In the era of peak Oscars, the movies commemorated were, at worst, honorably decent and, at best, the sort of sumptuously mounted, inoffensively impressive super-spectacles that the industry had good reason to be proud of: Lawrence of Arabia, Patton, Amadeus, The Last Emperor, The English Patient, and, inevitably but justifiably, Titanic. By the same token, the stars assembled to deliver statuettes into the hands of their fellow stars were worth oohing and aahing over. John Wayne announced The Deer Hunter as best picture in 1979; Jack Nicholson announced Unforgiven in 1993.
But Wayne is dead, Nicholson has entered a state of deep retirement, and Harrison Ford begged off fulfilling his previously-announced duties as an award-presenter due to shingles — a largely inconsequential viral infection (knock on wood) but one indicative of its victim having attained a certain age. Stars of this ilk have been replaced by alleged stars who garner more attention for their intra-celeb litigation (e.g., Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni) than their movies, which all too often are ugly, arty, and dumb in a manner that would have astonished the likes of David O. Selznick and Louis B. Mayer.
In this environment, the Oscars cannot help but come across as an artifact of a dead civilization — a leftover, like the United Nations General Assembly, of a more confident era. In the case of the Oscars, audiences have registered this decline by ignoring the once-boffo annual broadcast on ABC. COVID-19-era attempts to recalibrate the show came a cropper, and the host of choice in recent years, Jimmy Kimmel, failed to approximate even the limited grace and charm of early 2010s-era hosts such as Ellen DeGeneres and Chris Rock.
Yet Hollywood continues to convene its purported best and brightest each year at the Oscars. In an acknowledgment of the program’s declining fortunes, however, this year’s ceremony swapped the increasingly tiresome Kimmel with Conan O’Brien, who, for the most part, maintained a peppy, politically neutral tone on Sunday evening. O’Brien poked fun at the grotesque excesses of the awful “body horror” movie The Substance, the ostentatious running time of the insufferably tendentious The Brutalist, and the pronunciation of best actor nominee Ralph Fiennes’s first name. O’Brien shamed well-coifed attendees with their decades-old headshots. This was all well and good, but it’s a sad state of affairs when the Oscars host tapped with injecting new life into the show is the fellow most people remember for his failed takeover of The Tonight Show 15 years ago.
Of course, O’Brien could not help the gags that were written for him, including an early musical number poking fun at the Oscars’s reputation for exorbitant length — a well-trod source of humor that has lost much of its cultural context: To object to the length of the Oscars assumes that great multitudes of people are watching the Oscars in the first place. In any event, the first hour proceeded at the glacial pace to which any remaining longtime viewers have become accustomed. Robert Downey Jr. did not merely recite the nominees for best supporting actor but offered his own personal paeans to each nominated man.
After the 40-minute mark, the second award of the evening was presented: best animated feature for Flow, whose maker’s acceptance speech featured the first of many appeals to abstract notions of liberal tolerance: “We must overcome our differences and find ways to work together.” About an hour into the proceedings, best costume design was announced by assorted actors who appeared in the nominated films and had just marvelous things to say about their colleagues. Let me here register my preference for Oscar presenters to have no preexisting relationship with any possible winners.
Admittedly, many of my complaints about this year’s ceremony could have been lodged about past ceremonies, including the apparent conviction among Oscar program producers that audience understanding of the act of writing a screenplay is so limited that clips from nominated movies must be shown with dialogue tapped out on the screen, as though so-so dialogue is somehow improved when seen typed in courier font. As various winners thanked their managers, lawyers, or, in the case of best actor winner Adrien Brody, “my many friends at CAA,” I thought back to the immortal acceptance speech of Alfred Hitchcock: “Thank you very much indeed,” the master of suspense said upon being given the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award — and no more.
On the other hand, there were various crimes committed against television that were entirely unique to the show this year. For example, an elaborate film montage, interpretative dance routine, and musical medley were cued up to honor longtime James Bond producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, who just yielded their vaunted creative control over 007 to Amazon. It is a curious thing to celebrate the demolition of a once-great movie franchise with an Oscar-night tribute. No less terrifying were the words spoken by Oprah Winfrey when introducing an otherwise appropriate tribute to late honorary Oscar winner Quincy Jones: “And now with a song from The Wiz … ”
This leads me to Wicked, the girl-power-friendly Wizard of Oz spinoff that won just two awards but, thanks to an opening musical number with stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, seemed initially to dominate the proceedings. At least a majority of the audience is likely to have seen this movie. Can the same be plausibly said of best picture winner Anora? That movie also took home best director (Sean Baker), best actress (Mikey Madison), original screenplay (Baker again), and film editing (Baker once more). I do not begrudge quadruple-threat winners, but is it not a little ironic that Anora’s auteur won three more Oscars than Orson Welles did for co-writing, directing, producing, and starring in Citizen Kane?
OSCARS GET POLITICAL DESPITE EFFORTS TO KEEP CURRENT EVENTS OUT OF BROADCAST
My prevailing memory of the evening will not be Baker’s repeated appearances at the microphone but the prolonged rant-like speech of Brody, who won best actor for the overpraised, overstuffed The Brutalist. Savvy viewers would have known they were in for a rough ride when Brody started his remarks with the words “If I may just humbly begin” — “begin” being the most ominous word of all. He began, and then he continued. Mercifully, he ended his speech with pleas for “a more inclusive world” and an entreaty to “fight for what’s right.” Can we at least start by fighting for a more entertaining Oscar ceremony with bigger and better stars? To his credit, O’Brien injected a note of reality by commenting that viewers who stuck it out to a certain point were likely suffering from Stockholm syndrome — either that, or they were on deadline.
The evening ended as it began: without Ford. I could have watched one of the winning productions (most are already available to stream), but I decided to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark instead.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
