Stodgy, overlong, enjoyably corny, and with a combination of both genuine pathos and real Hollywood self-satisfaction, the 95th Academy Awards were a return to something like “form”.
There were zero major incidents, controversies, slaps, or ballot slip-ups, and the Best Picture winner – Everything Everywhere All at Once – was a solidly good film without even a remote whiff of greatness. Every single category was televised, from Best Animated Short to Best Editing, in a reversal of previous year’s attempts to shorten the telecast by removing certain live awards. In other words: it was good and boring, punctuated by bouts of slightly unhinged show-biz behaviour but nothing exciting enough to write home about.
As a host, Jimmy Kimmel was a mixed bag with a decent ratio of hits to misses throughout the evening, with inevitable reference to the Will Smith slap incident along the way. He began with a strong opening monologue where he ribbed an absent James Cameron for his “humility” and warned any aggrieved attendees to avoid coming onstage to “get jiggy with it”: for the most part, he did well at walking a fine line between brown-nosing and lightly insulting the gathered glittering celebrities.
More bemusing were his forays into the audience where he had a muted response from the guests, and a man dressed in a Cocaine Bear suit offered zero comic relief whatsoever. Still, there were some fun moments: Colin Farrell’s look of genuine childlike glee at the sight of Jenny the Donkey (although it turns out it may not have been the real Jenny the Donkey; Hugh Grant referring to his aging by referring to himself as “basically a scrotum”; the delightful performance of RRR’s hit song and utter earworm “Naatu Naatu”; Michael B. Jordan and Jonathan Majors giving casual viewers a mini history lesson on the art of film editing.
And then we come to the winners themselves. This was a year where none of the nominees were genuinely bad – All Quiet on the Western Front might be bland but it’s not objectionable, and EEEAO is sweet, self-consciously strange, if ultimately cornball stuff. But thrown in the league of films with the sorrowful poetry of The Banshees of Inisherin, or the towering and chilly intelligence of Tár, or even the perfectly calibrated emotional crush of The Fabelmans, these other big winners (seven wins for EEAAO, four for All Quiet) looked faint, uninteresting, and mediocre. It was irritating to see many excellent films and performances go unawarded, but equally difficult to resent the triumph of a veteran actress like Michelle Yeoh, or the design genius of Ruth Carter (who won for Best Costuming for her work on Wakanda Forever).
The finest moments were ones of possibly engineered but highly effective emotional symmetry: John Travolta presenting the “in memoriam” with reference to Olivia Newton-John’s death; Ke Huy Quan coming on stage for EEAAO’s Best Picture win and enthusiastically greeting the presenter of the award – aka his former Indiana Jones costar Harrison Ford.
Others depend on your patience: Brendan Fraser’s genuinely lovely, stunned reaction to his Best Actor win for The Whale and the rambly metaphorical speech that followed, for example, or Jamie Lee Curtis’ classically Hollywood speech for Best Supporting Actress, which paid homage to her famous parents.
The event was about as quintessential Oscars as you get: lukewarm, mostly unsurprising, almost comforting in its very blandness. Or it might be, were the Academy not so determined to make all the worst decisions about the big awards.
