“Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters took home the prize for best original song at Sunday’s 2026 Oscars following a triumphant performance from the singing voices of HUNTR/X, but EJAE and company’s heartfelt speech ended up being cut short when one of her collaborators was prematurely played off.

By winning best original song at the 98th Oscars, “Golden” set several records, becoming the first K-pop song to win an Oscar; the first song with more than four writers to win an Oscar; and the first best song winner where all of the writers won’t receive an individual trophy.

“Golden” has seven credited writers – EJAE, Mark Sonnenblick, Joong Gyu Kwak, Yu Han Lee, Hee Dong Nam, Jeong Hoon Seo and Teddy Park. Previously, no song with more than four writers had won in this category.

EJAE — who is also one of three singing voices of the film’s central girl group HUNTR/X, alongside AUDREY NUNA and REI AMI — spoke first for the group of songwriters on Sunday night, emphasizing the song’s message of “resilience.”

“Thank you so much to the Academy for this insane award,” EJAE began. “Growing up, people made fun of me for liking K-pop, but now everyone’s singing our song and all the Korean lyrics. I’m so proud. And I realized, the song, this award is not about success; it’s about resilience. And I’m just so grateful to our team, and just want to thank my mom, my dad, my brother, my fiance, my manager, of course, for always staying with me. And I also want to thank, of course, the resilient cast of KPop Demon Hunters. Thank you so much to [directors] Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans and our producer, Michelle Wang. Thank you so much for the film. Thank you to Netflix. Thank you Sony Animation.”

EJAE wrapped her speech by naming many of the collaborators onstage behind her, but when one of her co-writers jumped in to add his thank-you’s, the music loudly kicked in and drowned out what he was saying, as the Oscars abruptly went to commercial break.

The Motion Picture Academy has a strict rule that it will award no more than four statuettes in this category. If a song has five or more co-writers, as is the case with “Golden,” the writers must sign an agreement that, should they win, they will share one statuette. They will all forever be known as Oscar winners; they just won’t each have a shiny trophy to show for it.

Here’s the rule, verbatim, from the rulebook for the 98th Oscars. “No more than two statuettes will normally be given in the Original Song category. A third statuette may be awarded when there are three essentially equal writers of a song. The Music Branch Executive Committee has the right, in what it alone determines to be a very rare and extraordinary circumstance, to award a fourth statuette. In cases where five or more credited songwriters function as collaborators, a single statuette may be awarded to the group. Each songwriter must agree to the single “group statuette” option by signing and returning a Group Award form prior to the submission deadline. Final determination of the awardable songwriters in the group will be made by the Music Branch Executive Committee.”

“Golden” had already made K-pop awards show history. On Feb. 1, it became the first K-pop song to win a Grammy when it won best song written for visual media. “Golden” also won best original song at the Critics Choice Awards and the Golden Globes.

This year’s other Oscar nominees for best original song were: “Dear Me” from Diane Warren: Relentless; Music and Lyric by Diane Warren; “I Lied to You” from Sinners; Music and Lyric by Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Goransson; “Sweet Dreams of Joy” from Viva Verdi!; Music and Lyric by Nicholas Pike and “Train Dreams” from Train Dreams; Music by Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner; Lyric by Nick Cave.

In addition to original song, KPop Demon Hunters also won the Oscar for best animated feature film on Sunday.

Here are two other Oscar records “Golden” set:

Longest-running No. 1 hit to win an Oscar for best original song in more than 20 years

“Golden” is only the third song that spent eight or more weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 to win an Oscar. The first two were “You Light Up My Life” from the film of the same name (Debby Boone’s cover version spent 10 weeks on top in 1977) and “Lose Yourself” from 8 Mile (Eminem’s original version spent 12 weeks on top in 2002-03).

Moreover, “Golden” is the first song that had already hit No. 1 to win an Oscar since “Lose Yourself.” Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s “Shallow” had climbed as high as No. 5 before the Oscar telecast in 2019. It zoomed to No. 1 (for one week) after it won and after the two stars memorably performed the song on the show.

Six of the seven writers are the first South Koreans to win in this category

EJAE, Joong Gyu Kwak, Yu Han Lee, Hee Dong Nam, Jeong Hoon Seo and Teddy Park were all born in South Korea. (The other co-writer, Mark Sonnenblick, was born in the U.S.) Karen O, who was born in South Korea, was nominated 12 years ago for co-writing “The Moon Song” from Her, but the award went to “Let It Go” from Frozen.

