Oscar Thoughts

Whooooo boy – where to start? One key aspect of everything I’m going to say about the telecast itself is that I’m not sure who to blame. The producers? The Academy? ABC? Whoever it is had better find their job on the line come this week.

As for who won, I know that I’m directing my joy/anger/confusion at a massive body of thousands of talented individuals who will never know my name. But at least I have a target.

I don’t know if drinking made it better or worse, but it’s too late to change that now.

Fewer Awards. When I first heard of ABC’s decision to not live-broadcast 8 categories, including a potential win for Hans Zimmer – maybe the second-most famous composer currently working – and that they would instead pre-tape the awards and edit in the highlights of their speeches, I was bummed since I care about this stuff. I figured the Academy was missing an opportunity to teach this younger audience that they were so clearly desperate to reach how movies are made while celebrating each achievement. Considering that it was an effort to save time, and that after 3 hours and 45 minutes I was watching the final award get handed out, this gambit fully backfired. With every comedic bit, every montage not related to the nominees, every song that was performed in its entirety, and every 5+ minute speech, I wondered if it would have been better to watch some technical experts win an award and have 90 seconds to awkwardly thank their families. I didn’t wonder very long.

What was also missing from the show was the narratives that come from films going on deep technical runs – Dune won 6 Oscars, only 1 of which was televised live. It would have been thrilling to have a feeling that we were headed towards a potential Dune win.

Twitter Polls. Since none of these decisions are made in a vacuum, I must blame multiple idiots who thought that having people on Twitter vote for the “fan favorite” movie and the best “cheer moment” was a good idea. Both times I watched long clips from Zack Snyder movies – neither of which were theatrically released – take home the “prize” in these “categories” I was thinking of the fact that I was watching that happen instead of seeing a real person win a real award and give a real speech.

The Slap. By now, we’ve all heard (since fewer than 20 million people saw) that Will Smith walked up on stage and slapped Chris Rock after a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, which is due to her alopecia. We’ve all got feelings about it and adding another take to the spin cycle would be inane and redundant, and this is a complicated incident to sort through. Unfortunately, it will probably mar not just Smith’s triumphant and deserved win, but this entire ceremony. While the Oscars really needed a viral moment to remind people why watching live broadcasts is still worthwhile, this is an ugly incident. How the Academy moves forward from here is certainly worth watching; they still let him accept his award after this happened, which made for a bizarre moment that stretched on for far too long. As of the time of this writing, the Academy has stepped forward to say that they asked Smith to leave, he refused, and now they’re discussing disciplinary action; it’s worth noting that Roman Polanski was a member of the Academy until as late as 2018, despite fleeing the country following rape charges nearly 40 years earlier.

Poor Fundamentals. The new stuff the show tried flopped, and so too did the execution of a few of the traditional standards. The “In Memoriam” segment, not helped by occurring after the slap, featured a praise choir covering “Spirit in the Sky” and dancing in front of the screen, which was just an odd choice. Every musical performance dragged, they weren’t all in person, and they weren’t even all nominated. Separate from the egregious runtime – made worse by the fact that we all knew there would be fewer awards – the show was very weirdly paced and started dragging way earlier than it should have.

Good Fundamentals. Dwelling on the negatives about something I care about is a bad way to get others to care about it too, so I think it’s worthwhile to call out a couple of positives. I think the triad of Amy Schumer, Regina Hall, and Wanda Sykes overcame a very poorly planned ceremony to deliver some laughs, engage the audience at home, and stay out of the way of the rest of the show. I was happy to see the basic building blocks of an awards show: montages of the nominees accompanying every category, well-dressed celebrities, and awkward interactions. Distractions aside, the show mostly functioned as it should have, and we had an excellent slate of nominees.

But not always the best winners; for better and worse, this is still the Oscars. Time to talk about the stuff that actually matters.

Best Sound, Production Design, Score, Editing, Visual Effects, and Cinematography:

• Who won: Dune. All 6. I don’t think any were handed out live.

• How I feel: Impressed! With how large and diverse (in both craft and demographics) that the voting body has gotten in recent years, it’s becoming increasingly rare for a film to dominate this heavily. It also highlights that the year’s biggest snub was Denis Villeneuve, whose job as a director is theoretically to marshal all these technical forces in the name of strong storytelling. And while there were plenty of worthy nominees in most of these categories, Dune was the most deserving winner in every single one. And that’s pretty great.

• How will it age? Both excellently and poorly; Dune’s well-deserved dominance means that all eyes are on Villeneuve to deliver his sequel, but as time goes on his exclusion from the nomination pool will only get more and more inexplicable, and in several years, we may wonder if Dune shouldn’t have won the top prize after all.

Best Supporting Actress:

• Who won: Ariana DeBose, West Side Story

• How I feel: Great! She’s been steamrolling the competition all season, has a wonderful career ahead of her, and will probably win another award before she’s done. Her win makes history not just because of her ethnic and social identity, but because her win for playing a character that already had a winning performance puts her on a very short list with some very talented people.

