Oscars 2023: Historical Winners and Better Losers

In my previous post, I claimed that the days of a single film dominating the table are likely behind us with the recent expansion of the Academy; what I fool I was. I only got 15/23 categories correct in my predictions, which is low for me relative to recent years. What this year makes clear for me is what the younger, more international Academy is interested in: out with the old, in with the new. Everything Everywhere All at Once won a gobsmacking 7 Oscars, while three major contenders went home empty-handed. In the acting categories, legacies and comeback stories dominated. As is almost always the case, every triumph came over a nominee that I would have preferred, but as is always the case it’s hard for me to be unhappy that the people who finally got their first Oscar actually have one.

Kimmel and the Broadcast. After all the failed experimentation with pre-taping the Technical Categories last year, as well as all the messiness surrounding “the slap”, it was clear from the broadcast that the Academy was looking for a reset. This broadcast had no fluff, no frills, no bits, and still went rather long. I suppose there really is so much you can do if you’re not willing to play off everyone the way you are the VFX team for Avatar. If anyone from the Academy is in the mood to take suggestions from a guy like me, it would be to give the Shorts their own separate ceremony and remove the musical performances, so that we’re looking at more of an 11:15 EST finish instead of and 11:40 one. That said, I think Kimmel did very well as host and proved that a safe pair of hands guiding the ceremony is a good thing. Even with a competent host, there wasn’t a huge energy in this ceremony, but I don’t fault Kimmel for that.

Nobody was getting too drunk, there were no bizarre celebrity interactions that we could fixate on, in fact it was kind of hard to fixate on too many celebrities at all. Denzel Washington and Spike Lee went to a basketball game instead; Jack Nicholson was nowhere to be seen and is seriously getting on in years; Tom Cruise skipped the ceremony even though his film was nominated for Best Picture. This isn’t necessarily the Academy’s fault either, although looking at the casts of movies they chose not to nominate could be a great place to start. Our relationship to celebrity, and the concept of what a movie star is, has shifted in the last decade. There won’t ever be another Tom Cruise, but surely someone can give it their best go. As far as the ceremony and broadcast go, what happened last year was improper, but a little bit of mess wouldn’t hurt as long as no one gets hurt, especially if an overlong and over-stuffed precursors slate points to near-inevitable outcomes. If we’re not in for a loose, star-driven program, then I’d prefer a far more unpredictable set of winners. Maybe moving up the ceremony, thus minimizing the impact of the "precursors" could accomplish this.

The Acting Winners. As I mentioned earlier, the Academy was in the business of making up for past wrongs in the Acting races, but in the process, they might have committed a couple more wrongs. In the night’s second award, Ke Huy Quan finished a nearly-spotless run of awards by receiving the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Though I was closer to lukewarm on this movie and preferred Brendan Gleeson’s turn in The Banshees of Inisherin, I was pleased that Quan got the win and gave a very good performance and has been giving excellent acceptance speeches. Just afterwards, Jamie Lee Curtis received an award for Best Supporting Actress following a season of very few wins. I didn’t find anything about her performance all that fantastic, and neither did most critics or pundits. In fact, the prevailing opinion was that she wasn’t even the best nominee from her movie in this category, as Stephanie Hsu turned in a far better performance, a sentiment I agree with. Curtis’ win represents a well-run campaign by a well-liked celebrity who strongly hitched her wagon to a winning horse. This was a career-capping coronation, and while I like her as much as the next person, I must wonder why a legacy win wasn’t handed to a far more deserving Angela Bassett instead. I don’t see anything about that aging well.

Much, much (much much much) later in the evening, Brendan Fraser took home an Oscar that kind of felt like it was his since The Whale was announced last fall. In yet another instance of Banshees being overlooked, particularly for subtle and oft-comedic performances, Colin Farrell had my favorite performance but the emotion and joy in Fraser has been hard to deny. And then, the night’s penultimate, and possibly most competitive, award for Best Actress went to Michelle Yeoh over Cate Blanchett. On this one I’m also torn; while I’m very happy that Michelle Yeoh has one and Cate Blanchett doesn’t need two, if we’re talking about honoring the best performances then the best one was Blanchett’s turn as Lydia Tár and it wasn’t close.

