By I missed Conan monologues so badly: the transparent assessments of how every joke has landed and milking an extra laugh from those laughs, the masterly timed yelling, the rubber face of a towering Irish clown. When Conan O’Brien is on one (and he’s never not), he becomes an entertainer in our most romanticized sense; a man who will make you see Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in the same body, an Oscars host who matched the scrappiness of an indie awards sweep, but also buttoned up to revere the pomp of the blockbusters. A grieving O’Brien (the comedian lost both of his elderly parents in December and has been living in a hotel since January’s wildfires) was game to usher 18 million viewers (down 7% from last year’s measly jolt) through the grand finale for a middling year for cinema that yielded a legitimately exciting Oscars race. The writing was on the wall for an ANORA sweep since summer, but there were enough zigs to anticipate some zags (even if those zags ended up being “hey, turns out ANORA won even more than we thought it would”). Conan brewed a mood that elevated everyone else’s jokes, from Amy Pohler’s “hard to find the right adapter” rib to Ben Stiller killing his malfunctioning rising platform gag. Demi Moore clinging to a “thank you for having me again” victory lap this awards season is nice in the same way that Conan hosting is nice: these are people who want to be here. This is what love of the game looks like!
O’Brien rose to occasions that the telecast’s production team seemingly had no interest in even reaching towards. The Best Supporting Actor coronation had one previous winner comment on every single nominee, but, 180 minutes in, we got acting clips for lead actor nominees? Adrien Brody’s speech was delivered in front of Sebastian Stan’s pursed lips, every senile celebrity looked like a dog taken to the beach on the afternoon before they’re put down at the vet (all love to Meg Ryan and whatever her calm Wednesday afternoons must be like, but it’s 2025 and the early ‘90s valor has worn off!), and the orchestra is still playing the AUSTIN POWERS music—if Geoff Keighley’s exponentially tackier The Game Awards can assemble an orchestral melody of its GOTY contenders, then why does The Academy hire an equally large band to recycle stadium jingles? In a last-ditch effort to attract social media reactions akin to what the Grammys would receive, the Academy had the tempo all wrong, every single THE WIZ or WICKED verse going multiple verses too long. After last year’s solid production, all the lessons were tossed to the wind. This thing sucked. But, as always, the Oscars gave us a prolonged glimpse at the state of Hollywood’s guts—some glory, mostly gory. Here’s what we learned:
Letterboxd Has Entered the Awards Race
THE SUBSTANCE kicked off the show right after a prolonged WICKED introduction, with Conan squeezing his way out of Demi Moore’s spine like Billy Crystal crash-landing from a clip of THE ENGLISH PATIENT… A film whose special effects resembled the DIY making-of clips of TERRIFIER 3’s gore gags won Best Makeup and Hairstyling over WICKED and NOSFERATU. bro. Everyone is acting way too normal about this! I think everyone should be as astonished as I am, truthfully! The ginormous upset of the night was that Demi Moore lost Best Actress to Mikey Madison in Sean Baker’s ANORA. Sit on that. We live in a timeline where everyone thought THE SUBSTANCE had Best Actress in the bag, and instead the RED ROCKET guy nearly beat a world record set by Walt Disney. What a gift. We need Mikey Madisons to get coronated, the horse girl turned colossal It Girl now only the third acting winner born in the 1990s. Last week, I walked past a local pizzeria and overheard the sentence “Have you seen ANORA? It’s the stripper movie starring Mikey Madison.” Fucking finally, we have some fresh blood that might actually stick. I’ve seen Demi Moore’s house, she’ll be just fine.
But where were these two movies constantly celebrated from summer to spring? Letterboxd dot com.
EMILIA PEREZ, once bafflingly considered the favorite, could not endure the weight of a 2.1 average tacked to its tail, fighting off the viral displeasure over its disastrous numbers and crashing out once and for all with the brake-pumping discovery of Karla Sofía Gascón’s blind-fire bigotry. Despite still winning two Oscars, the film that you heard no one liked actually became the movie that no one really liked. The movies are not back yet, but the 2023 strikes—and the lack of commercial product that set the stage for independent fare to capitalize on the limelight—laid the brickwork for the resurgence of word-of-mouth. People crave curation; we want your top four. Your favorite Letterboxd power-users are becoming taste indicators as surefire as the A24 logo before a movie and The Criterion Collection’s monthly drops. When the producers of this ceremony recognize that they need to be producing a show for the Letterboxd freaks (a David Lynch tribute would’ve been a tremendous start), you will actually witness a renewed spirit in the Oscars telecast. Until then, watch as they continue to reward Cannes darlings that saw their catalysts spark aflame on the New Zealand based social media platform.