• How will it age? I’m glad to see West Side Story land a big win, but I don’t expect that it only winning in this category will age very well; in a field of deserving nominees, it’s right there with the best of them.

Best Supporting Actor:

• Who won: Troy Kotsur, CODA

• How I feel: Though I preferred Kodi Smit-McPhee’s complex work in The Power of the Dog, it’s been hard to deny the wonderful way that Kotsur has composed himself during this awards season, and to deny the performance itself.

• How will it age? This win, by itself, will age fine. Kotsur’s fellow nominees all have glory ahead of them, and this performance is the most remarkable thing in this film. However, when combined with CODA’s other wins, it’ll start to age poorly.

Best International Feature:

• Who won: Drive My Car

• How I feel: Critics seemed to have hailed this as the year’s masterpiece, and it’s pretty hard for me to disagree, even in a year of strong co-nominees.

• How will it age? This movie only winning one Oscar might age terribly; movies last forever, and audiences may connect with this movie in a way that they didn’t in the moment, and it will cement itself alongside the likes of Ikiru as a brilliant Japanese emotional masterwork capable of reaching right into its viewers’ soul.

Best Original Screenplay:

• Who won: Kenneth Branagh, Belfast

• How I feel: I believed that this was PTA’s moment, I really did. His script wasn’t his best, but it was still heads and shoulders above the film that treated Ireland’s Troubles as an inconvenience for an adorable if slightly insufferable 10-year-old boy with no consequence on the people he knows and loves. Licorice Pizza is a loose hangout movie with plenty of laughs but far more brains than people would initially suspect. At least this didn’t go to Don’t Look Up.

• How will it age? PTA not having an Oscar, not even for writing, has been aging poorly since he didn’t win for Boogie Nights in 1997. If this is more of a recognition of Branagh’s career, when will that occur for PTA? While there is certainly a badge of honor to not having an Oscar, the Academy has been nominating his work with enough frequency of late to suggest that they respect it; time to follow through.

Best Adapted Screenplay:

• Who won: Sian Heder, CODA

• How I feel: This screenplay, a remake of a little-seen French film, with our heroine’s struggle to deal with her burdensome, needy deaf family and find her singing confidence with a lazily-written music teacher, beat Dune’s impressively-paced adaptation of a hefty novel, The Lost Daughter’s lithe yet incisive adaptation of an exploration of the female middle age, Drive My Car’s adaptation of several short stories, and The Power of the Dog’s slow unpeeling of the American cowboy’s fragile masculinity. Yikes.

• How will it age? It’s already aging terribly – everything this film’s casting does for representation could have been done with a better screenplay.

Best Director:

• Who won: Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog

• How I feel: This is a phenomenal pick that was easily predicted; it’s not often that a “career recognition” award also recognizes one of the recipient’s most deserving works or the most deserving work in its category (see Kenneth Branagh for Belfast). Campion is in perfect control of the tone and pace of this slow-burn, progressively claustrophobic piece of character work that is also one of the most visually sumptuous movies of the year.

• How will it age? Tremendously, not just because it was a great choice but because Campion is now linked into history by being the third woman to win this honor and the first person to win only for directing since The Graduate, a classic that was taught in my Intro to Film Studies high school course, which as you can tell changed my life.

Best Actor:

• Who won: Will Smith, King Richard

• How I feel: It’s complicated. Can one slap ruin an entire image built up over a 30-year screen career? We are in the process of finding out.

• How will it age? Because of his actions 30 minutes prior to accepting the award that everyone in the room knew he would win and that he rightly deserved, terribly.

Best Actress:

• Who won: Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye

• How I feel: Embarrassed I didn’t predict it, and this is the moment I lost my annual prediction competition to my lovely wife. Some of her fellow nominees gave superior performances, but they already have Oscars, but should that matter?

• How will it age? I’m glad that Chastain has one, and that will never be taken away from her. I’m not glad she had to bury herself in gawdy makeup and impersonate a real person to get an award she should have won 9 years ago for Zero Dark Thirty. Unfortunately, rewarding actors at the wrong time for the wrong performance is a phenomenon that is still alive and well.

Best Picture:

• Who won: CODA

• How I feel: Pretty bad. Dune, West Side Story, Licorice Pizza, Drive My Car, The Power of the Dog, and I believe King Richard are all better movies than this one. It also feels weird to give an Oscar to the richest company on the planet in Apple, but I guess that’s the world we live in?

• How will it age? Not as bad as the wins for movies like Crash, Driving Miss Daisy, or Green Book, but I don’t think time will help anyone realize that this movie was in fact the best of its year. I do think the lack of a beloved, five-star film this year that appealed to audiences and critics the way that Parasite and The Irishman did two years ago helps its case: Crash topped Brokeback Mountain, Driving Miss Daisy topped Do the Right Thing, and Green Book topped Roma and Black Panther. It will be curious to see what films emerge in the coming years as the true rightful winners; I don’t think Licorice Pizza is large enough in scope or depth (although it is far from shallow), The Power of the Dog is perhaps too cold, and so I think it will be either Drive My Car or West Side Story when we consider Spielberg and realize this was the best film he’s made in a long, long time.