Oscars Recap

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

I don’t hate Green Book.

I want to lead with that, because over the next few days, weeks, and maybe decades, you’re going to be hearing a lot about how bad Green Book is, and how the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made a dreadful error when they awarded it the Oscar for Best Picture. I’m by no means a fan of the film, but I also don’t think that it’s completely irredeemable. (When I ranked every movie that I watched in 2018, it came in at #113 out of 135, but you could bump it as high as #70 and I wouldn’t put up a huge fight.) It’s very well-acted, it’s paced appropriately, its production values are impressive, and—if you can set aside its regressive politics and simplistic themes—it’s largely enjoyable. I’ve seen worse.

But “I’ve seen worse” is not exactly the type of ringing endorsement that should greet the Best Picture winner at the Oscars. And Green Book, as superficially pleasing as it can be, is not a very good movie. (Regrettably, I never formally reviewed it, though I did register my thoughts on Twitter.) Its screenplay is clunky and predictable, while its message—essentially a childish plea of “Can’t we all just get along?”—is hopelessly crude. Instead of grappling with the complexity and causticity of American race relations, it peddles a fairy tale of white decency and mutual growth. It is sappy, trite, and self-congratulatory. It does not resemble anything close to the best movie of the year. Read More

For a self-referential ceremony that exists mostly to celebrate itself, this year’s Oscars were different. Well, not entirely; in its bold strokes, last night’s telecast kept to the same basic rhythms—the clips, the songs, the montages—that the Academy Awards have been refining for the past nine decades. But many of the speeches and presentations that highlighted this year’s show were decidedly of the moment. At a time when Hollywood is facing a long-awaited reckoning, many of Tinsel Town’s brightest stars used show business’ glitziest stage to speak frankly on the issues that continue to engulf the industry. In that sense, at least, this was not your grandfather’s Oscars.

Beyond that, it was a perfectly decent show, which is to say that it was too long, too dull, and too stiff. In his second straight turn as host, Jimmy Kimmell delivered a decidedly adequate performance, with a few hits—in addition to a dry and well-paced opening monologue, his jet ski bit was an inspired touch, with many winners referring to it in their speeches—a few duds, and one ghastly misfire (the insufferable and interminable Wrinkle in Time bit). He seemed to minimize his own presence this year, which served the tone of this year’s Oscars well; with so much attention on diversity—of sex, of race, of orientation, of national origin—there is only so much that a straight white male host has to say. And at least the predictable callbacks to last year’s envelope fiasco were kept to a dull roar.

For my part, I did rather well in terms of my predictions, hitting on 18 of 21 categories, a marked improvement after my atrocious score last year. And while I often preferred one of the losing nominees (as is usually the case), it was difficult to begrudge most of the winners.

On to a quick recap of the awards, in order of presentation: Read More

In a shocking twist, La La Land was not the big winner at this year’s Oscars. But Moonlight, which actually (though not initially) won Best Picture, wasn’t the big winner either. Nor was Emma Stone, nor Casey Affleck, nor Best Animated Feature winner Zootopia, nor The Salesman director Asghar Farhadi (though his in absentia speech was pretty cool).

No, the big winner at the 89th Annual Academy Awards was Jordan Horowitz.

You probably don’t know Horowitz by name, but you almost assuredly now know him by sight. He’s one of the producers of La La Land, the one who—after realizing the historic, incomprehensible gaffe that concluded last night’s ceremony, when Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty erroneously announced La La Land as the recipient of Best Picture—handled the debacle with extraordinary grace. He could have ranted, cried, complained, or stormed off; if he had, it’s unlikely anyone would have blamed him. Instead, he kept his composure and, in a display of enviable courtesy, announced, “I’m gonna be really proud to hand this to my friends from Moonlight.”

That is the memory I will choose to take away from this year’s Oscars. Yes, it was crazy, inexplicable, and deeply unfortunate—even if you weren’t a fan of La La Land (and plenty of you weren’t), it was downright cruel to tease it with the gift of Best Picture only to suddenly wrench the trophy out of its grasp. But Horowitz made the best of a very bad situation. The official theme of last night’s ceremony was “inspiration”—that’s a tacky title, but as the telecast wrapped up its absurd conclusion, it was impossible to watch Horowitz and not be inspired by his humility and class.

Before running through the actual awards, a quick review of the overall telecast: It was fine. Jimmy Kimmell is hardly my favorite comedian, and many of his bits—the mean tweets, the candy dropping from the ceiling, the overlong segment with real tourists parading through the Dolby Theatre—fell flat. But his dry opening monologue cleverly downplayed the evening’s grandeur, and his inevitable political commentary was reasonably amusing, going for the funny bone rather than the jugular. (His extended feud with Matt Damon was excellent, culminating with his hilarious faux-appreciation of We Bought a Zoo.) The overall tone of Kimmell’s performance was one of understatement; he seemed to recognize that, yes, the Oscars are silly and stupid and self-aggrandizing and there are more important things going on in the world right now, but what the hell, we’re here, so let’s all enjoy ourselves. He even handled the envelope snafu with poise and wit, first name-checking Steve Harvey and then attempting to place the blame on himself. It wasn’t perfect, but it could have been a lot worse.

On to a brief recap of the show, with the awards listed in order of their presentation. Read More