When Shakespeare in Love swept the 1999 Academy Awards, claiming Best Picture with its witty, sun-drenched romance and deliriously theatrical energy. It felt like a perfect mirror of the moment. The late 1990s were a time of relative prosperity, cultural optimism, and a certain breezy confidence in the power of beauty, love, and art to carry the day.

The film gave audiences Shakespeare not as a tortured genius but as a charming young man tumbling joyfully into inspiration. It was escapism dressed up as erudition. The Academy, like the wider public, rewarded it warmly. That a film so luminous and life-affirming could dominate awards season tells us as much about 1998 as it does about cinema.

Fast forward to 2026, and the Best Picture field was anchored by Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s devastatingly emotional portrait of grief and loss following the death of William Shakespeare’s young son to plague. It’s a film that occupies the same Elizabethan universe as Shakespeare in Love, yet could not be more tonally opposite.

The two films share a world; they share almost nothing else. Where the 1999 winner danced through London with wit and warmth, Hamnet lingers in the shadow of unimaginable parental sorrow. Jessie Buckley took home the Best Actress Oscar for her performance. It’s a win for a film that asked audiences to sit with grief rather than be rescued from it.

What accounts for this seismic tonal shift from the Shakespeare in Love era? The answer is almost certainly the times themselves. The post-9/11 world, the 2008 financial collapse, a global pandemic, rising authoritarianism, an increasing divisiveness, and a fracturing sense of shared reality have all left their fingerprints on the stories we choose to tell — and to honor.

Cinema has always been a kind of emotional barometer, and filmmakers working in the mid-2020s are processing a collective psyche repeatedly shaken. The horror genre’s remarkable ascent is particularly telling: Sinners set an all-time record with 16 nominations, surpassing the previous record shared by All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land. This is a fact that would have been unthinkable in the era when a romantic comedy about a playwright could win everything.

There is, of course, something quietly hopeful in all of this. The fact that films as uncompromising as Hamnet, as politically charged as One Battle After Another, and as viscerally disturbing as Sinners swept the 98th Academy Awards suggests that audiences, and the Academy, have a genuine hunger for art that meets them where they are.

— What do you think? Does the darkness of this year’s Oscar class reflect something true about where we are as a culture? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.