Awards ceremonies are held one after another in Hollywood.
As for Sean Penn, he vowed never to attend another ceremony.
According to Variety, Penn, 65, explained his decision to skip the 2026 Oscars as “not just an awards ceremony” while speaking with CNN’s Caitlan Collins at the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday.
The “21 Grams” star, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for “One Battle After Another,” said the ceremony was a “social discomfort” for him and represented “too many people.”
“If this group were going to an afterparty and someone walked in there, the same thing would happen,” Penn elaborated. “I am now depressed and determined for the rest of my life that I will never go anywhere to be in a designated group of more than eight people.”
At these big Hollywood events, the “Fast Times at Ridgemont High School” actor feels like he only has “15 minutes per person,” which makes him feel anxious.
As Penn puts it, it’s “fear-inducing.”
“When I went to the Oscars twice, I was relieved to win because so many people worked so hard for it,” he said. “There’s a politics to things like that.”
Penn previously won Best Actor Oscars for 2003’s Mystic River and 2008’s Milk.
In 2025, the filmmaker starred in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, Benicio Del Toro, and Chase Infinity.
The film won six of the thirteen Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Penn said she told her co-stars that it would be “better” for their mental health if they skipped the ceremony. Instead, he went to Ukraine.
Penn met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kiev, continuing to show support for his country amid its war with Russia.
In a video posted on X, Ukrainian Railways CEO Oleksandr Pertsovsky presented Penn with an “Iron Oscar”, a handmade statuette made from metal taken from a rail car destroyed by a Russian missile.
“I’m missing out on the Oscars,” Perzovsky began. “And you gave the last one to the president, so we made this one.
“You said the metal survived. So we put a word here that’s very special to us. It’s not gold, but it’s very real and heartfelt. It’s important to us.”
Penn, visibly emotional, hugged Perzovsky and said: “These are all treasures, thank you.”
“For the first time, I was able to truly enjoy the Academy Awards,” he told Collins of watching the Academy Awards from abroad, according to Variety. “It was wonderful.”
Penn made the decision earlier this year to no longer attend awards ceremonies.
“The best I could muster was a sense of relief,” he mused. “I knew I wasn’t going to do that again, so this year I went before that. I went to the Golden Globes, and I’d never been there before. And then I decided, ‘I can’t do this.'”
