It has been a wild awards season, and the final show of the year certainly didn’t disappoint in terms of being surprising! The Slap (TM to come I’m sure), is obviously looming large over everyone’s reactions today, and I’ll get to some thoughts about it in a bit I promise, but there was a whole lot of show before it, and I don’t want to forget that!
Was it the best produced Oscars show I’ve ever seen? No. It really wasn’t, and despite relegating 8 categories to a “pre-show/edited back into the broadcast” tier, the show ran longer than it has in the past few years. (Not a complaint from me! Let the Oscars be long! People who get bored can just go to sleep, this will never please everyone, so maybe…try to please your core audience!) So hopefully the producers will move those awards back into the main flow of the show next year, since it didn’t solve anything and just pissed everyone off. Also, I found it kind of delightful how their stupid “fan favorite” moments were spammed by Zach Snyder fans and we all had to pretend we knew what “The Flash Joins the Space Force” means.
Overall, I still don’t think the Oscars need a host, but the ladies did an adequate job (I liked the Spider-Man bit – would have cut down the Regina Hall hits on all the men in the audience Covid jokes):
- It is insane that they played “Africa” by Toto for Daniel Kaluuya and H.E.R., but…the first win of the night was great (my mom declared it “First Cry of the Night”):
This speech seems great, wish we could have given this man his whole moment:
I admit that, probably because of the way the last hour went, a bit of the middle of the show blends together in my memory (I was hosting a party so I didn’t take notes like I usually do!), but my biggest take away was that I need to watch Encanto (though let’s stop acting like all animated movies are for children, especially in a year when Flee was nominated!)
Our group was very pro-Dune so it was fun to see them sweep the technical categories, I think Denis Villeneuve was the most thanked person of the night, which is amazing considering he was left out of the Best Director race. Really love the energy of this last dude:
So happy for Drive My Car, but like, why couldn’t they tell when Hamaguchi was done talking? Did he keep deciding to start again or not?
Mom’s second cry of the night, was Troy Kotsur’s win (I also cried – I mean, you could just tell how excited everyone was for him):
(Not going to post it, but…if you’re going to have a montage in honor of the anniversary of James Bond, I think that getting some people associated with James Bond to introduce it would make more sense than 3 assembled extreme sports athletes…though they are affable and charming enough.)
Loved that Sian Heder dressed as a disco ball:
OK, it’s time to talk about Will. I, like most people, at first thought it was bit. Then when the screen kept cutting out, wasn’t sure what was going on. I don’t have a well formulated take on this. But, I do think the way that the internet has reacted is a great microcosm of a lot of what I find so exhausting about social media. Two things can be true at the same time, Chris Rock shouldn’t mock a woman’s appearance, especially one who is dealing with a medical condition (maybe he didn’t know! But, as a person with a mostly invisible disability/chronic illness, I think it’s best to just err on the side of not mocking someone’s body, because maybe there’s something going on you don’t know about) AND it is a truly unhinged overreaction to leave your chair at an event partly held in your honor, to get up, storm the stage, and slap a person who made a tasteless joke. I don’t think Jada Pinkett Smith is a delicate thing in need of protection from Chris Rock, but I don’t know her, and she seems to feel supported by his actions. But…his actions were…at the very least disproportionate.
I love a truly wild awards show moment, I love that we all got to have a thing to react to together whose stakes are ultimately not very high, Chris Rock will be fine, Will Smith has an Oscar now, Jada looked great in her second dress of the night for the after parties (it’s truly wild to me that the Smith family still went to the Vanity Fair party!), but this quickly became the locus of debate about violence and racism on Twitter in a way that it just didn’t need to be, maybe this wasn’t about who we are as a society, maybe it was about weird workplace drama between three people who we do not actually know anything about. And it distracted from the fact that Summer of Soul won best documentary, and Questlove gave a lovely speech, which I can’t even find a clip of on YouTube, I think probably because The Academy doesn’t want us all to have the footage of the slap. (Which of course is all over Twitter anyway).
Will’s acceptance speech, did not help matters, he swung to make it seem like…he was a vessel for love and therefore he had to hit Chris? Jesus wanted him too? I don’t know, but at this point I just feel sad for him, he spent this whole awards season on a victory tour, and had successfully crafted the narrative that he was getting a coronation Oscar, and then…this? I feel bad for the Williams sisters that their awards season turned into such a mess, it’s just…a lot, and it really feels like something else must be going on here, right? Like, something felt off:
You can hear how quiet it is in that room once he says “protect,” because it’s clear that no one knew what to do or how to react. I just can’t even imagine the awkwardness of being in that room. We were all cringing and gasping, and we were in my living room.
And then it was followed up with a weirdly peppy In Memorium, with dancers and a puppy?! At this point, it honestly felt like the people running the show were like…trolling us? I’m not even sure, but I felt very bad for the women who had to give speeches right after this.
But, Jessica Chastain has an Oscar! We should have been able to say that years ago and now we can, and I love her:
For the first time ever we have back to back female Best Director winners! And Jane Campion made the smart choice of writing down her speech this week:
CODA! It wasn’t my best picture of the year (or even of the nominees), but it’s a lovely film and I’m very happy that it won:
Also, just realized that this was the first year with a Director/Picture split where both films were directed by women!
Fashion wise, there was a lot of red, and a lot of gray, and lot of strange, precarious seeming necklines and boob cups, but my list of favorites is pretty long:
I Get a Bit Obsessive 