Last year’s Oscar winners — Adrien Brody, Kieran Culkin, Mikey Madison and Zoe Saldaña — will return to the 98th Academy Awards to hand out awards to the next wave of victors.
Raj Kapoor, the show’s executive producer and showrunner, and Katy Mullan, an executive producer, announced the quartet as the first official presenters to join the anticipated ceremony.
Brody won his second best actor statuette (after “The Pianist,” 2002) for portraying an architect and Holocaust survivor in “The Brutalist,” while Madison claimed best actress for playing the titular stripper in the dramedy “Anora.” Culkin and Saldaña swept last season’s televised precursors en route to their supporting wins — Culkin for his snarky cousin on a Jewish heritage tour in “A Real Pain,” and Saldaña for playing a struggling attorney in the Spanish-language musical “Emilia Pérez.”
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The Academy has long leaned on tradition by bringing back the previous year’s acting winners to hand off the honors.
In some years, the show has “gender-swapped” presenters, with the prior male acting winners presenting the current year’s actress prizes and vice versa. Other ceremonies have revived variations of the “fab five” format, in which five past winners from a category take the stage to salute the nominees.
This year’s nominations are led by Ryan Coogler’s vampire saga “Sinners,” which landed an all-time high of 16 nominations. Close behind is Paul Thomas Anderson’s political action epic “One Battle After Another,” a searing examination of radical politics that earned 13 nods.
The films are nominated for best picture alongside “Bugonia,” “F1,” “Frankenstein,” “Hamnet,” “Marty Supreme,” “The Secret Agent,” “Sentimental Value,” and “Train Dreams.”
Additional presenters will be announced in the coming weeks.
As the season nears its finish line, the next major clues about Academy momentum arrive with Sunday’s 79th BAFTA Awards, followed by the Producers Guild of America Awards on February 28 and The Actor Awards (formerly SAG Awards) on March 1.
Final Oscar voting runs from February 26 through March 5. Conan O’Brien returns to host the telecast, set to air live March 15 at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT from the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood. The ceremony will broadcast on ABC and stream live on Hulu, with the ceremony airing in more than 200 territories worldwide.
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