Oscars Recap

The Oscars don’t matter. But the movies do.

That was the real takeaway of the 98th Academy Awards, an uneven ceremony that venerated some very good motion pictures. As a matter of celebratory choreography—as, y’know, an awards show—it was awfully bumpy. With the exception of Will Arnett and Channing Tatum, most of the paired presenters were dreadfully stiff, while the producers—perhaps traumatized by lingering memories of Adrien Brody a year ago—were unduly hasty in playing the winners off stage, especially for the below-the-line fields. The sound mix was clunky, some of the speeches felt obligatory, and a bunch of prearranged bits landed with a thud. It was far from the smoothest commemoration of the power of cinema.

But these Oscars were still, on the whole, a good time, in part because the movies they feted were so satisfying. It didn’t hurt that Conan O’Brien, in his second straight stint as host, was locked in from the jump, with an ingenious introduction—repurposing the rousing climax of Weapons into a rapid-fire tour through many of the nominated films—that led into a note-perfect monologue. O’Brien obviously knows how to work a crowd, but here he located just the right blend of good-natured sarcasm, political snark, and sincere admiration. He also delivered some pointed jabs about the industry’s future—roasting Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, castigating phone-cropped atrocities, teaming with Sterling K. Brown to mock the clumsy storytelling habits of the streaming era—without spoiling anyone’s fun. Read More

The internet demands extreme reactions; favored adjectives include disastrous, extraordinary, loathsome, and life-changing. This tends to chafe with my obnoxious penchant for suggesting that most things are Fine. So this year, I’ll do my best to deliver a hot take and proclaim that this year’s Oscars were… pretty good! They were not exceptional; most of the speeches were dull, the songs were a bore, and the lack of clips/footage was infuriating. But while Conan O’Brien initially seemed to be pulling the tedious shtick of complaining that the nominated films weren’t “popular” enough (I groaned when he mocked the length of The Brutalist), his overall vibe proved positive, earnest, and charming; no single movie was the butt of his jokes more than he was himself. His general enthusiasm infected the rest of the show, which had the feel of a playful, buoyant get-together. If Hollywood’s celebrities indulged themselves while the world around them burned, at least they had a good time and let us vicariously share in their joy.

As for the awards themselves, in one sense the Academy spread the wealth; eight of the 10 Best Picture nominees scooped up at least one trophy, with five of them scoring multiple victories. But the night belonged to Anora. Yesterday, I noted the oddity of my predictions, which pegged Sean Baker’s odyssey to win the top prize but only one additional Oscar; I knew that I’d be wrong, but I wasn’t sure which way. Happily, my favorite of 2024’s contenders went on a spree, winning five of the six categories it was nominated in. The sands of history will decide how this quasi-sweep is perceived, but in the moment, I’m very pleased for one of the year’s most enjoyable and poignant movies.

Per tradition, let’s run through the categories in their order of presentation and see which ones I messed up: Read More

This year’s Oscars were great, except for the bits that were terrible. Or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, such dissonance is the norm; Hollywood’s annual self-congratulatory gala has never equaled the sum of its parts. Speeches are wonderful and terrible, presentations are inspired and insipid, jokes are cutting and groaning, songs are riotous and wretched. It all adds up less to a unified ceremony than a collection of impressionable moments.

And this year’s Oscars, the 96th in the Academy’s history, delivered plenty of those. John Mulaney turned the rudimentary presentation of Best Sound (featuring a surprise winner!) into a majestic detour about Field of Dreams. Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling reminded everyone what natural star power looks like. A powerful speech from 20 Days in Mariupol director Mstyslav Chernov (about the atrocities in Ukraine) brought the typically tittering crowd into reverent silence, only for it to later explode with euphoria following Gosling’s rendition of Barbie’s “I’m Just Ken.” John Cena got naked. Read More

It could have been worse. That may seem like a low bar when judging the quality of the Oscars, but considering that the prior two years were disastrous—first the Steven Soderbergh-produced telecast that ended with a tribute to Chadwick Boseman which misfired spectacularly when he failed to win Best Actor, then the… incident involving Chris Rock and Will Smith—a carefully cultivated mediocrity felt like a win this time around. As host, Jimmy Kimmel was hit-and-miss, alternating between winning one-liners and groaning bits. (Thankfully, he kept Slap Discourse to a minimum, even as he tossed off one of his best quips in service of it: “without a hitch, and without Hitch.”) That unevenness extended to the presenters (the usual blend of funny and forced), the speeches (some tremendous, some tedious), and the song performances (yay “Naatu Naatu,” boo Son Lux). Everything averaged out to fine, and when it comes to the Oscars at this point, “fine” is something I can live with.

As for the movies themselves, the big winners were Everything All at Once, which scooped up seven Oscars—including six of the so-called Big Eight, which I believe is a record (I’m too tired to research it)—and All Quiet on the Western Front, which totaled four. (In fact, only one other film took home multiple prizes; more on that later.) Because the Academy tends to save its highest-profile categories for later in the evening, All Quiet appeared to be positioning itself as a Best Picture threat, especially when it ripped off three straight victories midway through the show. But that was a mirage; this was always Everything Everywhere’s night, from boisterous beginning (welcome to the stage, Ke Huy Quan!) to triumphant end. Read More

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