Getty ImagesLast night’s show featured a bizarre James Bond tribute – while failing to duly honour visionary director David Lynch. That choice spoke to the awards’ profound identity crisis.
Early on in Sunday’s three-and-three-quarter hour Academy Awards ceremony, there was a tribute to the James Bond franchise, consisting of a Broadway dance routine from Margaret Qualley and three classic theme songs belted out by Lisa, Doja Cat and Raye. It was a strange segment, not just because no Bond films have been released in the past three years, but because the series’ long-time custodians, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, have just handed over control of their family business to Amazon. Considering that so many of the evening’s speeches praised cinema and the cinema-going experience, it was embarrassing that the Academy’s 007 tribute coincided with the selling of one of cinema’s most spectacular, big-screen-worthy assets to a streaming service.
Wouldn’t a tribute to the late David Lynch have been more apposite? Lynch, who died in January, is regarded as one of modern American film’s most singular visionaries – and he was a four-time Oscar nominee and an honorary Oscar winner to boot. Yet he merited just a few seconds in the In Memoriam montage. Later in the ceremony, though, there was time for a tribute to the late Quincy Jones, who is undoubtedly a legendary figure, but more in the music world than film. This sequence consisted of Queen Latifah’s performance of Ease on Down the Road, a song from The Wiz (1978) which was produced but not written by Jones. With all due respect, do any film fans believe that The Wiz merits more attention than such Lynch masterpieces as The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive?
Presumably the producers of the Oscars do – and that could be why the institution has such a profound identity crisis. Glance at the list of winners, and you’ll see that this was probably the most radical celebration of innovative, low-budget cinema in Oscar history. And yet the cheesy and clichéd ceremony is lagging decades behind the tastes of its voters.
The biggest winners of the night were Anora and The Brutalist, two independent films made by auteurs with big ideas and tiny budgets. (Last year we had Barbenheimer. This year we had… Brutanora? The Anoralist? Maybe not.) Brady Corbet’s defiantly serious period drama, The Brutalist, won the Oscars for score, cinematography and leading actor (Adrien Brody’s rambling speech really should have had an interval, like the film itself). But the voters’ favourite was Anora. Sean Baker’s heart-tugging screwball tragicomedy won the Oscar for best picture as well as for director, original screenplay and editor – quite a haul for Baker, a boundary-pushing low-budget film-maker who did all three jobs himself.
Getty ImagesThe star of Anora, Mikey Madison, also won the best actress prize, making this an historic occasion in which two different Oscar acceptance speeches paid tribute to the sex worker community. The 25-year-old definitely deserved the Academy Award for her explosively dynamic yet sensitive performance, but she is almost a newcomer, so it was hard not to feel sorry for her closest rival, Demi Moore. In The Substance, Moore plays a middle-aged Hollywood actress who is usurped by her fresh-faced young doppelganger, so when Madison took to the stage to her accept her Oscar, and Moore was left in her seat, there was a cruel and eerie sense that the plot of The Substance was unfolding in real life.
Still, The Substance won for make-up and hairstyling – not bad going for a delirious body-horror film from a French director. Jacques Audiard’s trans gangster musical, Emilia Perez, won best supporting actress (Zoe Saldaña) and best song. And Walter Salles’s political yet personal Brazilian drama, I’m Still Here, won best international film. There were technical awards for Dune: Part Two and Wicked, and an adapted screenplay prize for Conclave, but in most of the high-profile categories, this was an Oscars for the underdogs: an evening when leftfield artists like Baker won awards, and then spoke about the value of independent film-making and going to see films in cinemas.
Kieran Culkin won best supporting actor for A Real Pain, as expected, and he swore in his acceptance speech, as expected. The best animated feature film was Flow, a cartoon made in Latvia using free, open-source software. And the best documentary feature was No Other Land, a documentary set on the occupied West Bank and made by an Israeli/Palestinian collective, which doesn’t even have a US distributor. A few years ago, a film like Flow could never have toppled a Disney-Pixar cartoon as popular as Inside Out 2, but the Academy’s drive to bring in a younger, more diverse set of voters is obviously having an effect.
If only the show had been affected, too. Instead, the proceedings could easily have been mistaken for a 1970s television variety show. The host was Conan O’Brien, following two years when Jimmy Kimmel was master of ceremonies, so that’s three years in a row when the event took its self-satisfied tone from a late-night talk-show host delivering late-night talk-show wisecracks. O’Brien wasn’t unfunny, exactly, and he made the odd sharply political comment, but essentially it was yet another evening in which a bored man in a bow tie made snide, roast-style jibes about films that deserve better. The Oscars are clearly in their “safe pair of hands” era when, in the wake of the notorious La La Land/ Moonlight envelope mix-up, and Will Smith’s slapping of Chris Rock, the producers are intent on making everything as middle-of-the-road and predictable as possible. The show was slick and glitzy enough, with nothing actively obnoxious about it except for the insulting practice of cutting off the winners’ speeches, while making time for O’Brien’s skits. But the format is getting so tired that it’s no longer fit for purpose.
You don’t have to take my word for it. “If you’re still enjoying the show, you have something called Stockholm Syndrome,” said O’Brien after about three hours. And if a show’s host is joking about how much of an endurance test it is, then a major shake-up is required. What the ceremony needs now is even a fraction of the invention, daring and energy which are evident in the films it’s honouring. Oscar winners have changed. Now it’s time for Oscar night to change, too.
