“Patience, resilience and that rarest of qualities today, optimism.”
That may have been Oscar host Conan O’Brien’s serious wish tonight for the film industry and the world, but it ended up being a pretty good epitaph for Hollywood’s biggest night this year.
For one thing, let’s get it out of the way that all three traits were required for a show that was over 3 hours and 40 minutes long. Sinners star Michael B. Jordan’s Best Actor speech tapped into the same trio of elements in a very different way as he listed off “the people that came before me. Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Jamie Foxx, Forest Whitaker, Will Smith.”
Maybe it was the fact that YouTube will be replacing ABC as the home od the Oscars in 2029, but someone somewhere in AMPAS and Disney finally dragged the lumbering show deep into the 21st century.
Making the Oscars watchable from start to finish, and reducing the cringe, has been no easy task. Many a producing team, director and AMPAS board had been defeated trying, or at least pretending to try. A changing culture, fractured viewing habits and sliding ratings over the past 15 years has only exacerbated the hardship as the movies’ big night seemed to get smaller and smaller and far less relevant.
Tonight wasn’t perfect, but it sure was something worth watching with some drama, some surprises and a lot of fun. O’Brien will not be Oscar host for life, but the end of show pre-recorded bit where he is killed off just like Oscar winner Sean Penn’s Lockjaw character was in One Battle After Another was a nice nod to the Best Picture winner that had just been announced a few minutes before hand (Was there a Sinners one shot too if the Ryan Coogler film won?)
Big and bold-ish, the 98th Academy Awards had eagles, the Pope, crowns, Josh Groban, and a “hasasmallpenis” Donald Trump dig. The Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan produced show also had best use of a Beastie Boys tune in an Oscars opening skit ever, a passable new Leonardo DiCaprio meme. some YouTube pearl clutching, a couple of big wins for Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, and a “Thank you, Canada” all in its first 30 minutes.
Then there was that feverish, whirling and star studded (Buddy Guy in the house) performance of Sinners’ Best Song nominee ‘I Lied To You.” Miles Caton, Jayme Lawson, Li Jun Li and a glorious spin by ballerina Misty Copeland got the gussied up crowd up on its feet and those feet movin’
In the end, KPop’s ‘Golden’ won Best Original Song, but Sinners created a juke joint in the middle of Hollywood at the Dolby was beautiful enrapture of American art in motion, the power and the glory of the history of the nation and cinema wrapped in bristling song.
Ryan Coogler compelling the Sinners cast to stand up as he received a standing ovation for his Best Original Screenplay win tapped into the same flame.
Both were, to paraphrase nominee and Sinners star Delroy Lindo, a living breathing world of their own in a often bleak world.
In fact, in a political statement with far great blast radius than Jimmy Kimmel’s well-aimed hit on MAGA-positive CBS and Javier Bardems’s much cheered “No to War, Free Palestine,” it was a big night for Sinners and for Best Picture winner, One Battle After Another and its Best Director winning leader Paul Thomas Anderson. To that, it was a very big night for Warner Bros, which put out both pictures.
For nearly the first hour, with the exception of returning host O’Brien’s bit too long and bit too much Timothée Chalamet monologue, it looked like the Oscars curse of bloat, bumbling and bloviating may be broken – or at the very least, a show celebrating the best in film would entertaining and heartfelt.
Time kept ticking by and the curse, for the most part, remained broken this year.
There may have a lightly lower wattage of star power at the Oscars this year, even with O’Brien making it clear in his first few minutes that Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos is the real King of Hollywood. There’s been a lot of doom and gloom out of a year that still sees the industry trying to get up off the mat, find the public’s favor, battle AI and witnessing the shift of Tectonic corporate and technological plates (yes, that’s the obligatory Paramount buying Warner Bros Discovery reference in this review).
It’s hard out there. The way things are shaping up it might get a lot harder.
The Oscars played to the subtext, which turns out is a strength for these storytellers.
Won by One Battle After Another’s Cassandra Kulukundis, the inaugural Best Casting Award, with five actors from each nominee’s film onstage, wobbled a bit. C’mon, can’t slam anyone for that, the unsteadiness was real and the moment was more poignant because of it. The Live Action Short Film tie for The Singers and Two People Exchanging Salvia was even more unexpected than OBAA‘s Kulukundis’ win (the bet was on Sinners’ Francine Maisler) as was whatever that retracted microphone glitch was.
Look, this is the Oscars, this is live TV, and dumb sh*t still happens. Cutting the mic and dimming the lights of the KPop Demon Hunter team when they were giving their Best Original Song victory speeches was very not cool at all.
There are also a lot of people that need to be appeased to put the show together, so some habits are going to die harder than others. On the flip side, because film is partly a visual medium, let’s note the ABC broadcast ceremony also looked great on-stage, with top tier production design from Misty Buckley and Alana Billingsley.
Outside, the rise of the Right, the return of Trump, and an very American Authoritarianism, abductions, deportations, killings of Americans by government agents and war all over the globe threatens to overwhelm everything – even the films and art that seek to resist.
Tonight, with only three years left until the big (and it is big) move off network TV to YouTube, the Academy Awards stretched to straddle all the divides in the room and outside. It was a balancing act made all the more steady and solid by its ambition and, honestly, its humanity – a mix missing too often the past decade and more.
Let me be clear, this reinvention of sorts was not a case of TES (Trump Exhaustion Syndrome). Rather, it was about being surgical in its swipes and joyous in its love of cinema and its practitioners.
There was Sinners’ Autumn Arkapaw’s callout to the women in the Dolby (Stand up …I don’t get here without you guys) in her Best Cinematography win remarks. There was Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley cutting through all the awards gibberish to speak as a mother and a storyteller. On a much lighter level, there was Moulin Rouge co-stars Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor riffing on love, with charm, nostalgia and some lyrical callbacks in a reunion that was neither too long and never asked for.
For ages, the Oscars’ In Memoriam segment has seen oversights and face plants galore.
There was some omissions this year, let’s not lie.
Still, the tragic deaths of Rob Reiner and Michelle Reiner were handled with such love from longtime family friend and When Harry Met Sally star Billy Crystal tonight along with an overview of the filmmaker’s career. The sad passing of Catherine O’Hara, Diane Keaton and Robert Redford all had their moments in the spotlight too in a calibrated outpouring of respect and emotion.
Again: “Patience, resilience and that rarest of qualities today, optimism.”
In America, in the dirty business of show business and on the Oscars, you could do a lot worse than that. As Joe Biden liked to say, “take the win.”