Last year’s Oscar winners Adrien Brody, Kieran Culkin, Mikey Madison and Zoe Saldaña will return for the 98th Academy Awards to present the trophy to the next winner.
The show’s executive producer and showrunner Raj Kapoor and executive producer Katie Mullan announced the quartet as the first official presenters to take part in the upcoming ceremony.
Brody won his second Best Actor Oscar for his role as an architect and Holocaust survivor in The Brutalist, following 2002’s The Pianist, while Madison won Best Actress for her role as a titular stripper in the drama Anora. Culkin and Saldaña swept last season’s TV trailblazers on their way to a cheering victory. Culkin played a cantankerous cousin on the Jewish Heritage Tour in A Real Pain, and Saldaña played a struggling lawyer in the Spanish-language musical Emilia Perez.
The Academy has long relied on the tradition of bringing back and honoring previous year’s acting award winners. In some years, the show will “gender-swap” the hosts, with a previous male acting award winner serving as the presenter for this year’s actress award, and vice versa. Other ceremonies brought back a variation of the “Fab 5” format, where five past winners of a category take to the stage to honor the nominees. The Academy and production team have not yet announced which categories Brody, Culkin, Madison and Saldaña will compete in.
Additional presenters will be announced in the coming weeks.
This year’s nominations were led by record-breaking director Ryan Coogler’s bold and bloody vampire tale “Sinners,” which received a record 16 nominations. It was closely followed by Paul Thomas Anderson’s political action epic One Battle After Another, which thoroughly examined radical politics and received 13 nods. Both films are nominated for Best Picture along with Bugonia, F1, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value and Train Dreams.
As the season draws to a close, the next big clue about the Academy’s momentum will be the 79th BAFTA Awards on Sunday, followed by the Producers Guild Awards on February 28th, and the Best Actor Awards (formerly known as the SAG Awards) on March 1st.
Final Oscar voting will take place from February 26th to March 5th. The telecast, once again hosted by Conan O’Brien, will be broadcast live from the Dolby Theater at Ovation Hollywood on March 15th at 7pm ET/4pm PT. The ceremony will be broadcast on ABC, livestreamed on Hulu and broadcast in more than 200 territories around the world.