All told, I’m in the “acceptance” phase for 3 / 4 winners here – Jamie Lee Curtis will take a while, and maybe will never happen. Perhaps that’s what acceptance is.

Everything Everywhere All at Once. The enthusiasm around this film at basically every major awards show after the Golden Globes was really something to behold – and that’s separate from this film’s dominant run of the awards themselves. Voters really went bananas for this movie in a way that’s never been seen before; EEAAO won more awards than any other film has before (unseating the wonderful Return of the King). Part of the responsibility for this stat lies in the fact that we have more awards today than we’ve had before for film, but this is still quite a historic feat. While in the grand scheme of history, this is one of the oddest movies to ever achieve this kind of awards success, it made for an ultimately anticlimactic Best Picture race. Focusing more on its Oscar success, it joins Network and A Streetcar Named Desire as the only movies to win 3 acting awards, and even though I don’t think it’s nearly as good as them, particularly Network, nothing I can say can change the fact that this happened for only the 3rd time in 95 Oscars. In fact, with its awards for Original Screenplay, Best Directing, and Best Picture, this movie has now won the most “above the line” Oscars ever. This places it above, in this statistic alone, films like The Silence of the Lambs. I wonder if I’ll be wrong, but I don’t think this film will be remembered in quite the same way despite its redeeming silly sweetness and formal freshness.

The Big Whiffs. With the insane sweep that EEAAO pulled off, 5 of the 10 Best Picture nominees went home empty-handed (Women Talking won for Screenplay, Top Gun got Sound, All Quiet got Production Design, International Feature, Cinematography, and Score, and Avatar got VFX). Just as massive sweeps are unheard of nowadays, so too is this. I’m feeling just fine that Elvis and Triangle of Sadness didn’t win any Oscars, but I’m bummed, if not totally stunned, that the other three didn’t.

If you haven’t seen The Fabelmans, The Banshees of Inisherin, or Tár, I’d say that they’re more than worth it and were some of the very best I saw all last year. The marketing for Fabelmans did it no favors, as audiences were presented with what appears to be a thinly disguised, self-consumed, saccharine ode to himself and the “magic of the movies”. That is not what this movie is; Spielberg lays his feelings and the psychological burden he’s carried since childhood completely bare in an absorbing family drama that’s exquisitely made, entertaining, and self-effacing in a fascinating way. The Banshees of Inisherin won some Golden Globes in the “comedy” category, and it is spectacularly funny throughout. It’s also one of the deepest and darkest explorations of male grudge-holding, bluff-calling, and self-destructing mediocre artists I’ve ever seen. The movie is also an effective study of the collateral damage that civil war causes without a single shot fired in its runtime that features some of my favorite performances in the entire year. Tár is a slow-burn masterpiece in the highest order of performance and filmmaking powered by an engine of psychological intrigue and ambiguity. It’s so ambiguous, in fact, that it can be read as a comedy, a ghost story, a triumph, or a denouncement. It’s spectacular to have a text that refuses to explain itself yet stands up to scrutiny and is top-to-bottom a clinic in detail-oriented filmmaking that features one of the best lead performances, male or female, in a decade. If I’d had it my way, it would have won everything it was nominated for – Picture, Actress, Director, Screenplay, Editing, and Cinematography; I’d even throw it a nomination and win for Sound. If Everything Everywhere is the movie most of our times with its multiverse-addled story of familial love, then Tár is the movie for our times in the way it forces us to reckon with our notions of power, genius, and morality.

Who’s to know how any of this will age? All I can hope for next year is an equally fantastic slate of films to pour into and debate over that hopefully breeds an entertaining awards season; what they get wrong is always as important as what they get right.