“I have always found goodness in the people I’ve met everywhere I went in the world,” Zhao said when accepting the best director award. “This is for anyone who has the faith and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves and to hold on to the goodness in each other no matter how difficult it is to do that.”

With a howl, Nomadland star Frances McDormand implored people to seek out her film and others on the big screen. Released by the Disney-owned Searchlight Pictures, Nomadland premiered at a drive-in and debuted in theatres, but found its largest audience on Hulu.

“Please watch our movie on the largest screen possible and one day very, very soon, take everyone you know into a theatre, shoulder to shoulder in that dark space, and watch every film that’s represented here tonight,” McDormand said.

Soon after, McDormand won best actress, too. The win puts McDormand (previously a winner for Fargo and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) in rare company as a three-time acting winner. Only Katherine Hepburn (a four-time winner) has won best actress more times.

In the night’s biggest surprise, best actor went to Anthony Hopkins for the dementia drama The Father. The award had been widely expected to go to Chadwick Boseman for his final performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Hopkins was not in attendance.

The most ambitious award show held during the pandemic, the Oscars rolled out a red carpet and restored some glamour to the nearly century-old movie institution, but with a much transformed – and in some ways downsized – telecast. It was a year when, to paraphrase Norma Desmond, the pictures got smaller and were overwhelmingly seen in the home, not on the big screen, during a pandemic year that forced theatres close and prompted radical change in Hollywood.

It was also perhaps the most diverse Academy Awards ever, with more women and more actors of colour nominated than ever before – and Sunday brought a litany of records and firsts across many categories, spanning everything from hairstyling to composing to acting. It was, some observers said, a sea change for an awards harshly criticised as “OscarsSoWhite” in recent years, leading the film academy to greatly expand membership.

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The ceremony – fashioned as a movie of its own and styled as a laid-back party – kicked off with opening credits and a slinky Regina King entrance, as the camera followed the actress and One Night in Miami director in one take as she strode with an Oscar in hand into Los Angeles’ Union Station and onto the stage. Inside the transit hub (trains kept running), nominees sat at cozy, lamplit tables around an intimate amphitheatre. Some moments – like Glenn Close getting down to Da Butt – were more relaxed, but the ceremony couldn’t just shake off the past 14 months.

“It has been quite a year and we are still smack dab in the middle of it,” King said.

Daniel Kaluuya won best supporting actor for Judas and the Black Messiah. The win for the 32-year-old British actor, who was previously nominated for Get Out, was widely expected. Kaluuya won for his fiery performance as the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, whom Kaluuya thanked for showing him “how to love myself”.

“You’ve got to celebrate life, man. We’re breathing. We’re walking. It’s incredible. My mum met my dad, they had sex. It’s amazing. I’m here. I’m so happy to be alive,” Kaluuya said, while cameras caught his mother’s confused reaction.

With the awards capping a year of national reckoning on race and coming days after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted for killing George Floyd, police brutality was on the minds of many attendees. King said that if the verdict had been different, she might have traded her heels for marching boots.

Travon Free, co-director of the live-action short winner Two Distant Strangers, wore a suit jacket lined with the names of those killed by police. His film dramatises police brutality as an inescapable time loop, like a tragic Groundhog’s Day for black Americans.

“Today, the police will kill three people. And tomorrow, the police will kill three people. And the day after that, the police will kill three people because on average, the police in America every day kill three people, which amounts to about a thousand people a year,” Free said. “Those people happen to disproportionately be black people.”

Best supporting actress went to Youn Yuh-Jung for the matriarch of Lee Isaac Chung’s tender Korean-American family drama Minari. The 73-year-old Youn, a well-known actress in her native South Korea, is the first Asian actress to win an Oscar since 1957 and the second in history. She accepted the award from Brad Pitt, an executive producer on Minari. “Mr. Brad Pitt, finally, nice to meet you,” Youn said.

Hairstylists Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom became the first black women to win in make-up and hairstyling. Ann Roth, at 89 one of the oldest Oscar winners ever, also won for the film’s costume design.

The night’s first award went to Emerald Fennell, the writer-director of the provocative revenge thriller Promising Young Woman, for best screenplay. Fennell, winning for her feature debut, is the first woman to win solo in the category since Diablo Cody (Juno) in 2007.

The broadcast instantly looked different. It was shot in 24 frames per second and in more widescreen format. In a more intimate show without an audience beyond nominees, winners were given wider latitude in their speeches.

The telecast, produced by a team led by filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, moved out of the awards’ usual home, the Dolby Theatre, for Union Station. With Zoom ruled out for nominees, the telecast included satellite feeds from around the world. Performances of the song nominees were pre-taped and aired during the preshow. Husavik (My Hometown) from the 2020 musical comedy Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, was performed from the Iceland town’s harbour. Others were sung from atop the academy’s new US$500 million film museum.

David Fincher’s Mank, a lavishly crafted drama of 1940s Hollywood made for Netflix, came in as lead nominee with 10 nods and went home with the awards for cinematography and for production design.

Best adapted screenplay went to the dementia drama The Father. My Octopus Teacher, a film that found a passionate following on Netflix, won best documentary. Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round won best international film, an award he dedicated to his daughter, Ida, who in 2019 was killed in a car crash at age 19.

The red carpet was back, minus the throngs of onlookers and with socially distanced interviews. Only a handful of media outlets were allowed on site, behind a velvet rope and some distance from the nominees. Casual wear, the academy warned nominees early on, was a no-no. Stars, limited to a plus-one, went without their usual battalions of publicists.

The pandemic-delayed Oscars brought to a close the longest awards season ever – one that turned the season’s industrial complex of cocktail parties and screenings virtual. Eligibility was extended into February of this year, and for the first time, a theatrical run wasn’t a requirement of nominees. Some films – like Sound of Metal – premiered all the way back in September 2019. The biggest ticket-seller of the best picture nominees is Promising Young Woman, with US$6.4 million in box office takings.