The Academy Awards are goofy. Always have been. A combination of theater-kid pageantry overload and an earnest celebration of Hollywood, or maybe just of the people working in Hollywood. The show has never had its finger on the pulse of the art form, settling instead on keeping its foot on the sternum, and the movies that lose usually say more about the state of the medium than the movies that win.
This year's slate of nominees featured very few truly great movies, but also very few truly bad ones. So a lukewarm Oscars telecast is exactly what everyone should've expected. A few laughs, a couple surprises, and no one walks away feeling particularly good or bad about any of it in totality. Good work!
The show got off to a promising start, even in the opinion of an award show–hating curmudgeon like me. Conan O'Brien has the right mix of intellectual silliness and old showbiz song-and-dance panache, which makes it kinda insane that it took this long for the Academy to have him host. His jokes were dumb and charming, his bits were even dumber and more charming, we got some Adam Sandler. Everybody can be happy about it.
Outside of Conan's parts, most of the night was curious, and sometimes hilarious in unintentional ways. Like the strange, overlong James Bond tribute, which included Margaret Qualley (?) and Doja Cat (??). Or like how The Brutalist, a movie that probably would've swept the Oscars 10 years ago, was mostly ignored in the major categories except for Cinematography, Score, and Actor. Speaking of that actor, the whole Adrien Brody–Halle Berry kiss when he won the first time back in 2003 was always corny, but he really outdid himself last night, talking for like five minutes straight about not a damn thing except how hard it is to only win an Oscar every 20 years. We weep for you, Adrien Brody. (Guy Pearce was better in your movie, though.)
We were spared an Emilia Pérez Best Picture, but the movie still had a good night, namely with Zoe Saldaña's win for Supporting Actress. Apparently if we are to reward the French, it won't be for the body horror of The Substance but rather the Lady-Gaga-music-video theater of Pérez. Then there was the biggest winner of the night: Anora, a.k.a. Gen Z Pretty Woman. I rewatched this one coming into the weekend and it seemed even dumber the second time than it did originally. Any movie that inspires the inane online discourse that this one did already puts me in a bad enough mood. It does, however, fit the Best Picture narrative: an independent film made by a young "auteur" hitting his (let's be honest, it's always a he) prime, about a subject that people can pretend to care about without knowing anything about it in reality (much like the movie). It's well-made, it's stylish, it has a decent runtime. Even better, it's a movie about what Hollywood people think "real people" are like. It's not the most offensive winner, but it is one of those that even in two years we're going to look at with some suspicion. A Nomadland, if you will.
But that's the Oscars; they're built to be frustrating. You're never happy about any of the things that win, really. So why does anyone still care? Well, because even an institution like the Academy has the potential to surprise, as this edition did when No Other Land won Best Documentary. I've written before about the movie, which still cannot find major U.S. distribution to get it in more theaters. This movie was made by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers, and talks about the ethnic cleansing of a Palestinian community. Upon winning on Sunday, the filmmakers went up and talked about that very thing on the Oscars stage, broadcast across the world.
The Oscars love to be a venue for protest and activism, but typically in shallow, safe ways. We can argue about whether all of these awards are ultimately shallow, but this movie and the acceptance speech took courage from everyone involved. By the time you read this, I am sure there will already be backlash to it, but for a moment the Oscars stood on shaky ground. In that moment, you're reminded of just why we can never quit them.
Correction (2:57 p.m. ET): A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that Gal Gadot had been slated to present the Best Documentary award. The post has been amended.
