The documentary “All the Empty Rooms,” which memorialized children killed in school shootings through a look at the bedrooms they never returned to, took home the Oscar for Best Documentary Short at the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday.

The film follows CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp along their seven-year journey to document the toll of America’s school shooting epidemic. Director Joshua Seftel accepted the Oscar on stage alongside Hartman, producer Conall Jones and Gloria Cazares, whose daughter Jackie was killed in the Uvalde school shooting in 2022.

“The four empty rooms in our film belonged to four young children who were all killed in school shootings: Hallie, Gracie, Dominic and Jackie,” Seftel told the crowd before passing the mic to Cazares.

Wearing red dress and a pin with an image of Jackie, Cazares spoke of her 9-year-old daughter and appealed for an end to gun violence.

“Since that day, her bedroom has been frozen in time,” Cazares said. “Jackie is more than just a headline. She is our light and our life. Gun violence is now the number one cause of death in kids and teens. We believe that if the world could see their empty bedrooms, we’d be a different America.”

When Hartman traveled to Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School, Cazares told him that people are always telling her that they can’t imagine what she’s going through. But she said we need to imagine, and that’s why she invited Hartman and Bopp into her home.

“It just makes everything more real for the public, for the world,” Carazes said at the time. “Her room completely just speaks of who she was.”

In Jackie’s room, there was the chocolate she had saved for a day that never came, and an “About Me” chalkboard where she wrote that she wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up.

Many of the children’s rooms, like Jackie’s, remained virtually untouched, years after the shootings. 

“Their personalities shone through in the smallest details of their untouched rooms — hair ties on a doorknob, a toothpaste tube left uncapped, a ripped ticket for a school event — allowing me to uncover glimpses as to who they were,” Bopp said in an essay about the project in 2024.

Explore the rooms:
Unmade beds and overdue books: Photographing the rooms of kids killed in school shootings

More from CBS “Sunday Morning”:
Standing on the threshold of grief, documenting the bedrooms of kids killed in school shootings

A tie at the 2026 Oscars on Sunday marked a rare moment for the movie awards ceremony — the seventh time in the academy’s history that two awards were given for one category.

As Kumail Nanjiani took the stage to announce the winner for Best Live-Action Short at the 98th annual Academy Awards, the actor and comedian exclaimed: “And the Oscar goes to … it’s a tie. I’m not joking. It’s actually a tie.”

The Oscars went to “The Singers,” a musical comedy, and “Two People Exchanging Saliva,” a French-language short drama. First up on stage was the team behind “The Singers.”

“A tie, wow. I didn’t know that was a thing, a tie, but we’re happy to be up here,” said “The Singers” director Sam Davis as he accepted the award.

Nanjiani then took the mic again and announced “Two People Exchanging Saliva” as the second winner.

“We love all of our fellow nominees, and we’re so, so grateful to everyone who has supported our film,” director Natalie Musteata said. “Thank you to the academy … for supporting a film that is weird and that is queer and that is made by a majority of women.”

Other ties at the Oscars include Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand

There have been six other ties at the Oscars over the course of nearly a century.

At the 5th annual Academy Awards, actors Fredric March (“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”) and Wallace Beery (“The Champ”) shared the award.

It was not a true tie, however, as March received one more vote than Beery, according to the Academy. But rules at the time said if the runner-up in any category came within three votes of the winner, they would both get rewarded. The rules have since been changed, and only an exact tie in votes now qualifies for two awards.

In 1949, the documentaries “A Chance to Live” and “So Much for So Little” tied in the short subject category.

In 1968, Katharine Hepburn (“The Lion in Winter”) and Barbra Streisand (“Funny Girl”) both received Oscars for Best Actress.

In 1986, the Feature Documentary category saw a tie between “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got” and “Down and Out in America.”

In 1994, another tie occurred in the Best Live-Action Short category. “Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Trevor” received the same number of votes from Academy members.

The last tie occurred in 2012 in Sound Editing for “Skyfall” and “Zero Dark Thirty.”