The New Yorker’s “Two People Exchanging Saliva” Wins a 2026 Oscar

The New Yorker’s “Two People Exchanging Saliva,” a satire of consumerism and sexual repression, won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short at Sunday night’s ceremony in Los Angeles. The victory, in a tie with “The Singers,” marks the second consecutive year that a film released by the magazine won an Oscar, following honors for Best Live Action Short, in 2025, for the dark comedy “I’m Not a Robot.” A second New Yorker film,“Retirement Plan,” was nominated for a 2026 Academy Award, for Best Animated Short.

“Two People Exchanging Saliva,” written and directed by Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata, follows two women who meet at a glamorous Parisian department store. In the tense world they inhabit, kissing is illegal, and purchases are paid for with slaps to the face—a scenario that drew inspiration from Western materialism and instances of authoritarian repression across the globe, including the violence that sparked the “Woman Life Freedom” movement in Iran, in 2022. Singh and Musteata said that their film, which was executive-produced by Julianne Moore and Isabelle Huppert, is about the quiet power of tenderness, especially in repressive societies. “By evoking the taboo, the bizarre, the playful, and the absurd, art allows us to imagine an inverted social order,” they told The New Yorker. “Once we see that inversion, we’re forced to ask ourselves a simple question: Why do we accept our own world as natural, when it is often no less strange than any satire?”

In “Retirement Plan,” written and directed by John Kelly, a cartoon protagonist draws up an initially mundane list of activities to fill his golden years. As the list grows, it becomes more expansive: not only will he finally catch up on e-mail; he “will write a devastating yet optimistic piece of poetry.” The film, produced by Julie Murnaghan and Andrew Freedman and featuring voice work by the actor Domhnall Gleeson, runs for less than eight minutes, but quickly snowballs in emotion and poignancy, sprinkled with laughs. “I’m in my mid-forties, time-poor, submerged in possibilities that compete for my time,” Kelly said. “Animating a comedy about all of these feelings felt like the best way to meet them head on.”

In addition to The New Yorker’s 2026 winner and nominee, four documentary shorts released by the magazine were short-listed for Oscar nominations: “Extremist,” “Cashing Out,” “Rovina’s Choice,” and “Last Days on Lake Trinity.”

In all, twenty-one films released by The New Yorker have received Academy Award nominations. The first New Yorker short to claim an Oscar, “Stutterer,” came out in 2015. You can watch past winners, nominees, and the magazine’s full library of short films at newyorker.com/video, and on the magazine’s YouTube channel.

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