Sean Penn won Best Supporting Actor at the 2026 Oscars and, unsurprisingly, didn't turn up

Sean Penn has taken home the gold for Best Supporting Actor at the 98th Academy Awards for his role as corrupt military officer Col. Steven J. Lockjaw in One Battle After Another.

The award was accepted on his behalf by Kieran Culkin, who won the award the previous year for Jesse Eisenberg's A Real Pain. "Sean Penn couldn't be here this evening, or didn't want to," Culkin humorously said.

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and loosely based on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, the black comedy follows an ex-revolutionary (Leonardo DiCaprio) who is forced out of hiding when he and his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), are pursued by Lockjaw. Penn previously told W Magazine that the film made him fall in love with acting again after he turned to directing (though he did play Jack in Anderson's Licorice Pizza).

Penn beat out fellow nominees Jacob Elordi for Frankenstein, Delroy Lindo for Sinners, Stellan Skarsgård for Sentimental Value, and co-star Benicio "A Few Small Beers" Del Toro. This is also the second win of the night for One Battle After Another, the first being the Oscars' first-ever Best Casting award (and I personally think Cassandra Kulukundis deserves all the awards for introducing us to Infiniti), and the third being Best Adapted Screenplay.

The film is up for 9 more Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio, Best Original Score, Best Sound, and Best Director for Anderson.

For more on this year's Academy Awards, check out our Oscars 2026 live blog.