Buckley and Arkapaw mark milestones on Oscars night

Jessie Buckley and Autumn Durald Arkapaw both made milestones at the Academy Awards on Sunday night, with Buckley becoming the first Irish performer to win Best Actress for Hamnet and Durald Arkapaw becoming the first woman to win Best Cinematography for Sinners.

Buckley's win means Irish performers have now triumphed in all four acting categories at the Oscars, with that achievement spread across more than seven decades. Barry Fitzgerald got the ball rolling in 1945 when he won Best Supporting Actor for Going My Way, Brenda Fricker followed with Best Supporting Actress for My Left Foot in 1990, and Cillian Murphy won Best Actor for Oppenheimer in 2024. Buckley has now completed the set.

There was also a landmark moment in cinematography, with Durald Arkapaw winning for Sinners. Already the first Black woman to be nominated in the category, she has now become the first woman ever to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography, as well as the first Black person to take the prize.

In the Best Director race, Sinners director Ryan Coogler and Hamnet director Chloé Zhao were both chasing milestones of their own. A win for Coogler would have made him the first Black filmmaker to take the award, while Zhao was hoping to become the first woman to win Best Director twice, having previously won for Nomadland. Instead, the prize went to Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another.

Coogler did not leave empty-handed, however, with Sinners winning Best Original Screenplay. That made him only the second Black writer to win in the category, after Jordan Peele for Get Out in 2018.

Elsewhere, the ceremony featured the first Oscar tie in more than a decade, as The Singers and Two People Exchanging Saliva shared the prize for Best Live Action Short Film. The last tie came in 2013, when Best Sound Editing was shared by Zero Dark Thirty and Skyfall.

Jessie Buckley and Autumn Durald Arkapaw mark milestones on Oscars night

More stories on

Read Next