That did not go according to plan.
I suppose that’s fitting, nothing in this past year has gone according to plan. It was almost directly after the last Academy Awards in early February 2020, that the pandemic hit and everything changed. This years’ Oscars had to make a lot of concessions: moving the ceremony back two months and stripping it of a lot of its glamour, cutting down on the number of people allowed to attend and thus moving it from the traditional Dolby Theatre to Grand Central Station. The Academy would have liked not to have done it this way, but they had no other choice. Even Los Angeles isn’t out of this pandemic yet.
Working within these constraints though and determined not to go as poorly as the preceding awards ceremonies this season (especially the Golden Globes), the Oscars managed to get a handle on things. They secured a good producer in Steven Soderbergh who approached the ceremony as if it were a film itself …and that really showed. The venue was cozier and Soderbergh and his team took advantage of that, highlighting its’ intimacy and almost humble feel for a show where as Billy Crystal famously said “millionaires give each other gold statues”. It certainly was much better than any of the other awards shows this season, and may be a model for what the Golden Globes ought to be, should they continue at all (they shouldn’t). There was a sense of spontaneity as Awards were presented out of traditional order and nobody at any point giving a speech was ever played off, allowing them to express themselves fully. This construction was practical (I particularly liked the moving of the Best Original Song performances to the pre-show), accommodating certain presenters, nominees, or recipients spread across the globe and deeper into the night; but one can also see how it was meant to be dramatic too. But again, not everything goes according to plan.
There were bits and pieces of the show that didn’t work. While in theory I like the idea of announcing each nominee through an anecdote about their history with movies, in practice it can at times be a bit tedious -as is the case with uninterrupted speeches. And while there was a lot of respect paid to filmmaking through speech, there was a notable lack of film showcasing. Few clips were used in reference to nominations, removing context for people who haven’t seen the movies. In fact the show seemed tailored more for audiences who have watched the nominees and who care about movies and their artisans more than casual fans. Yet I feel that we too would like bits of movies in our movie awards show, and their absence was a shame. I don’t know, maybe I’m just still riding high on that movie magic montage from three years ago that I still re-watch time and again. The In Memoriam tribute was also lacking, paced too fast and to a song that didn’t quite do it justice. And as much as I understand why certain categories had to be shifted around, it was essential to have kept the final and most important last four awards in their proper place, for reasons we’ll get into.
Other changes included a reintroduction of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award into the televised show, this year going to both Tyler Perry and the Motion Picture & Television Fund. The pandemic and other hugely relevant social crises is likely why it was brought back -in his introduction of the MPTF from the Dolby Theatre, presenter Bryan Cranston explicitly discussed how they’ve helped workers in the film industry affected by COVID-19. This was also the third year in a row without a host -though Regina King fulfilled that role in some capacity at the start of the show. Someone who may be tapped for the hosting gig in the future if they bring it back, Lil Rel Howery, supervised the shows’ only extraneous segment: a brief Oscar music trivia game where he asked a few nominees to guess if a particular movie song won an Oscar or not. More than anything this bit did not belong and it doesn’t flow naturally, but it can’t be faulted too much. It provided a great little bit of banter between Howery and his former Get Out co-star Daniel Kaluuya, and by far the most meme-able moment of the night when Glenn Close accurately guessed and then danced to “Da Butt” from Spike Lee’s School Daze. Whether or not it was scripted it was still extremely fun!
In fact there were a ton of likeable moments throughout the show. In Kaluuya’s long acceptance speech in winning Best Supporting Actor for playing Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah, his moment thanking his mother and father for having sex and moreso the shot of his mother in London reacting to that is sure to be a weird little touchstone of Oscar history. Likewise, the adorable Youn Yuh-jung, winning for her performance in Minari, just being so sweet and flustered up there on that podium over Glenn Close and Brad Pitt -it was an instant highlight. And Thomas Vinterberg, expectedly winning Best International Film for Another Round, told the story of how his daughter died early into its’ production and how the final product was a love letter to her -it was the best kind of solemn and sobering moment.
As far as the actual awards go, for most of the show there were few disappointments. I would have preferred that Lee Isaac Chung or Darius and Abraham Marder had gotten the Best Original Screenplay Award instead of Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman -a movie that I think is good but operates off of a tonally inconsistent script. And Mank getting Best Cinematography bugged me as it’s not a terribly visually interesting movie, especially next to most of its’ fellow nominees. But the newly integrated Best Sound Award appropriately went to Sound of Metal and though it wouldn’t have been my first choice, Florian Zeller and Christopher Hampton taking home Best Adapted Screenplay for The Father was perfectly satisfying. As opposed to previous years, few movies got left out in the cold -just about each major nominee took home at least something… except for The Trial of the Chicago Seven, which being the worst of the Best Picture nominees, was wonderful. Though that still didn’t quite take the pain away of Cartoon Saloon remaining a bridesmaid as Soul predictably nabbed Best Animated Feature. However it is a consolation that Wolfwalkers has been more widely championed than any of studios’ previous films, far more attention has been diverted their way and it’s only a matter of time before they truly achieve the recognition they deserve as the best animation company in the world. I think it’s really just Pixars’ lock on the category that irritates me.
