How Sean Penn’s Oscars speech spoke the loudest even though he wasn’t even there
Sean Penn deservedly won the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ thanks to his role in the ICE-adjacent action caper One Battle After Another this morning.
Predictably, he wasn’t there to pick it up. His absence, however, spoke louder than what was said at the ceremony.
Despite the cutting social commentary of One Battle After Another cleaning up with a wealth of wins, given how fraught the world seems right now, the Oscars were startlingly apolitical this time around.
Penn won his award for a deliberately grotesque embodiment of modern evil. His character, Colonel Steven Lockjaw is a horny, gurning, old man on steroids who conveys, in a comical satire, the ugliest impulses of power, demagoguery, and self-serving manipulation. He’s so wicked, he feels inextinguishable. That feeling is wearyingly familiar to the world right now.
His performance made you feel uncomfortable and highlighted the plight of the unending battle between empowered bastardry and belittled activism – the Oscars in 2026, by contrast, made you feel cosy, and highlighted almost nothing.
Given One Battle After Another’s stark political commentary on the unfurling ICE crisis, that Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland – on which the film is based – foresaw way back in 1990, this apoliticism felt glaringly incongruous. If you wanted to take it further than that, you could argue that it felt like an extension of the inaction that has brought Pynchon’s damning vision to its ugly fruition.
To some extent, this business-like incarnation of the ceremony may have been by design. After all, for years, the very inverse of that incongruity has made people feel uncomfortable. Many times over, stars have ascended the stage to collect an award for a romcom in a 12 grand tuxedo and spoke at length about inequality and injustice. Without visible consequence, these gestures began to feel like further Hollywood theatre rather than conviction.
Somewhere along the line, that disconnect has fed a broader public frustration and resulted in a wary sense that elites are very good at talking about problems, but not so good at doing anything at all to change them. In its more corrosive form, that frustration has curdled into the political backlash shaping much of today’s right-wing populism. When people feel lectured to but rarely see action, the appetite for disruptive or even destructive alternatives grows.
So, while this angling towards a more sanitised awards season might have been understandable a few years back, at this stage in the current political climate, it feels like a futile attempt at “decency”, as one award winner championed, and a bid for upstanding respectability akin to reasoning with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.
The winning co-director, David Borenstein, for the documentary, Mr Nobody Against Putin, spoke to this very point in one of the rare vital moments of the evening. “You lose your country through countless small acts of complicity,” he said when collecting his award.
In some ways, he sounded like a character from One Battle After Another, the documentary embodying similar real-world activism as the fiction on display in the ‘Best Picture’ winner. He continued, “When we act complicit when a government murders people on the streets. When oligarchs take over the media and control how we produce and consume it. We all face a moral choice. But even a nobody is more powerful than you think.”
Penn, of course, is not a nobody, and he chose to use the platform that his celebrity status afforded him not to make a speech, but to highlight the fact that he was heading to a warzone rather than Hollywood for a back-pat. In place of his absent seat were reports that he was travelling to Ukraine. This is a trip he has frequently made, lending his support to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Say what you like about that, it is certainly not casual complicity or performative. It showcases active participation with grippable geography. So, in a night that felt oddly muted, his genuine silence perhaps spoke loudest of all. While Kieran Culkin’s quip that the now-three-time Oscar winner “couldn’t be here this evening, or didn’t want to” might have drawn a laugh, it drew even greater attention to why he often declines the spotlight.
As far back as 2007, he even remarked, “There’s baggage attached to coming out publicly on stuff, but there’s baggage – in my view, more damaging baggage – to going and [appearing] on Jay Leno’s show, philosophising about ‘Uncle Buck’ or whatever you’re hawking.” In other words, he recognised even then that an audience with world leaders is, in its own way, entitled, but at least it brings attention to an active bid to make a difference rather than peddle further commercialism.
By no means is this to say that all actors should follow suit and flock to throw themselves in danger rather than don designer clothes, that would be ludicrous (and there have been times when the extent of Penn’s frontline leanings have been derided), but with the world at war, as the evil supporting star of a film about age-old cruelty and corruption flexing its muscle, when words were silenced or felt makwishly mild, Penn proved the adage that actions always speak louder.
