When it comes to the Oscars, I crave moments.
With all due respect to One Battle After Another, which I think is one of the most deserving Best Picture winners in recent memory, and winners like Jessie Buckley and Michael B. Jordan, this year’s ceremony didn’t have those moments.
The show felt as exhausted with itself as we have all felt about awards season. It goes on for too long. It was to the point that I swear I felt some winners groan about having to go up on stage and say their thank yous…again.
This year’s ceremony felt too produced. There was too much preparation. Too much of knowing what was going to happen. Too much of trying to be “the Oscars.” Nothing felt spontaneous or authentic. There weren’t any moments!
I liked Conan O’Brien when he hosted last year’s ceremony. But he had an impossible job this year. The Oscars host needs to be topical, which these days means roasting Donald Trump, a war, and the fact that no American is happy with their life right now. That’s not exactly easy material for a comedian to navigate without alienating a huge percentage of the audience.
So while O’Brien made his presence known this year, far more than last, everything felt a little flat and neutered. There was a big AI bit, but the issue with AI is that no one has managed to make criticizing it funny. That includes O’Brien.
What makes it so disappointing that the ceremony was hardly entertaining is that it’s a year when the winners were actually spectacular.
It would have been incredibly awkward if Amy Madigan didn’t win Best Supporting Actress for Weapons, after O’Brien’s entire opening bit was centered around her character. Thankfully, she won, the rare performer to get an acting Oscar when the film they were in wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. (That’s a good piece of trivia.) It’s a great win, one of the few times the Academy has embraced a horror film.
The curse of every Academy Awards telecast is that it has to find a way to entertain the audience for three-plus hours when the people are really only tuning in to see who wins the four acting trophies. So you’re at a disadvantage when one of those four winners doesn’t show up, as was the case with Sean Penn, who won for One Battle After Another. I know a lot of people don’t like it when actors use speeches to say political things, but I would have been eager to hear what this famously incendiary curmudgeon would say at that microphone.
Jessie Buckley and Michael B. Jordan were deserving as Best Actress and Best Actor, as well. The biggest winners of the awards season, though, might be the worlds of ballet and opera, which, thanks to Timothée Chalamet, have been showered with appreciation. Chalamet was at one point a frontrunner to win Best Actor for Marty Supreme. I don’t think it was his misspeaking about ballet and opera that cost him the award. That controversy exploded after voting was over. I just think the momentum for Sinners was on the upswing.
When an awards season is as long and exasperating as this one was, you need the Oscars telecast to have some sort of spark and zest to wake you up into caring. That didn’t happen this year. Even in the heavily produced segments that should have been one of those aforementioned “moments,” the show flatlined.
Autumn Durald Arkapaw made history as the first woman to win Best Cinematography for her work in Sinners. “I really want all the women in the room to stand up,” she said, in her moving speech. Where was the camera to pan across those women?
The most emotional segment of the night was the In Memoriam tribute. Billy Crystal paid tribute to Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle. His referencing the wildly diverse resume Reiner had as a director, one after another, was astonishing. And I gasped when he talked about “storming the castle” and the scrim lifted to reveal so many people who had worked with Reiner there, holding hands, to pay tribute as well. Demi Moore! Meg Ryan! At least I think, because the camera panned over them so fast that it was impossible to tell. What should have been a moment was a meh-ment.
The ceremony failed to capitalize on both the things it could and couldn’t plan for. It was bad producing. And bad directing.
There were highlights, sure. The Bridesmaids reunion could have gone on for an hour; that’s how much I enjoyed it. Rachel McAdams paying tribute to Catherine O’Hara and Diane Keaton was the epitome of class. The rare tie in Best Live Action Short gave the show a gift: drama in a category that most people take a bathroom break during.
But these things seemed to happen in spite of the telecast, not because of it. Talk about people not caring about the Oscars has been going on most of my adult life. The show is already going to move to YouTube in 2029, which O’Brien made light fun of during Sunday’s telecast. But the crux of his joke was “be careful what you wish for” when instead the show should be learning a lesson. The ceremony is so pretentious that even people who have seen every movie and cherish the dog-and-pony show of it all, like me, are bored.
It’s half the fault of the telecast and half the crushing slog of the season. By the time Jordan won Best Actor, I was exhausted of caring who would win the category. This was the most unpredictable ceremony in years, which should have sparked interest, yet it was still hard to care. It was more fun to read people’s jokes about ballet and opera than it was to tune in to see if Chalamet would win the Oscar.
I’m an Oscars super fan. Three of my favorite movies in recent years—One Battle After Another, Sinners, and Sentimental Value—were big winners. So why am I yawning?