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN Is An All-Timer Oscar Anomaly
I am so stuck on this. Why do you nominate James Mangold for Best Director if it doesn’t lock up Timmy for the trophy?! I have no clue what else to say—what a confounding loss, even if a majority of the precursors indicated a Brody win. To that, I will once again say: the Academy nominated James fucking Mangold for Best Director. In 2025, they did that.
As for Chalamet, Timmy’s in a tricky spot in his career: too seasoned to be the ingénue, too hungry and much too young to appeal to a voting body who did not buy into his pursuit for greatness. They are going to make that adorably braggadocious twerp wait a good fucking minute before they hand him the award he’s destined to place on his mantle—in front of the Kid Cudi vinyl discography and beside a chalice filled with dubiously sourced cocaine. At the ceremony, Chalamet was razzed as much as he was knighted, with Sandler’s baptism all but certifying another millennium of this kid showing up in our lives.
Erstwhile, Adrien Brody is a curious beast, an artist whose vast talent is proportionate to his absolute lack of charisma; his performance in THE BRUTALIST had me seek out every stop on his promotional tour, and, about as promptly, saw me abandon every podcast appearance thereafter. You can see why. Listen to that speech composed entirely of pregnant pauses leading up to hackneyed platitudes, tossing the gum from his mouth to Georgina Chaplin so he can ramble through a lesser version of what Demi Moore’s comeback-kid monologue was going to be. That man certainly did not charm his way to this point, so it’s even odder that Chalamet lost. It’s a testament to how pompous that speech was that I’m this mean towards a collection of words that were not inherently objectionable! He just sucked at hyping himself up, stunk at tying it all together into a harmonious sentiment, and took forever to do it. Any other repeat winner telling the orchestra to knock it off because they’ve been here before would be the championing white-boy-swag move of the century, but that Brody took the extra time to kind of just wing it made you wish Don Julio had supplied everyone with tomatoes. Wait, huh, what was that you just said? Adrien Brody’s next film is an S. Craig Zahler period two-hander with Vince Vaughn? Never mind, he’s a generational talent.
It’s Time to Kill Best Short Film
I’m sorry, but none of these people in the last decade have mined any value from this spotlight whatsoever. The Best Live Action Short and Best Animated Short categories are blatant tools for upward mobility—if they’re even that—because let’s be real: most of the winners have Netflix distribution or celebrity producers already, so these folks already had a foot in the door.
And I’m not salty because these fucking movies keep wrecking my betting odds. It leads to excruciating public speaking doubling as network mixer banter about nothing delivered by, frankly, nobodies. Just as the novices were petrified to utilize a platform, the industry professionals outright refused to implement reality in any of its shapes. “El Mal” was written to combat corruption. Which corruption? Who knows! The 2024 awards slate took on the oddly consistent pattern of—to varying dramatic effect—holding their ideological cards close to their chest. I’M STILL HERE and NICKEL BOYS are obvious calls to action, but THE BRUTALIST, ANORA, EMILIA PEREZ, and even WICKED, THE SUBSTANCE, and CONCLAVE, could be argued as so vague about their own intentions that they err on apolitical. Even the films struggled to say anything! With the standout exception of Basel Adra for NO OTHER LAND, nothing of value was spoken at the 2025 Academy Awards, and breaking that mold might be an unfair expectation to place on the Shorts winners, but you motherfuckers are keeping us watching this interminable telecast for an extra 15 minutes, so at least give us a tap dance. People already don’t give a fuck about arthouse indie cinema—I don’t think we’re going to be transcending boundaries and see an upswing of interest in short form theatrical narrative anytime soon. When the Academy decides to make this category a YouTube-centric one, call me, but until then, I’m proper exhausted by this phony agency-whoring industry known as “shorts filmmaking.”
