The narrative of this year’s Oscars was: how to pick? Between Sinners and One Battle After Another, voters put two majorly successful, critically beloved, star-driven studio releases at the top of the nominations pile. While One Battle After Another had seemed like the odds-on Best Picture favorite for months, Sinners was collecting enough trophies, and getting so much love at precursor ceremonies, that it felt impossible to fully count out. The 98th Academy Awards, which came at the end of what felt like a particularly never-ending cycle of discourse and prognostication, did a good job making plenty of room to celebrate both movies sincerely. Yes, One Battle After Another won Best Picture, one of six trophies it won. But Sinners took home four, with its honorees delivering the most powerful speeches of the evening.Tonight’s ceremony had none of the major dramatic mishaps that have both embarrassed the Academy Awards’ organizers and affirmed the event’s status as must-see live TV. There was no slap, no incorrect naming of a winner; even Adrien Brody humorously acknowledged how he’d rambled on for too long during his Best Actor speech last year. The host Conan O’Brien ran a relatively tight ship, seeming even more confident in his second go at the gig after doing a bang-up job the year prior. The show’s only truly awkward thuds were Sean Penn not even bothering to turn up for his historic third acting trophy (reports surfaced he may be in Ukraine) and a few victors being shooed off-stage before they could speak into the mic.By Oscar standards, this all adds up to a pretty chill atmosphere. Many of the recipients who took the stage seemed especially eager to shout out their fellow nominees, acknowledging that everyone in the room likely has a similar goal: to preserve cinema as an art form that mass audiences still care about. Michael B. Jordan, accepting the Best Actor award for Sinners, gave thanks to God, his family, his team, and the movie’s cast and crew, before concluding his lovely speech by expressing gratitude to theatergoers who saw the film again and again when it came out almost a year ago. They were the ones, he said, who helped make the movie into the unexpected box-office phenomenon it became.[Read: Ryan Coogler doesn’t want to hide anymore]Jordan’s victory was maybe the most dramatic of the ceremony. The Best Actor category was widely seen as up in the air: After most early attention during awards season went to Marty Supreme’s Timothée Chalamet, Jordan had gained some momentum with a surprise win at the Actor Awards earlier this month. But watching him take the stage tonight seemed almost a fait accompli; the love for Sinners from the Academy voters felt profound, and was strong enough to power the movie to other big victories even in the face of One Battle After Another’s clear domination. Jordan is an industry veteran who started his career on The Wire, then moved to soap operas and well-liked TV such as Friday Night Lights; now, he has joined the rarest air of all, becoming a true A-list superstar with an Oscar to his name, and it was a moment that felt genuinely thrilling to watch live.Otherwise, the evening was more about anointing talent that was arguably overdue for awards recognition. Paul Thomas Anderson, who won for producing, directing, and writing One Battle After Another, was sitting on 14 career nominations without a win going into the ceremony. As with Christopher Nolan a couple years prior, the Academy decided now was his moment—solidified by the fact that Anderson had made a trenchant film on a far grander scale than he’d ever worked before, an old-fashioned family epic that was still defined by his spiky sense of humor. But One Battle After Another was not the total juggernaut it could have been: Penn won the movie’s sole acting award, and it also took home Best Editing and the inaugural Best Casting honor.Along with Best Actor, meanwhile, Sinners won for its screenplay, cinematography, and score, which made for some really memorable speech-making. The writer-director Ryan Coogler affectionately shouted out his wife and producing partner Zinzi; the composer Ludwig Göransson spoke of his father investing him with a love of blues music from childhood. Most moving was the film’s director of photography, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who became the first woman to earn the Best Cinematography prize—she asked women in the audience to rise to their feet, representing the support she’d had in her journey to success.Watching her speech was the only moment I wavered on my belief that One Battle After Another would take Best Picture, despite its daunting haul of precursor accolades at several guild awards, the Golden Globes, and the BAFTAs. That slew of prior ceremonies, which begin in late November and, this year, slogged all the way through to March for the Oscars, has become a bit of a chore; sometimes they sap the big show of any real drama, as the same series of winners repeat their speeches ad nauseum. But the audience in the Dolby Theater had too much affection for, among other films, One Battle After Another and Sinners for this year’s Oscars to ever feel dutiful. To see that kind of big-budget artistry properly lionized, given some of the duds the Academy has recognized in recent years—I’m looking at you, Green Book—felt like a true triumph.[Read: A hilarious—and poignant—Oscars moment]The two films’ dominance did mean other worthy nominees were largely snubbed of attention. Marty Supreme’s obvious place for a win was Best Actor, but the narrative had seemingly turned against Chalamet’s fantastic performance in recent weeks because of his idiosyncratic approach to campaigning. (The storm in a teacup over his thoughts on ballet and opera, which came the day voting closed, was likely not a factor, although O’Brien made sure to reference it during his monologue.) I thought the loopy, wonderful Brazilian thriller The Secret Agent might triumph somewhere, most likely in the International Feature category; it lost out there to the Norwegian drama Sentimental Value, which took home its only prize of the night after 9 nominations. Jessie Buckley, an ironclad lock, earned Hamnet’s sole trophy in Best Actress, while Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein cleaned up in the craft categories but was a non-factor anywhere else. Two other films that clawed their way to Best Picture nominations, Bugonia and Train Dreams, were afterthoughts.But that’s the inevitable result of a ceremony dominated by two big movies, a much rarer situation than one titanic favorite enjoying a major sweep. As Anderson took the stage for his final win of the night, he recalled the incredible Best Picture contenders of 50 years prior in 1975—Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jaws, Nashville, and Barry Lyndon. “There is no ‘best’ among them. There is just what that mood might be that day,” he said. The 1975 lineup is a hard one to beat, but this year’s roster had a similar robustness to it, and Anderson was wisely paying homage to his film’s closest “rival” in Sinners: There’s no “best” on this stage, just whatever might take your fancy on a particular evening. On this evening, fortune happened to favor him.