Welcome to The Oscars 2026, where everyone is very, very thin, and we’re not meant to talk about it. But can we just talk about it, please?

I do not believe in talking about a woman’s body or weight under normal circumstances, but the skinny epidemic that has hit Hollywood is impossible to ignore.

This is not just one celebrity losing weight: it is a situation where 90 per cent of female celebrities have shrunk – and the Oscars red carpet has just exposed it.

Every year, my best friend and I text about the Oscars fashion.

Throughout the three-hour awards show, we message back and forth, discussing who we thought looked good and who we thought looked terrible (all while I am wearing ugly sneakers recommended for nurses), but this year, everyone’s thinness has distracted us.

The first message he sent me today wasn’t his usual, “God, Nicole Kidman can pull off the shade blush,” but instead, “Have you seen how scary thin (insert actor name here) looks?”

Instead of discussing how we felt about some see-through feather number, we were discussing if a celeb had gotten so thin she was now unrecognisable.

It really made me long for the days when our biggest red carpet scandal was whether Keith Urban was wearing lifts in his dress shoes.

The ultra-skinny trend is distracting from fashion.

Celebrity after celebrity walked the Oscars red carpet, and they all had the same alarming thing in common – they’ve lost weight.

It appeared a lot of the women have lost a dramatic amount of weight because you have to shed a fair amount for it to show up noticeably in photographs.

Emma Stone, Gracie Abrams, Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman, and Barbie Ferreira are just some of the beautiful women, in beautiful gowns, who looked unnervingly small.

I understand talking about this is hard; it is nuanced, women are so judged for their weight, and there’s endless social pressure on women to shrink themselves.

If I point out that all the famous women are getting even thinner, do I just become part of the problem?

But by not saying it, I worry we’re condoning it, normalising it, and making other women think this is all just normal.

Celebrities set the beauty standards, and if they’re all disappearing on us (quite literally), that filters down to how everyday women feel they should look.

I can already see the impact in real-time. Suddenly, the phrase “skinny goals” is being said on social media again.

Gen Z call someone’s body they admire, “body tea”, and all over X, young women are resharing photos of dangerously thin women and claiming their body is “tea” and aspirational.

The goal has gone from fitting into a pair of jeans in a certain size you want to be to looking so thin that your jeans hang off you.

There are threads on the internet where women praise famous women for the fact that their clothes look like they’re falling off them.

I am quite frankly horrified.

I am sad to report that we have made no progress since the horrifying 90s body-image “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” bulls***.

We have simply changed tactics and are now just playing lip service to body acceptance and acting as if we don’t talk about it, then everything is fine.

Celebrities certainly aren’t sharing the extreme measures they take to get as thin as they’re getting, but their rail-thin bodies are doing all the talking.

There was a brief moment where we celebrated body diversity, and plus-size singer Lizzo reigned supreme; those days are over.

She’s now on a weight-loss journey, and celebrities are hitting red carpets looking gaunt instead of glamorous.

It is all very scary; it isn’t normal for adult women to look like Bratz dolls, because their bodies have gotten so small, and their heads now look quite large.

I don’t want to be writing about women’s weight, but I just can’t for a second stand the idea of anyone looking at today’s red carpet and thinking these are the kinds of bodies we should strive to obtain.

Everyone has gotten very very thin … but that does mean you should too.