Hollywood Knows It’s Dying
When the lavish self-canonization includes costume designers getting Fab 5 presentations, you clearly understand the Academy’s agenda: what’s more critical than movies is the ethos behind them. Cinema will not naturally reclaim the zeitgeist, it must be constantly hoisted to the high heavens until the big tuna bites the hook. The 2025 Oscars were an attempted balm on a mangled foundation, replete with a James Bond musical medley to celebrate… the death of the IP thanks to the Broccoli family’s relinquishment of the brand to Amazon? A little inside baseball, don’t you think? It’s obvious the Academy has adjusted itself to mimic the Grammys, a ceremony with the built-in boost of having the most popular musicians in America erect Broadway productions of their biggest hits. But I’m not even sure James Bond is still in the five most significant franchises currently in U.S. circulation.
The best Oscars ceremonies implore you to watch movies—instead, this ceremony pleaded for you to think about them, to reintroduce cinema into your daily considerations. I can only hope the medium once more solidifies its popularity past the freaks like me. If the bulk of Hollywood’s A-List is in Morocco filming THE ODYSSEY on the Oscar day where the iPhone-movie-guy is crowned prince, was a trophy really handed out? Meryl Streep, anyone who’s ever been cast in an OCEAN’S ELEVEN sequel, ‘70s royalty, ‘80s royalty, ‘90s royalty, I mean, guys, you can’t even get Reese Witherspoon or something to show up? It’s a raw deal when the only people who bother to show up to Hollywood’s biggest night are ones who are directly involved with the nominated films, and only two of those Best Picture nominees have cracked $100 million at the domestic box office. The most famous person in the room was, what, Kylie Jenner? Looking at the stage, you’re met with a program that is committed to selling you the idea of its own importance, but look around the room and you’re faced with a very different pitch.
Long Live Independent Film
NO OTHER LAND marched to the main stage on nothing but fervor for Palestinian sovereignty and a grassroots campaign of yapping festival-goers who ensured no one in the film community could forget this movie’s name. The film still does not have distribution in the United States, but it does have an Oscar for Best Documentary. That’s the real indie success story of the night, but the Cinderella story is undoubtedly the auteur behind TAKE-OUT and TANGERINE playing the long-game and integrating into the mainstream by barely changing a thing about himself. Baker’s “battle cry” was a low-stakes endeavor to preserve theatrical exhibition and the ritualistic customs of attending a cinema; it was a safe sentiment, even if it made Cord Jefferson’s polite demand for many mid-budget risks in the stead of bloated mega-movie gambles sound like a Leninist proverb. In a sweeping display of poetic justice, numerous accounts across social media blasted Hulu’s livestream shitting the bed throughout multiple points of the show (including during the final categories!). Until we get those aforementioned 1,000 screens that shuttered since quarantine (and the many more that closed its doors thanks to thieving landlords and an already waning theatrical attendance before 2020), the ANORA victory is more of a bump than a tide shift. People like good movies, and it is quite clear from both an anecdotal and statistical basis that the core issue of the past decade is centered on quality control! Oh no, here it comes, the lot of you who are antsy to tell me that the 2020s have actually been an invigorating time for the medium. Sure, bud, but save the spiel for the umpteenth writer ditching this town to work back at their parents’ small town pharmacy in Wyoming.
As for the film itself (Merry-Go-Round’s best film of 2024), I think ANORA is a great spin on a Tinto Brass sex-pest-comedy despite its fundamental shortcomings (Jesus Christ, a not insignificant number of sex workers very vocally do not fuck with this motion picture), but ANORA falls short of its potential similarly to how Mr. Beast squanders any of what he could stand for by merely using independent resources to copycat American game shows from 20 years ago. Studios used to just make ANORA. Credit where credit is due, the studios did in fact make CONCLAVE and NICKEL BOYS. But they also used to just make THE BRUTALIST, A REAL PAIN, and THE APPRENTICE, too. That these stories—and the familiar forms in which they were realized—are scrapping for cash from a variety of milked benefactors, grants, and oil princes and still can only afford substandard wages for offshore labor doesn’t strike the profound inspiration a Sean Baker Oscar sweep would have 10 years ago. What’s the real difference between ANORA and PRETTY WOMAN? A cynical disposition, gutsier ending, and a non-union crew? Maybe it’s time to bin the wilted flowers: the Chinese century is around the corner! Whatever, why not!
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