The first televised awards ceremony of 2026 happened last night, the 31st Critics Choice Awards. It was a night that largely went as expected. Adolescence, The Pitt, and The Studio cleaned up in the television categories, making for a fairly dull and repetitive first half to the show. (Following Chelsea Handler’s tame, sincere opening monologue.) The movie portion also mostly aligned with the prediction models that they’re now using the Large Hadron Collider to make. That said, we still learned some things.

For background, these awards are handed out by an association of television, radio, and web critics that does not include a lot of the working critics I know. (Though, it does include some!) They tend to honor a mix of big Hollywood stuff and a few “smaller” films (indie, non-American, etc.), which puts them pretty much in line with the Academy Awards these days. In that way, they can be seen as a useful predictor, even though I don’t think there is any overlap in membership. (Ron Howard stopped doing reviews for Ain’t It Cool News a few years ago.) I’d guess that a lot of what happened on Sunday will happen again at the Oscars in March, though the Screen Actors Guild awards could shift the course a little (as could, to a lesser extent, the Golden Globes or the BAFTAs). So, let’s talk things through, shall we?

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One could argue that the greatest utility of the CCAs is to give likely Oscar winners a chance to road test their acceptance speech style. Will they be going a serious route, like best actress winner Jessie Buckley did last night? Will it be more funny-sweet, like best actor winner Timothée Chalamet? Based on what we saw, it seems that One Battle After Another writer, director, producer Paul Thomas Anderson will not be making any grand political statements as he presumably continues to collect trophies all winter. On stage to accept both best director and best picture on Sunday, Anderson was halting and genially terse; he didn’t seem all that interested in having a real moment. Though, that could obviously change at a higher-stakes event like the Oscars. 

Chalamet surprised me in a couple ways.