The 94th Academy Awards: A Trainwreck in More Ways Than One

Wow… That was a shitshow! In some ways expected, some unexpected. Going into this years’ Oscars show, producer Will Packer stated his primary objective was that his Oscars be entertaining. I don’t know if that’s entirely what happened, but certainly it is going to be memorable -mostly due to one man who very quickly overshadowed the rest of the ceremony.

Weird shit happens at the Oscars, it’s almost guaranteed, and yet that hasn’t effected the ratings it seems these last several years. And of course it’s because of ABC and the Academy’s obsession with ratings that resulted in a lot of the very worst material of this Oscars show. Like every year, there were scattered wonderful moments, there were a few nice, moving speeches, but they didn’t come close to making up for what came between them. Even the awards themselves were without any major upsets, with the possible exception of Kenneth Branagh taking home Best Original Screenplay for Belfast. And so there was nothing to distract from the terrible choices left and right that dominated. There’s no way around it, this was the worst Oscar night I have ever witnessed.

A chunk of that did obviously have to do with those changes that everybody in the film community, myself included, has been talking about these last couple months: the cutting of eight categories from the live broadcast. We were assured they were going to be intercut into the main show and that the artists would receive their due recognition. How did that pan out? Shortly, it was smoother than expected but still bad. These categories opened after commercial breaks, the nominees were read out and then the winner announced. No presenter was called in, the broadcast cut immediately to the winners at the stage, but the speeches themselves were shown seemingly in their entirety. I have to imagine this was concession to the backlash, integrating the categories competently and with a degree of respect, yet it was still clear these were not awards being presented on equal footing with the others. And ultimately it shaved off not a ton of time. It still struck as being disrespectful, and a way to marginalize those film professionals who don’t happen to have the glamour of actors and directors. As to those Twitter contests, they were far less substantial than I dreaded -amounting mainly to a couple mere acknowledgement montages, but their presence at all did still cheapen the show. They felt every bit as pandering as we all knew they were. However I would gladly take that kind of bullshit over most of the other stuff that was added.

To start from the top of the proceedings, Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, and Regina Hall were terrible hosts! I can count on one hand the jokes they made throughout the night that worked, and just about all the rest I loathed. They ranged from being just unfunny, like the running gag of Hall trying to get with the attractive men in the room, to unoriginal, like Schumer’s white-Karen line, to patently offensive such as the parade of idiotic lampshading jokes about nobody watching or liking the Oscars (in addition to other juvenile potshots at films like The Last Duel). These three actually made me empathize with Adam McKay, when they called out the bad reviews that his movie got -as much as I disliked Don’t Look Up myself, that was a low punch flagrantly out of keeping with the spirit of the Academy Awards. That however was exactly the plan. It’s clear that they and Packer modeled their approach on the far less prestigious Golden Globes, which are much more irreverent an affair. It was extremely out of place here though, at a ceremony meant to honour filmmaking, made worse by the fact the jokes and subsequent sketches were geared to that same  binding principle of appealing to young people -most of whom of course don’t have cable television. Probably their stupidest bit of the night was when they dressed up as movie characters for an utterly directionless routine that seemed premised on them doing a parody but not deciding on what. It was mind-numbingly awful and only existed to get Schumer in a Spider-Man outfit. The attitude conveyed by them did however reflect well the show’s contempt for itself. A show that despite being billed with the tagline “Movie Lovers Unite”, really gave the impression it doesn’t like movies much at all.

This was maybe best illustrated in the severely underwhelming for how much it was built up 50th anniversary Godfather reunion. A montage set to a strange remix track of all three movies was played before Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro came on stage to basically just acknowledge the anniversary. No James Caan, Robert Duvall, Talia Shire, or Diane Keaton, no interesting stories from the set or the production, Pacino and De Niro didn’t even speak -Coppola merely gave credit to Mario Puzo and Paramount’s Robert Evans, before  making a gesture of support for Ukraine (one of a few made by the show this year). The Godfather wasn’t the only film honoured by an anniversary reunion -rather arbitrarily so was White Men Can’t Jump (30th), Juno (15th), Pulp Fiction (28th), and lastly Liza Minneli to represent The Godfather’s great Oscar rival from 1972 Cabaret, there to present Best Picture with Lady GaGa. Less random of course was the James Bond acknowledgement, the franchise’s 60th anniversary coming this year, and that series despite featuring sports stars introducing it, wound up with the only good homage of the entire night.

