I am writing up what I thought of the Oscars since that is something I do. To me it was another weak year of movies. A lot of what came out this year had to have been filmed during the Covid pandemic, or before (Maverick), and I think that was a tough challenge. I try to go see any good movies that come to my local AMC, which has a great discount, but I still only managed to see four of the ten Best Picture nominees, and I didn’t even make it all the way through Avatar before walking out. I am happy for Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAO), but I only gave it a B+. I liked Maverick more, but it seemed unlikely that would ever win. I don’t know how they could limit it in some years and not others, but 10 nominees was just too many this year. I didn’t see it, but by all accounts, Triangle of Sadness had no business being nominated.
Despite articles predicting all kinds of things, the awards were pretty much by the numbers. The awards earlier in the season by the different guilds are very accurate predictors of Oscars, which is no surprise since it is a lot of the same voters. The producer, director, actor, and writer guilds delivered exactly the same winners as the Oscars would, including the landslide by EEAO. The technical awards may have been more of a tossup, and I was surprised All Quiet on the Western Front did so well.
So with no real surprises from the awards, that leaves the broadcast itself. Jimmy Kimmel was certainly a safe choice for host and he did a pretty decent job. He had a few good jokes, including welcoming Nicole Kidman from her abandoned AMC theater where she tried to get people already in theaters to come back to the theaters. I think it was good they didn’t push the jokes too hard since a lot of times they are corny or divisive. Even the presenters stayed away from lame jokes for the most part, instead reading effusive blurbs about whatever category they were presenting. They usually have the previous year’s best actor present best actress and vice versa, but since last year’s best actor was Will Smith, they brought in Halle Berry. I didn’t realize the drama of that until I read about it later. I did like Elizabeth Banks’ bit with a guy in a bear suit presenting visual effects. She pretended to trip and then almost did trip on the way out, but she and the bear did a good job. It was a tie-in with the just released Cocaine Bear, which she directed. Another tie-in that had nothing to do with anything except money was presenting a new trailer for Disney’s live action The Little Mermaid. Product placement.
In the last couple of years, they had taken out some of the smaller awards from the main broadcast, but put those back this year. I don’t think it added that much to the running time, but really nobody goes to see short features and documentaries. There weren’t a lot of production numbers wasting time, but they did do musical numbers for each of the nominated best songs. In some years the songs category can be stacked, but this was not one of them and couple of the songs just weren’t very good. But the dance-off song from RRR was pretty good and showed why it would eventually win the Oscar. Apparently the broadcasters wanted to leave a couple of the songs out (a very good idea), but Lady Gaga refused to perform her song from Maverick unless they did all the songs. She did a great job on her song even though the song is so-so.
The night moved along pretty well, albeit mostly predictably. The acceptance speeches were decent, mostly tolerable (in the past I fast forward over a lot of them). Because most of the winners have been accepting awards throughout, they maybe weren’t that spontaneous. I don’t mind long speeches being played off, but as usual they let big winners talk endlessly (the EEAO writing/directing team, one of whom said quite frankly he wasn’t going to stop, which is when I hit fast forward) while on a smaller award one person would make a very short speech and as the other person stepped up to also probably make a short speech, they would immediately be cut off. One team used their speech to sing happy birthday to one of the other team, which was cute, but really? 30 seconds for the smaller awards, 60 seconds for the big awards, and then cut the mic. How hard is that?
The broadcast was not at all spectacular, just like the year in movies, but maybe marks a return to normalcy after Covid and last year’s slap. Something to build on, though the broadcast still went 40 minutes over.