If you feel exhausted just thinking about the 2026 Oscars, you’re not the only one. The 98th Academy Awards, which celebrates films released in 2025, will air on Sunday, March 15 on ABC and Hulu, more than 70 days into the new year. The nominations for the 35th Gotham Awards was announced in late October last year (yeah, it was that long ago), and we’ve been talking about Sinners, one of the frontrunners in multiple Oscar categories, for nearly a year since its theatrical debut in April 2025. This award season has already lasted five months. Though there are several reasons why the Oscars has been pushed back, reasons that are seemingly out of its control, the show has been stubbornly clinging to its March date for more than several years, despite it making the event feel like it’s arriving much too late to the party.
Why the 2026 Oscars is scheduled so late this year
Some of the blame for why the 2026 Oscars, to be hosted again by Conan O’Brien, was pushed to the middle of March has been placed on scheduling conflicts.
The 2026 Critics Choice Awards was held during the first week of January, which was much earlier in the year for the event, but that is traditionally the spot that the Golden Globes takes. This is why the ceremony was pushed to January 11, 2026, delaying the awards season. Later, the SAG-AFTRA’s Actor Awards happened at the start of March, a week after its typical date in late February. So it’s comes to little surprise that the 2026 Oscars would be similarly pushed back to March 15, compared to last year’s iteration that took place on March 2.
There’s also the matter of the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, which aired from February 6 to February 26. Though the international sporting event airs on NBC and Peacock, the Oscars tends to be delayed due to networks fearing that there would be too much competition for ratings. This is partly why the 2022 Oscars found itself airing even later in the year on March 27.
The Academy Awards should listen to its own advice
However, even after considering the potential scheduling conflicts of the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and other award shows, the Oscars is still independently capable of airing a month earlier in February, something which the show has done on numerous occasions in the past. The 2020 Oscars, which saw Parasite shockingly win Best Picture, took place on February 9. The 2004 Oscars, which started the trend of the Academy Awards being pulled ahead to February instead of March, was held on February 29.
At the time, Terry Press, the marketing chief at DreamWorks, explained to The New York Times the benefits of having the Oscars cap off the awards season a month earlier. “By the time you get to the Academy Awards now, they’re almost anticlimatic,” he said. “The same people tend to win over and over again. So by Oscar time you’ve already seen Julia Roberts six times in six different dresses. The Oscars needed to do this to restore their own luster.”
As admitted by the then Academy’s director of communications John Pavlik, the earlier date was meant to protect the show’s prestige and the viewers’ attention. “The basic reason for doing this is to improve the position of the Academy Awards with regard to ratings and viewership,” Pavlik noted. “So the thought is that if you could move the show a little closer to the year that it is actually honoring, that might make things feel a little fresher in a lot of people’s minds.”
Today’s Academy would be prudent to heed past advice. While ABC and Hulu might not have much incentive to change the date given that the Oscars will eventually move to YouTube in 2029, the show needs to remain as relevant and exciting as possible so that viewership doesn’t slip during the modern age of streaming.