Billboard‘s current cover star Mau P swung by the Billboard House @ SXSW on Sunday (March 15) to talk about music and more ahead of his headlining set at Austin’s The Concourse Project. (This show was originally scheduled to happen as part of Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW 2026 at Moody Amphitheater, but was moved due to severe weather.)

Speaking with Billboard senior music correspondent Katie Bain, the Dutch producer reflected on his earliest inspirations, sharing that he grew up listening to “a lot of Snoop Dogg and Pharrell, and my dad would always play jazz in the car that I had no interest in at the time, but it always stuck in my head.”

The artist in fact grew up in a highly musical household where his mom was a singer and his dad was a session musician, music teacher and conductor, with the first floor of the family home occupied by a music studio.

“I could always just go downstairs and play whatever instrument was available,” Mau said. “To me it was just like, ‘If I don’t know what to do later in life, I can always fall back on whatever my parents were doing. Music was almost like the last resort, if I didn’t think of anything else to do that was not music.” (He also revealed that before music, he considered becoming both a designer and a camera jib operator.)

Of course, music has worked out very well for Mau P, who’s skyrocketed to headlining status over the last four years with a signature sound that’s at once darkly groovy, sexy and playful. He arrived to this style after years cutting his teeth in the mainstage EDM world under the name Maurice West.

“When I transitioned into Mau P, it felt like my whole background of doing Maurice West was being put to use for a different kind of direction,” he said. “I had this knowledge of really big sounds that were made for really big stages, and the only goal was to get everybody jumping up and down. My thought was, ‘How do I package that into a sound that’s sexier and also approachable for the clubs and not just for the big stage and the big speakers, but also just for your earbuds.”

Landing on this sound has also made for Mau to play both massive festival stages and trendsetting parties. “It’s a very thin line between me being able to play CircoLoco, but also me being able to play an hour at Coachella in a headline slot and still make it entertaining for people,” he said of his viral show at the festival last April, “and not just in a way that it’s fireworks and flames, but where I’m mixing for a very long time. I wanted to show people that I’m actually taking my time DJing and doing this craft.”

Between all the shows, Mau is making time to work on the debut album he announced in January. Finding the vibe for this collection has found him back in the studio making songs “that you can play on a piano and you can sing it, and it still holds up nice,” he said. “I’m not trying to follow what’s popping right now. I’m just trying to take it back to the core, so it’s not going to be dependent on like, ‘I mixed those drums really well and that has the fattest bass ever.’”

“Like, you know me, it will have the fattest bass ever,” he continued. “But it still has to be timeless.”

At Sunday’s (March 15) 2026 Oscars, Barbra Streisand took the stage to pay loving tribute to her The Way We Were co-star Robert Redford, who died in September at age 89.

Streisand gave a speech honoring Redford as “an intellectual cowboy who blazed his own trail and won the Academy Award for best director, and I miss him now more than ever.” She wrapped up her fond words by singing a snippet of “The Way We Were,” her three-week Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 theme song for the 1973 romantic drama, which also won the Oscar for best original song at the 1974 ceremony.

Below, read Streisand’s full tribute to Redford:

After I read the first script for The Way We Were, I could only imagine one man in the role of Hubbell, and that was Robert Redford. But he turned it down because he said the character had no backbone. He doesn’t stand for anything. And he was right. So many drafts later, Bob finally agreed to do it. He was a brilliant, subtle actor, and we had a wonderful time playing off each other, because we never quite knew what the other one was going to do or say. And I’m thrilled that The Way We Were is now considered a classic love story, but it’s also about a dark time in our history, the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, when people were informing on each other and subject to loyalty oaths.

Now, Bob had real backbone, on and off the screen. He spoke up to defend freedom of the press, protect the environment and encouraged new voices at his Sundance Institute, some of whom are up for Oscars tonight, which is so great. He was thoughtful and bold. I called him an intellectual cowboy who blazed his own trail and won the Academy Award for best director, and I miss him now more than ever, even though he loved teasing me. He called me Babs, and I’d say, “Bob, come on, do I look like a Babs?” I’m not a Babs, you know? But the way he said it made me laugh. And many years later, we were chatting on the phone about the usual — politics, art, [Italian painter and sculptor] Modigliani, our favorite — and as we were hanging up, he said, “Babs, I love you dearly, and I always will.” And in the last note I ever wrote to Bob, I ended it with, “I love you too.” And I signed it: “Babs.”