “I understand that a band playing in a club might charge €3,000 and at a festival €6,000. Because the festival has bars, sponsors, public funding… What you can’t do is charge €3,000 in a club and €30,000 at a festival.” Santaner warns against artificial inflation: “I once left a company and everyone started calling me because my successor had tripled the fees. What I was offering for €4,000, he was offering for €15,000, and of course, no band had experienced a corresponding increase in their fees.”

Added to this logic is a less visible, tangible issue: the true costs of live performance. Not all “sold out” concerts are necessarily profitable, and the resulting deficit is seen as an investment in brand positioning. “Selling a projection of success isn’t free,” Ferrara insists. However, not all organizations can afford to take that risk. Take the case of The Music Republic, a network that combines a talent agency with ownership of festivals like FIB, Festival de Les Arts, and Viña Rock. In 2024, the American fund KKR acquired Superstruct Entertainment (owner of The Music Republic) for approximately €1.3 billion. This ecosystem creates a vicious cycle that’s difficult to break: the same players who inflate their artists’ fees are also the only ones who can afford to pay them.

The consequences are felt particularly strongly by small and medium-sized festivals. David Cuerdo (Oviedo, 45 years old) is one of the directors of Prestoso, a festival with 1,500 attendees in Cangas del Narcea (Asturias): “Prestoso would be, at most, the smallest corner within a macro-festival. This practice affects festivals like ours.” Cuerdo also points to the centralism of the sector. Before Prestoso, he was a programmer at the La Salvaje venue in Oviedo: “Once, a band that had filled La Riviera (in Madrid) came here and only drew 17 people. I also had the case of a band that drew 60 people to a free concert in Oviedo, and they were asking Prestoso for €10,000. For me, that’s devastating: it doesn’t even benefit the person who receives that €10,000.” Ferrara, in addition to centralism, adds another distortion to the price calculation: “Monthly listeners don’t correlate with ticket sales. For me, for example, an urban artist with 200,000 or 300,000 listeners is equivalent to the ticket sales of a rock band with 30,000 or 40,000.”

A similar logic to Prestoso is observed at Festival Observatorio, which has been held for eight editions in Balboa (León) and deliberately maintains a reduced capacity. “We’ve kept practically the same capacity for several years now,” explain Hannah Olmedilla (Madrid, 28 years old), Jaime Torrego (Madrid, 29), and Iván Dueñas (Madrid, 34), the festival organizers. However, both Observatorio and Prestoso admit that, in certain cases, bands are willing to lower their fees in exchange for other benefits. “There are artists who know that the initial fee doesn’t make sense for a festival like ours, but they still want to come because it’s worth it for other reasons,” point out the Observatorio organizers. “Being on our lineup puts you in a showcase that isn’t proportional to the actual size of the festival, but it is to its potential within a certain niche.” Prestoso agrees: “A band that would be third or fourth in line at a major festival, at most, is headlining here. Plus, there are no clashes: everyone comes to see you, and people come to hear real music.”

Even so, the capitalist logic of the market is still felt. Observatorio recalls that in 2022 they almost had to cancel the festival: “Sales were very bad and we had to issue a statement: if we didn’t sell X more tickets, the festival wouldn’t go ahead and the losses would come directly out of our pockets. ‘Sold out’ is always celebrated, even though it’s often a lie, but the opposite is almost never acknowledged,” they point out. “And that’s also part of the reality of live music.”

Pressure to succeed

All those interviewed agree that the inflation of fees is accompanied by increasing pressure to project success: “We live in a culture of constantly selling success,” explains Ferrara. “This puts pressure on artists to always try to play to bigger venues.” Santaner sums it up from experience: “I’ve worked with many artists who have been around for 20 years and are always in the same place. They have their audience, and that’s who they’ll stick with. And that’s fine. But for emerging artists, it’s a different story.” This pressure is what sometimes kills emerging musical projects. Bego (Toledo, 37 years old), vocalist and leader of Monteperdido (a band signed to Sonido Muchacho and disbanded in 2023), describes it this way: “Before Monteperdido, I wasn’t obsessed with numbers. I had the childish idea of ​​wanting to do well. That started when I entered that environment. The experience with the industry damaged me psychologically a lot.” After playing several times at Sala El Sol (Madrid), her next concert was planned for a larger venue. Shortly afterward, she decided to distance herself from the industry: “It destroyed my social fabric, my creativity, everything.” Even so, she avoided announcing the end as a farewell: “The [venue] Copérnico concert was our last in Madrid, but we were forced to disguise it for fear that [festivals] Sonorama and Canela Party, where we were scheduled to play that summer, would be canceled. That devastated me, because the industry’s financial gain was valued more than the band’s well-being.”

