Oscars Recap

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

Well, that was… different.

Look, I don’t envy Steven Soderbergh and the other producers tasked with running the 93rd Academy Awards. The ceremony was doomed to fall under the giant shadow cast by the COVID-19 pandemic—not just because it presented an enormous logistical challenge in the era of masks and social distancing, but because the show itself was celebrating a year’s 14 months worth of films that were released during a time when virtually nobody was going to the movies. The result was a telecast that needed to be fluid and innovative in an industry that prizes consistency and tradition.

Soderbergh’s team tried. Even with nominees spread across the globe rather than packed into the Dolby Theatre, they attempted to mount a more intimate-feeling gathering, one reliant on conversation and eye contact as opposed to engineering and bombast. As the capper to an absurdly lengthy awards season, the Oscars are typically meant to feel gigantic, but here they aimed to be small, even cozy. Read More

Every so often, the Academy gets one right.

Look, I don’t care all that much about the Oscars. They’re a self-congratulatory ceremony designed to honor the preferences of an insular collective whose tastes rarely mirror my own. Getting worked up about them is just silly. But they still matter, as a matter of historical record if nothing else. Sure, the Academy Awards can help launch careers or highlight social issues, but their primary function these days is statistical. Actors are identified in obituaries as having been nominated X number of times, while certain victories become data points—anecdotes used to spot cinematic trends in terms of genre, style, and demographics. How many war movies have won Best Picture? How many women have been nominated for Best Director? These questions are posed not just in esoteric bar trivia, but by scholars who seek to measure changes within the film industry, who participate in our ongoing quest to determine which movies we like and which we ruefully ignore. We pay attention to the Oscars because they matter; the Oscars matter because we pay attention. Read More