Tributes to Sidney Poitier, Ivan Reitman, and Betty White in the In Memoriam segment did little to soften the blow of how awfully that was handled as well. The song choices weren’t wholly in keeping with the mood as it was, but the way the camera frequently panned away from the tributes so that you couldn’t read the names sometimes was ghastly -giving more attention to the performers on stage (who had a complete choreography going) rather than the artists being recognized. Halyna Hutchins was apparently included there, but I missed her, and several other industry noteworthies including Bob Saget were left out. Just abysmal. And in so many other corners of the show a similar stink of apathy was felt, a concern with the ceremony’s production at the expense of its’ ideals. Even the Academy’s usual self-promotion bit, a sequence at their new Museum of Motion Pictures, was characterized by Sykes touring it and making it about herself (although her only good jokes came from this segment).

But let’s maybe talk about the actual winners, who have little to do with the show’s failings, but didn’t much save it either. This was a glorious night for Dune whatever else; it swept the prerecorded categories, winning Best Sound, Production Design, Editing, and Original Score. In the ceremony proper it also took away Best Visual Effects and Best Cinematography, Greig Fraser no doubt winning his first of many. Also ahead of schedule, Best Live Action short went to Riz Ahmed’s The Long Goodbye, Best Documentary Short went to The Queen of Basketball, and Best Animated Short went to The Windshield Wiper. Jessica Chastain made a point of attending this ceremony to support her make-up artists and she was rewarded as The Eyes of Tammy Faye bizarrely won Best Make-up and Hairstyling in the maybe the strangest win since Bohemian Rhapsody took home an editing award. They say some of these Oscars are awarded for the most of something rather than the best and that definitely seems to be the case here.

Chastain ultimately took home an Oscar herself as well, in spite of that late season possibility of a Penelope Cruz upset -yet another good performer winning for one of their weakest performances because they’ve been overdue. Her speech was a bit long (though not the longest as we’ll get into), and I respect that few speeches were cut during the course of the show. She was the only winner to address the epidemic of legalized transphobia hitting the U.S. right now, so that was worth something. Generally though the politics of the show were under-emphasized, there wasn’t a lot of pontificating. Where it was, it took the form of exultation in representation. 

As everybody expected, Ariana DeBose early on won Best Supporting Actress for West Side Story and delivered a speech few topped in the subsequent three hours. She is only the second Latina to win after Rita Moreno, and for playing the same part; but is the first openly queer woman to win, and she embodied the importance of that moment profoundly. Just as much so did Troy Kotsur, also expectedly winning Best Supporting Actor for the only worthwhile aspect of CODA. He is the second deaf performer to win an Oscar, after his CODA-co-star Marlee Matlin, and his speech was astoundingly joyous, funny, and heartwarming at the same time. Easily the best speech of the night. CODA also won Best Adapted Screenplay, much less deservingly so, perhaps as recompense for not giving Sian Heder a Best Director nod in light of the fast popularity her movie was getting throughout awards season. Best Original Screenplay conversely went as mentioned earlier to Kenneth Branagh, another strange choice possibly to give the Oscar-less Branagh an award (similar to Spike Lee’s BlackKklansman win a few years back). Best Costume Design went to the legendary Jenny Bevan for Cruella, its’ only nomination, while Billie Eilish possibly riding on that Bond nostalgia of the night was awarded Best Original Song for her title track to No Time to Die, making the 20-year old Eilish by far the youngest artist to win this award.

I was perhaps most interested this year in the alternative film categories, which were generally more interesting than Best Picture. The years’ critical darling Drive My Car succeeded in winning Best International Film, and seeing Ryusuke Hamaguchi accepting an Oscar was another of the nights’ rare highlights -even if it did seem rudely cut short. Less of a highlight was Disney continuing their streak of dominance in Best Animated Feature, that award predictably going to Encanto. One of these days maybe some non-Disney flick will win it again but not in the near future it seems. And Questlove picked up an Oscar for Best Documentary for his important work of cultural preservation, Summer of Soul.