The use of fictitious “sold out” figures as a tool for legitimization has ultimately disrupted the balance of live performance: it distorts the perception of success, puts pressure on fee-setting, and shifts risk to the most vulnerable areas of the sector. The gap between narrative and reality not only affects the finances of venues and festivals, but also the sustainability of the artistic projects themselves.

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Located some 450 miles from the bustle of Cairo and just 30 miles from the Libyan border, Egypt hides a treasure that has managed to survive the tourist crowds and retain the magic of the unexplored. The only way to reach this remote corner of the Western Desert is to hire an overnight minibus from the capital. After a journey of more than eight hours, the first rays of dawn announce arrival at the Siwa Oasis. In this verdant location, situated 17 meters below sea level, palm trees reach for a sky filled with stars, turquoise saltwater lakes paint a utopian landscape, and time seems to have stood still amid the footsteps of Alexander the Great.

The secret to Siwa’s beauty lies in its geographical location. For centuries, the inaccessibility of this oasis — without a single road connecting it to major cities until the 1990s — kept it impenetrable, allowing it to remain a paradise to this day, home to the only Berber population still present in Egypt, the Siwis, with their own language, culture, and traditions.

Much of this isolation is due to the fact that the Great Sand Sea, the Libyan-Egyptian Sahara, begins here. This ocean of shifting dunes, reaching up to 140 meters in height, stretches across more than 70,000 square kilometers (27,030 square miles) and is one of the most impenetrable areas in the world, but also one of Siwa’s most impressive tourist attractions. To explore it, many hotels offer their own tours with local guides in 4×4 vehicles. It’s one of the wildest and most beautiful experiences you can have in the oasis. The adrenaline rush of navigating its dunes is complemented by breathtaking sights: fossils of shells and marine sediments embedded in the sand — this immense desert was, millions of years ago, an ocean — or enormous springs that weave through the landscape, cutting across the barren wasteland.

After the tour, some guides allow you to end the experience with a sunset picnic among the sand mountains, and even extend it with a night of camping under the sea of ​​stars that covers the desert.

Salt pools and lakes

In this Martian-like landscape, water springs forth from the desert in all its forms. Hot springs and thermal pools flow from hotels and city streets, and enormous springs — both fresh and salt — are its defining feature. The explanation for this verdant and blue jungle lies underground: the Nubian fossil aquifer — fresh groundwater — feeds Siwa, flowing through various channels, some of which encounter minerals reminiscent of the formation of salt lakes.

Fatnas Island is one of the best spots to appreciate this natural spectacle: there, local cafes offer drinks to those who come to enjoy a sunset on the shores of Birket Siwa, one of the largest salt lakes in the oasis, next to Birket al-Maraqi. However, one of the most striking and photogenic tourist attractions in this verdant oasis is its small salt pools. These excavations, with their utopian turquoise hues, have a salinity almost as high as that of the Dead Sea, and floating in them is one of the most relaxing experiences in Egypt.

The oracle that chose Alexander the Great

Beyond its stunning landscape, Siwa is historically known as the Oasis of Amun because of one of its historical relics: the Temple of the Oracle — built during the 26th Dynasty, between 664 B.C. and 525 B.C. — which Alexander the Great visited from the newly founded Alexandria in 331 B.C. to consult his divine lineage. It was there that the oracle declared the conqueror “son of Amun.”

On the outskirts of the new city of Siwa lies another dreamlike site: the Shali fortress, the village the Siwi people built in the 12th century to protect themselves from neighboring tribes. What we see today is actually what remains of it, as the mud and salt structures were crumbled by the torrential rains of 1926. Since then, its ruins have created a labyrinthine landscape of sepia tones, crowned by a horizon of palm groves, water, and sand.

The Gebel Al Mawta necropolis — the Mountain of the Dead — is another living testament to the passage of the centuries in Siwa. This hill is freely accessible, allowing visitors to lose themselves among dozens of excavations dating from the Ptolemaic period (323 B.C.–30 B.C.) and the late Roman period (52–68 A.D.). Although many of the tombs have been looted and vandalized over its more than 2,000-year history, some of the beautiful paintings with which the Egyptians ensured the eternal life of their deceased have been preserved. These paintings differ from the well-known reliefs of the temples along the Nile due to the historical period they represent: on the walls of the Siwa tombs, Egyptian gods, such as Osiris, merge with Roman and Greek mythology in a fascinating symbiosis of cultures for lovers of archaeology and history.

It is precisely the last queen of the Ptolemaic period who lends her name to another of Siwa’s most enigmatic places: Cleopatra’s Pool. Legend has it that, on one of her journeys to the desert, the Egyptian queen bathed in this natural freshwater spring hidden among forests and palm trees. Today, this magical spot is surrounded by traditional Siwa restaurants and shops that perfectly embody the soul of the oasis, a hypnotic enclave where time seems to slow down and the authenticity of the inaccessible prevails.

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