Thank you Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Cena, Al Pacino, and Messi the Dog.
It’s not easy to steal the show and puncture the kind of air of inevitability that hung over the 96th Academy Awards as the night’s juggernaut Oppenheimer glided towards its gold-plated destiny, but they did it.
Sunday night at the Dolby Theatre was a well produced, good-humoured evening helped along by the dominance of studio contenders. It was only fitting that after several pandemic years of existential gloom capped off by more of the same thanks to last year’s months-long, strike-induced production halt, the industry breathed out a little sigh of relief and let its hair down.
Hollywood’s challenges continue to line up in the wings, but the Oscars showed the business of show business is alive and well.
What is a film awards ceremony for if we can’t enjoy a be-sequined Ryan Gosling belting out Barbie’s male angst anthem ‘I’m Just Ken’ with Slash from Guns N’ Roses as the bejewelled denizens in the Dolby Theatre front rows stood and clapped along; goofy John Cena hiding his essentials with an outsized envelope during the best skit of the night; Arnold Schwarzenegger and his “Twin” Danny DeVito poking fun at themselves and Batman; Steven Spielberg winking complicitly to the camera; and Messi the Dog from Anatomy Of A Fall applauding Robert Downey Jr.? Could AI have scripted all that?
Jimmy Kimmel was back for his fourth hosting gig and proved the emcee doesn’t need to be the star of the show; merely the facilitator. A couple of gags failed to land but the late night talk show host scored especially high marks for his Donald Trump rebuke and references to the strikes and a tribute to IATSE and below-the-line workers, who are in early negotiations for their contract renewals this summer.
There was politics, another inevitability at a time of heightened geopolitical concern, yet it did not dominate proceedings.
Protestors on Hollywood Boulevard calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war managed to slightly delay the start of the show. Mark Ruffalo, Billie Eilish and others wore red pins calling for a ceasefire.
Inside the Dolby Theatre, the statements seemed compartmentalised and made their points well: Jonathan Glazer, director of the Oscar-winning The Zone Of Interest, spoke on Israel; Oscar-winning 20 Days In Mariupol’s Mstyslav Chernov on Ukraine; a line from the late Alexei Navalny reiterating John Stuart Mill’s quotation about evil triumphing when good people do nothing leading into the In Memoriam section.
The general bonhomie of the night was actually buoyed by speeches that were heartfelt and decent. There was little of the traditional A-list onanism which alienates a global TV audience in long-term decline; instead the focus shifted to UK Mothers’ Day (!), mid-life crisis (the delightfully batty Anatomy Of A Fall filmmaker Justine Triet), self-expression (The Holdovers’ Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and gratitude.
Emma Stone appeared genuinely overwhelmed upon winning her second lead actress Oscar for Poor Things after La La Land in 2017.
So did Christopher Nolan, who in his Nolan-esque way also blubbered when he accepted the best directing Oscar for Oppenheimer. For much of the ceremony he and wife and producer Emma Thomas did their best impression of benign alien overlords, watching the whole thing with cerebral detachment. Yet when it came time for Nolan’s big moment, the typically restrained British filmmaker almost, almost choked up as he thanked Academy voters for considering him a meaningful part of the ongoing story of cinema.
“We don’t know where this incredible journey is going from here,” said Nolan in reference to the art form. Accepting the best picture Oscar for Oppenheimer at the end, Thomas may have given us a clue, thanking Imax CEO Rich Gelfond and cinema owners in that order for their collaboration on the blockbuster.
Getting into cinemas is one thing these days; the other is getting the chance to make films. American Fiction’s adapted screenplay winner and first-time feature filmmaker Cord Jefferson urged Hollywood’s gatekeepers to consider spending $200m not solely on one feature but on 20 $10m features so new talent can get a foot in the door.
Martin Scorsese, whose Killers Of The Flower Moon backed by Apple Original Films cost at least 20 $10m films and ended the night empty-handed, watched on glumly.
Takashi Yamazaki, part of the Oscar-winning effects team on Toho’s Godzilla Minus One, echoed Jefferson’s sentiment when, clutching the statuette and a Godzilla replica, he said, “This proves everybody has a chance.”
Toho/Studio Ghibli’s The Boy And The Heron from Hayao Miyazaki won best animation in a big night for Japan which will have chimed with the Academy’s growing international membership and the global audience of these films.
The show had gone swimmingly, yet were the dark gods of awards ceremonies about to spring a cruel trick at the death? At the end of a three-hour and 23-minute show that had started an hour early to keep it mostly in the primetime window and not keep East Coast audiences up late, Pacino ambled on stage to announce the least surprising Oscar of the night, best picture.
Unwittingly invoking the spirit of the 2017 La La Land-Moonlight mix-up, Pacino did not read out all the nominees, opened the envelope and casually suggested Oppenheimer. Briefly, confusion reigned in that liminal space between scripted bliss and the potential bedlam of live television. How to avert catastrophe? Summon Messi? Thankfully, Pacino brought it home and confirmed that, yes, Oppenheimer had indeed won. Panic over, cue huge applause.
And what of the biggest box-office hit of 2023? Barbie’s brilliant director and co-writer Greta Gerwig missed out on a directing nod – Kimmel noted that – but the film’s presence in the ceremony resonated because so many people have actually seen it or enjoyed the songs and memes on social.
Well, Barbie won something. While Oppenheimer converted 13 nominations into seven Oscars, Barbie’s return from eight nods was a single statuette for best song, ‘What Was I Made For?’. That made Eilish the youngest double Oscar winner (alongside brother and collaborator Finneas O’Connell) at the age of 22 following the 2021 best song win for ‘No Time To Die’.
The sense of an industry taking a moment to reflect and look forward was writ large in the acting awards presentations. The show producers saw fit to bring prior winners onstage to big up nominees in the four acting categories.
Another classy move. Ben Kingsley waxed lyrical about Oppenheimer best actor winner Cillian Murphy, Sally Field introduced Stone, and so on. Tim Robbins mistakenly called Robert De Niro “Oscar-winning” instead of “Oscar-worthy” in his spiel, which brought a fleeting wry smile from an otherwise stony-faced De Niro who looked for most of the telecast like a man who desperately wanted to be somewhere else.
The acting category presentations also gave us the abiding memory of Nicolas Cage heaping high praise on Paul Giamatti for out-Caging Cage in the method acting stakes.
Giamatti wore an opaque contact lens to affect a lazy eye as Paul Hunham, the grouchy prep school teacher in The Holdovers, effectively rendering him blind in one eye throughout the shoot.
Cage loved that. Giamatti loved that Cage loved that, and there was a genuine, wild-eyed connection between them. Giamatti seemed to thoroughly enjoy himself on the night. He wasn’t alone.
No comments yet