Elsewhere in the show Mank won for Best Production Design, while Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom got both Costume Design and Makeup & Hairstyling -Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson being the first African-Americans to win in that discipline. My Octopus Teacher, which I only know from Maggie Mae Fish’s entertaining video essay, won Best Documentary Feature. Editing went to Sound of Metal, which seemed a tad odd but not undeserving. And in the short categories, the extremely timely subject ruled the night, with Two Distant Strangers, a film about police brutality, winning best Live-Action, and If Anything Happens I Love You, about parents losing a child in a school shooting, winning Best Animated. Best Short Documentary went to Colette, a film about a former French Resistance Fighter. The Academy vindicated Christopher Nolan by giving Tenet its’ Best Visual Effects award (it didn’t have much competition this year but I would have preferred Midnight Sky). Jon Batiste, Trent Reznor, and Atticus Ross won Best Score for Soul while “Fight For You” from Judas and the Black Messiah by H.E.R. won Best Song.
The Academy Award for Best Director was handed out within the first hour of the show, likely for the sake of its presenter, Bong Joon-ho, sixteen hours ahead in South Korea, accompanied by to everyones’ delight Sharon Choi, his dependable translator from last years’ awards circuit (I loved the choice to put the camera on him speaking without any subtitles for nearly a full minute before panning over to Choi as a surprise reveal -Soderbergh knew what he was doing!) There was little suspense, and soon enough Chloé Zhao came up to the podium to make history as the first woman of colour and only the second woman overall to accept the Academy’s highest honour for directing. And she gave a lovely speech too. This naturally forecast Nomadland’s chances later in the show and sure enough it was ultimately announced for Best Picture, the third last award of the night.
Best Picture has been the final award presented since the beginning of the Oscars. It’s what the show is designed to build to and to mess with that is a bad idea. To place it out of that order, there’s got to be a good reason, something greater to build towards. And it’s clear that the shows’ producers felt there was. Best Actress came next, and that wasn’t it. But it was great to see Frances McDormand go up and collect her third Best Actress Oscar, now only the fourth actress to win three acting Oscars (after Katherine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, and Meryl Streep), and second only behind Hepburn in having as many in the same category -she also won as a producer on Nomadland giving her four overall. And she’s still just as powerful a presence as ever, even if her speech was relatively brief. But the event of the evening was now to be Best Actor.
Joaquin Phoenix came up, he introduced the nominees and read off the winner… Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins did not attend the show either in London or L.A. So the Academy had to accept on his behalf and the show abruptly ended.
This is one of the bigger upsets in recent Academy history and more than others dramatically effected the awards show itself. It seems pretty obvious that Soderbergh and his team expected the award to go to, as has been forecast, the late Chadwick Boseman for his performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (which I arrogantly predicted he would win back in December). The category rearrangement would make sense then, ending the show on one last triumph for the late actor and burgeoning cultural icon. But the Academy didn’t vote that way and as a result the show ended on a pathetic whimper. A no-show and then an immediate end to the show.
I won’t lie that I’m disappointed in this beyond how it hurt the ceremony on a level perhaps not seen since the infamous La La Land/Moonlight mix-up of 2017. Boseman really deserved that award, it would have been an exemplary cap on his career, and it would have been a meaningful show of support to black audiences. The Academy still has a race problem, it’s now been fourteen years and counting since a person of colour won this award. Even if not Boseman, Steven Yeun or Riz Ahmed would have been a fine gesture. Though the narrative wouldn’t have been the same, it might at least have salvaged the show.
This being said, I don’t have anything against Anthony Hopkins, who did deliver one of the best performances of his career in The Father. Indeed, it’s a far better performance than the last three actors who’ve won this award at least. But this was just not the year for him to win. I don’t even begrudge him not showing up -he probably didn’t expect to win, it was the dead of night in the U.K., and he’s eighty-three (now the oldest Best Actor winner to date).
Going into the show a part of me was really hoping that Youn, Kaluuya, and Boseman, all apparent frontrunners, would be joined by Viola Davis or Andra Day, thus giving us the first roster of all POC acting winners. It would have been such a great symbol of an evolving Academy, an evolving Hollywood. I also assumed given the relative quality of a lot of the nominees this year, that I’d be content with whoever won in multiple major categories. As it turns out, I was wrong. As much as I liked Hopkins’ performance, in the moment I wasn’t happy to hear his name called out.
And it was a really depressing way to end what had otherwise been a different but generally likeable Oscar ceremony given the circumstances. Up to that point, the show was doing very well in comparison to its’ awards season brethren. But the finale really makes or breaks an Oscar telecast. I do feel bad for the producers, as much as they should have anticipated an alternative outcome for their stunt and not staked the entire structure of the show around it -it is a lesson to future Oscar producers that nothing is a sure thing. Hopkins’ win would surely have gone down better if it weren’t saved till the end. But it is kind of the Academys’ fault too. For every success of the night and the leftover goodwill from Parasite’s win last year, the Academy is not yet the different organization it needs to be. That it still is, as I pointed out in my Best Actor essay, conflicted between being stuck in its ways and trying to reflect the new face of cinema. Perhaps in Zhaos’ win, which this whole debacle sadly undercuts, and those of Kaluuya, Youn, Fennell, and the other milestone ones of the night, they hoped it would even out the passing on the most popular nominee in one of the most major categories. But alas, that did not go according to plan.
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