I closed my predictions post saying it felt odd to have positive expectations for the Oscars. It also feels odd to have those expectations met. That was the most enjoyable Oscars night since at least the Parasite year. Let’s process it, and then we can finally watch some 2025 movies.
Here are five narratives still on my mind after Sunday’s ceremony.
Diversity develops downstream.
The Academy is deep in a years-long effort to diversify their membership, both racially in the wake of #OscarsSoWhite (Simpler times…) as well as internationally. The most tangible effects of that mission materialized a few years ago. A foreign language film being nominated for Best Picture has gone from remarkable achievement to annual expectation. This year we had two, Emilia Pérez and I’m Still Here. The Academy’s taste has also converged closer to the international festival circuit’s. Four films have now won both Best Picture and the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Two of those agreements occurred in the last five years: Parasite and Anora.
This is old news. What caught me off guard is which categories we’re starting to see it affect now.
Flow, also nominated for Best International Feature, won Best Animated Feature. The independent Latvian film, a surreal wordless adventure about a cat displaced by an apocalyptic flood, defeated more conventional fare from animation titans Pixar, Dreamworks, and Aardman. This never ever ever would have happened in the 2000s. For 20 years since its inception Best Animated Feature might as well have been called Most Popular Children’s Film. Voters were not shy about voting on their kids’ behalf. (Spirited Away is the exception that proves the rule here.)
But consider the previous two winners: How Do You Live?1 and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. Yes, they are children’s movies, as is Flow. But there’s clearly a difference in artistry between these films and something like Zootopia that makes them just as accessible to all ages. These are movies I would encourage my children to watch. It’s an exciting development. If 2022’s vote happened now, I wonder if the Danish animated documentary Flee would even overcome my beloved Encanto.
Let. Them. Speak.
The bizarre 2020/2021 ceremony continues to linger in our my consciousness. It was a night of experiments, some of which backfired spectacularly. Every year I can’t help but recall one of those weird choices: They did not play off the speeches. At all. Ever.
Bring that back.
Yes, you will get cases like Adrian Brody rambling authoritatively. But you also get Kieran Culkin laying out his evening plans with his wife for the world to hear. It’s more charming than it sounds, I promise. You also dodge the awkwardness of having to play off non-native speakers struggling to deliver a speech in their second or third language. If the only downside is a few more minutes from the bigger egos… maybe cut the extended James Bond tribute to make up for it?
SEX!!!!
I thought I was being bullish on Anora by predicting it to win three awards. It beat me by two.
It was a near-sweep so effortless that any explanation involving the words “Emilia” or “Twitter” do a disservice to the film and its campaign. Anora won because the Academy likes it, and it likes Sean Baker, and it likes theaters, which Baker smartly made synonymous with himself. I feared the film might be too raunchy for the voters. Turns out I’m the prude.
Other trends haven’t changed. Anora is among the lowest-grossing Best Picture recipients in modern history, earning less than The Hurt Locker, once the standard for underseen winners. Only CODA and Nomadland brought in a smaller haul in the last 25 years, and those get the covid asterisk. Could Sean Baker’s plea defending the theatrical experience reverse the trend?
Honestly, I’m past the point of caring. The Oscars are for the sickos now. But maybe if the sexless superheroes continue to decline at the box office, studios will realize that actually advertising their grownup movies will produce a worthwhile return on investment.
Disney still can’t get out of its own way.
As a cord cutter, it’s become tradition in my house to pop a free trial of YouTube TV every February/March exclusively for the Oscars. Not this year, I thought. For the first time ever, it’s on Hulu!
And for the first time ever, almost the entire show was on Hulu!
Sunday morning I bought the Disney+/Hulu bundle. At exactly 7pm, when the red carpet feed switched to David Muir, I discovered the Oscars stream was on Hulu specifically, not Disney+, and the bundle doesn’t let you access the Hulu app. By 7:05 I was watching on YouTube TV and submitting a refund request to Disney. Frustrating, and fantastically lucky. After a night of technical issues, the Hulu feed finally failed in spectacular fashion. Just before the announcement of Best Actress, Hulu shut off the broadcast with a “Thanks for watching!” screen. Anyone unfortunate enough to be streaming missed the biggest upset of the night.
If I were conspiracy-minded I would wonder what statistic this fiasco skews in Disney’s favor. ABC clearly hasn’t been happy with the Oscars’ ratings, despite them outperforming every other awards show in an era of declining TV viewership overall. The Grammys would throw Sabrina Carpenter into a volcano if it could grant them Oscar-level numbers. But I’m a believer that you shouldn’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. Is the largest media company in the world really that bad at this?
Well, I consider myself a clued-in person and clearly even I don’t know the distinction between Disney+ and Hulu anymore. So yes.
Announce Conan’s return immediately.
This was the first ceremony in years where I was looking forward to the production as much as the awards themselves. Jimmy Kimmel is fine, but he’s a boring, safe option with a low ceiling. Conan O’Brien has so much more potential. On Sunday, he delivered.
Conan was visibly nervous for some of the monologue, and I imagine the “wasting time” song played better on paper than in practice. Outside of that, once he found his stride, he was locked in. As a fan, I never doubted him. The Dune sandworm’s musical prowess is the exact type of costumed absurdity we watched Late Nite for, and Conan’s superpower of spinning muted reactions into giggles through ardent buffoonery kept the laughs rolling without resorting to meanness.
Others got in on the fun too. Ben Stiller echoed last year’s incredible costume design introduction with a gag about malfunctioning production design, and one LA firefighter had the honor of delivering a killer Joker 2 dig. (“Remember, you have to laugh,” Conan reminded us.)
It was as close to a perfect ceremony as we’ve gotten in recent memory. If they bring back Conan next year, we might actually achieve it. Assuming he isn’t nominated himself.
- It’s still a better title. ↩︎