But Questlove’s win was tainted unfortunately by what had immediately preceded it. And we might as well now address that elephant in the room, which is honestly the perfect metaphor for this Oscars as a whole. Presenting Best Documentary was Chris Rock, and going off the shitty vibes established by the hosts and producers, he felt comfortable ribbing some of those seated nearest the stage -specifically Jada Pinkett-Smith. His off-colour comment about her shaved head making her suitable for a G.I. Jane sequel was extremely tasteless on its own given her alopecia -her husband thought so as well. And watching it on T.V. it was surreal when the sound suddenly cut out as Will Smith marched up on stage and slapped Rock in the face, before returning to his seat as the two exchanged a couple more aggressive comments still muted -though even without the aid of the uncensored Australian broadcast it wasn’t hard to make out “keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth”.

My Oscar Party was in shock as we realized it wasn’t a bit. Will Smith really did physically accost Chris Rock, and it suddenly became all anyone could talk about. And immediately I knew it was going to be all anyone would talk about with regards to this show -an insane moment of drama without equal in Oscar memory. I certainly can’t recall anything like it. Not long after, Will Smith had to go on stage again when his name was called as winner for Best Actor. It was the most tense, awkward, and strangest moment that lasted what felt like an hour -he certainly got more time for a speech than anyone else. It seemed mostly ad-libbed as he related the story of King Richard as being about a man fiercely protective of his family. He fought back tears, thanked the right people, but also seemed to have a kind of existential crisis as he went on about wanting to be an example of love right after assaulting a man; and he couldn’t for the world divorce the moment from what had just happened. There was something humane about it and Smith has a clever way with words, but there was something deeply uncomfortable too -as though he realized he has forever stained a moment he’s been clearly working towards for decades. He ended his speech apologizing to the Academy and said he hopes he can still be invited back. I’m sure he will. But it was an unpleasant debacle that draws attention to the Oscars for the very worst reasons -one of the most embarrassing moments’ in the institutions’ history.

The show playing out afterwards might not have mattered. Jane Campion winning Best Director, astonishingly the only win of The Power of the Dog’s twelve nominations (perhaps fitting seeing how the show embodied that toxic masculinity her film so highly criticized). It was the first time since Mike Nichols won for The Graduate in 1968 that such a thing has happened, but was washed out by the circumstances, as gracious and professional as Campion was, now the third woman Best Director in Oscar history. Schumer tried to play the whole thing off before egregiously tempting fate again by mock getting in the way of Jesse Plemons’ and Kirsten Dunst’s relationship (one that had already been ignored all night in favour of the Smiths and Bardem and Cruz). Even Anthony Hopkins had to acknowledge it in his presentation of Best Actress, although he did so in the sweetest Anthony Hopkins way. It still cast a shadow by the time CODA won Best Picture, breaking the Oscars’ two-year streak of good movies winning the top prize. All I’ll say is it’s a win that’s not going to age well, especially in such an excellent year for movies as 2021. Everyone was so eager to get out of there, I was surprised the show still gave Schumer, Sykes, and Hall room for their cheap exit material. Oh yeah, and for all that effort by ABC and Packer to shorten the show it still went a full half hour over, a good deal longer than last years’. Maybe it wasn’t so important they squeeze in an elaborate performance of a song that wasn’t even nominated just because its’ popular. But we don’t talk about that.

Granted it did open with a pretty well-done Beyonce performance, and honestly some of the presenters were quite good and charming. Yeah, Kevin Costner may have droned on too long, but Daniel Kaluuya, Youn Yuh-jung, Simu Liu, Anthony Hopkins, and Liza Minnelli were great (I also to my dismay liked the end of that Pulp Fiction routine). But these and the wins by DeBose, Kotsur, Hamaguchi, and Fraser are diminished by a show that I had low expectations for, yet still it managed to disappoint in new ways before going completely off the rails. This is not what the Oscars are supposed to be, I hate the idea of it being a model for them going forwards. It’s got almost none of the spirit of joy and artistic celebration that should define this awards body, it feels like a lesser copycat of what the Oscars used to be. It had the makings of this going in and doubled down repeatedly throughout the show to ultimately symbolize an Academy of self-loathing, a movie awards show with no love of movies. And that disregard of its’ true purpose offends me more than any fiery bit of celebrity drama. I worry that’s exactly what ABC wants.

As I said though, that Will Smith-Chris Rock confrontation is in a way a microcosm of this years’ broadcast: offensive, chaotic, unprecedented, uncouth, and immediately regrettable for everyone involved. This did not go as the higher-ups intended and in the coming weeks there’s going to be plenty of criticism at a whole host of the ways this show was handled. One can hope that lessons will be learned. They will have to be if dignity is to ever find its’ way back in a lasting sense to Oscar night.

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch

Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch/