The film One battle after another won the top prize Sunday at the Academy Awards, where the French language film Two people exchanging saliva shared the award for best live-action short.
The darkly comic thriller One battle after another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a former revolutionary turned weed-smoking single father of a teenager, led the awards with six Oscars, including best picture.
“I wrote this movie for my kids to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left in this world,” said Anderson, who won best director, while accepting the award for best adapted screenplay.
“But also with the encouragement that they will be the generation that hopefully brings us some common sense and decency.”
Sean Penn won best supporting actor for his role as an obsessed military officer.
Sinners, a celebration of blues and Black culture with a supernatural twist, entered the ceremony with 16 nominations, more than any other film in the nearly 100-year history of the Oscars.
It won four awards, including a best actor for Michael B. Jordan, who played the twin brothers Smoke and Stack.
French film ties for live-action short award
In an unusual result, two films tied for an award for best live-action short: The Singers an 18-minute musical comedy and Two people exchanging saliva, a 36-minute dystopian French-language film directed by Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, distributed by The New Yorker.
Amid the celebration, the took a more somber tone to honour major losses in the film world, including the deaths directors Robert Redford and Rob Reiner.
However, French actress and icon Brigitte Bardot, who died in December at the age of 91, was not mentioned in the In Memoriam segment, which did include a tribute to Claudia Cardinale, the Franco-Italian actress, who died in September, along with Catherine O’Hara, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall and Val Kilmer.
