MovieManifesto

For nearly two-and-a-half hours, the 94th Academy Awards were a predictably unpleasant disaster: awkward, arrhythmic, unfunny. They were destined to be aggressively forgettable, and their legacy was likely to be a harsh reputation of the Academy’s baffling decision to announce the awards for eight categories during the red carpet and then “integrate” them into the proper broadcast. It was a dull and haphazard show, one certain to ignite the usual funereal chatter about the Oscars’ supposed irrelevance.

Then Will Smith slapped Chris Rock in the face, and the show morphed into an entirely different type of fiasco—uglier, messier, and undeniably more memorable, albeit for bad reasons. Read More