{"id":527734,"date":"2026-03-16T23:50:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-16T23:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/527734\/"},"modified":"2026-03-16T23:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T23:50:08","slug":"2026-oscar-winner-sean-penn-skipped-the-show-it-wasnt-the-statement-he-thinks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/527734\/","title":{"rendered":"2026 Oscar winner Sean Penn skipped the show. It wasn\u2019t the statement he thinks."},"content":{"rendered":"

When Kieran Culkin<\/a>, last year\u2019s winner for Best Supporting Actor, arrived onstage at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles at Sunday\u2019s Academy Awards to pass on the crown, he did so by praising the five men up for the award. \u201cGentlemen, you gave us performances we will always remember,\u201d Culkin said. \u201cNow it is my genuine pleasure to give one of you a moment I hope you will never forget.\u201d The announcement that followed was indeed unforgettable, but mostly for those watching rather than the nominees in attendance. Sean Penn took home the Oscar for his role as the sadistic white supremacist Col. Steven Lockjaw in the rollicking One Battle After Another<\/a>, but the actor was a no-show. \u201cSean Penn couldn\u2019t be here this evening\u2014or didn\u2019t want to,\u201d Culkin ad-libbed to audible guffaws from the crowd, \u201cso I\u2019ll be accepting the award on his behalf.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Culkin made the announcement, the other nominees could be seen<\/a> clapping politely within their Brady Bunch picture squares, save for one: Sinners\u2019 Delroy Lindo\u2014the veteran actor who, along with Frankenstein\u2019s Jacob Elordi and Sentimental Value\u2019s Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd, was up for his first-ever Oscar<\/a>\u2014sat still, his hand over his mouth. Watching at home, I didn\u2019t sense that Lindo felt snubbed for his work, but instead stung that the academy had opted to reward someone for whom none of this seemed to matter anymore. \u201cI don\u2019t get very excited about what we\u2019ll call the Academy Awards<\/a>,\u201d Penn had said in 2024, criticizing the Oscars for \u201cextraordinary cowardice\u201d in limiting different cultural expressions.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not unheard of for nominees to miss the actual Oscars ceremony, although it is usually because of scheduling conflicts. But even though Penn was the clear front-runner, the writing was on the wall ahead of Sunday night that he wasn\u2019t going to make the trip, something he\u2019d also done the first three times he was nominated<\/a>. Apart from January\u2019s Golden Globes (at which he was photographed smoking cigarettes<\/a> at his table, despite the fact that it\u2019s illegal in California to smoke indoors), Penn has been mostly MIA this awards season, winning both a BAFTA and an Actor Award (formerly known as a Screen Actors Guild Award) in absentia. \u201cSean Penn, Please Don\u2019t Skip the Oscars<\/a>,\u201d read an ultimately fruitless entreaty published by Variety last week, calling for him to attend if only for \u201cthe cause of good TV\u201d and so \u201caudiences don\u2019t lose out on his brand of chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the New York Times, Penn had decided to sit out the show because of his plans to instead visit Ukraine<\/a>, a country that has been central to the actor\u2019s recent activism, most notably in the 2023 documentary Superpower<\/a>, which he filmed about Russia\u2019s invasion there. (Indeed, later on Monday, President Volodymyr Zelensky posted a picture of him meeting with Penn apparently in Kyiv, calling the actor \u201ca true friend of Ukraine<\/a>.\u201d) In 2022 he gave Zelensky one of his Oscars apparently as a \u201csymbol of faith\u201d<\/a> that the Ukrainian leader would prevail in war and one day return it to Penn in Malibu. But Penn also said that he was so disgusted that academy producers didn\u2019t want Zelensky speaking at the show in 2022 that he didn\u2019t care if Ukraine melted down his Oscars<\/a> \u201cto bullets they can shoot at the Russians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, if Penn was hoping to make some grand gesture through his absence on Sunday night, it actually had the opposite effect: It felt petty and small. On a night when Culkin had been open on the red carpet<\/a> about how emotional he was at the chance to hand on the award, and on an evening when three other actors in the category were experiencing Oscars excitement for the very first time, Penn came across not as someone sitting nobly above the Hollywood fray; he came across as someone who didn\u2019t care whether his absence would make his fellow actors feel silly for caring at all\u2014a jerk, if you will. In other words, he came across as Sean Penn.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Sam Adams
\n He Was the Losingest Filmmaker in Oscars History. To Finally Triumph, He Changed Something.
\n Read More\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

There is no doubt that Penn is one of the finest actors to ever live. Sunday\u2019s award was his third Oscar, making him a member of an elite club of three-time winners that includes only him, Meryl Streep, Frances McDormand, Ingrid Bergman, Jack Nicholson, Walter Brennan, and Daniel Day-Lewis. (Only Katharine Hepburn has more, with four.) But for decades, the actor has been as famous for his pugnacity and self-importance as for his talent. In addition to his repeated<\/a> arrests<\/a> and<\/a> convictions<\/a> for hitting people (mostly<\/a>, but not entirely<\/a>, photographers), Penn is notorious for his activism, self-seriousness, and humorlessness\u2014the latter quality was memorably on display when he chided Oscars host Chris Rock onstage some 20 years ago for a mostly harmless joke he told about Jude Law<\/a>. Penn can be difficult\u2014a quality women rarely get to exhibit, especially if they want to be celebrated professionally, much less in Hollywood. \u201cI do know how hard I make it to appreciate me often,\u201d Penn said with a flash of self-awareness when he won for Milk in 2009<\/a>. With this reputation, perhaps Penn\u2019s absence for much of awards season is precisely why he won on Sunday: Without any lecturing acceptance speeches or reminders of his lawless behavior, voters could instead think solely of his remarkable, scene-stealing work in the movie, rather than his remarkable, scene-stealing ego.<\/p>\n

And indeed, if you sift through the Oscar-campaigning tea leaves, there were a few signs that Penn did perhaps want another little gold man. In addition to showing up\u2014albeit grumpily and with cigarettes\u2014to the Golden Globes, he took part in an interview for Variety\u2019s \u201cActors on Actors\u201d<\/a> series (a traditional campaign stop) and was lauded in a curiously timed New York magazine report<\/a>, published just before Oscars voting began, about efforts he made in 2013 to secure the freedom of an American man from a Bolivian prison. Still, if Penn was secretly angling for a win, he had little to lose from showing up to the capstone night to receive the prize, save for the nasty headlines right-wing outlets would inevitably print about his speech. But to that, I can only think of Pete Buttigieg\u2019s words<\/a> about the right branding leftists as \u201ca bunch of crazy socialists\u201d no matter what, so you may as well go out onstage and say what you want to say.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Penn has previously used his two Oscar wins to seize the moment to speak his heart in ways that eloquently combined politics with deep respect for other actors. When he won for Mystic River in 2004, during the Iraq war, he told the crowd, \u201cIf there\u2019s one thing that actors know\u2014other than that there weren\u2019t any WMDs<\/a>\u2014it\u2019s that there is no such thing as \u2018best\u2019 in acting.\u201d For Milk, he praised his collaborators on the biopic of LGBTQ+ rights campaigner Harvey Milk while issuing a heartfelt plea for equality only months after California passed Proposition 8.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sinners Made Oscars History, but Not the Kind Anyone Expected
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

He Was the Losingest Filmmaker in Oscars History. To Finally Triumph, He Changed Something.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Only One Oscars Winner Skipped the Show. I\u2019m Not Sure I Buy the Reason.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

What an enormous missed opportunity, then, to not use the Oscars spotlight to remind audiences of the righteous fury\u2014not just the indiscriminate kind\u2014that motivates Penn. This was an evening, after all, that gave the award for Best Documentary to a film that was expressly about resistance to Vladimir Putin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine<\/a>. It was an evening when everyone from Javier Bardem<\/a> to host Conan O\u2019Brien<\/a> felt the need to get political. Hell, Penn won for playing a bombastic, hypocritical, egotistical racist who is unwittingly used as a pawn by a grander right-wing cabal. What better chance to take the stage and deliver a dig at you-know-who?<\/p>\n

For my money, the most appropriate thing Penn could\u2019ve done to be both respectful to his fellow nominees and true to his own ideals would have been to pull a version of the famous Marlon Brando\u2013Sacheen Littlefeather stunt<\/a>: Turn up to the show, graciously take the stage with a quick thank-you, then turn the microphone over to whichever victim of the world\u2019s many current injustices Penn wanted us all to hear from. Then he could\u2019ve gone out for a smoke.<\/p>\n

Read more in Slate about the Oscars<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Kieran Culkin, last year\u2019s winner for Best Supporting Actor, arrived onstage at the Dolby Theatre in Los…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":527735,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[88,57990,1208],"class_list":{"0":"post-527734","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-the-oscars","10":"tag-ukraine"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/527735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}