By Normally, when one reacts to the Oscars, there’s only enough gas in the tank to tackle snubs, surprises, and musical number highlights, but this year’s ceremony was a rare beast that—as innocuous as it may have appeared on the surface—presented tea leaves of varyingly damning (and hopeful!) varieties for the past, present, and future of the film industry. Here are five major takeaways I took from the night, and what they may mean for greener (?) pastures beyond campaigning for a trophy.
#1 The Guilds Should’ve Pushed a Streamer Boycott
It would’ve worked! The general public was amped! Streamer subscriber numbers are incredibly fragile and fetishistically tracked: Sarandos would’ve panicked! Name me one major cultural event that was dumped between Barbenheimer and the WGA securing a deal! I’ll wait! Netflix and Apple fell flat on their faces, with Disney succeeding with a Yorgos Lanthimos joint that Bob Iger likely still refuses to touch with a six-foot pole and Amazon barely edging out a win with an AMERICAN FICTION screenplay win that had its winner note how spineless executives have become. In the meantime, this is a key strategy for any union to keep in their arsenal as the material circumstances of “the town” only deteriorate.
#2 If You’re Not Going To Address Gaza, Then the Speech Has to At Least Be Fire
Below-the-line winners—often a hotbed for some of the night’s cutest and most radical moments—saw few highlights, if any. For such absurdist delights, the POOR THINGS craft teams (quietly staffed with non-union Hungarian crews) gave us nothing, and THE ZONE OF INTEREST’s Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers were giving “two dads rushed back from a ska festival for the bowler hat one’s daughter’s wedding,” but it was fun to learn that the Oliver Stone breathlessness of OPPENHEIMER was the doing of a quirked-up brunette lady you had a junior year Spanish class with. The splendor of GODZILLA MINUS ONE’s visual effects trophy was brutally lessened by the charming Takashi Yamazaki attempting shaky phonetic English to honor his cohorts and inspirations, an unnecessary capitulation to American audiences that catered to no one, and the deserving Ludwig Göransson sort of just stumbled over a reference to his creative partner and wife that started as a bit of gratitude, kinda transformed into an anecdote, and then fizzled out into a vocal ellipses that ended with him thanking his parents for gifting him drum machines instead of video games as a kid, a weird lateral dig that screamed “former Childish Gambino collaborator.” The pain with drawing out awards season to mid-March is that none of these fucking people can even pretend to be excited, and even with the opportunity to seize 60 seconds of unbroken television spotlight, upward mobility has muzzled any sort of ambition from what these speeches could achieve, a disappointment even more glaring when “the traffic” referred to throughout the night was caused by pro-Palestinian protestors getting their skulls caved in by LAPD from the Cinerama Dome to The Dolby Theatre. John and Yoko’s kid got on stage for some Netflix short called “WAR IS OVER” and after his handlers ate up the entire block, the dude couldn’t even muster a single breath for the demonstrations outside braver than what either of his parents ever summoned.
Above-the-line was somehow worse! Hoytema advocating for celluloid, Cord Jefferson promoting mid-budget cinema, Emma Stone covering up her catastrophic upset over Lily Gladstone (watch THE CURSE on Paramount Plus!) with a ramble about collaboration, THE LAST REPAIR SHOP folks supporting music programs in public schools… Is it 2019? These mission speeches were delivered from a perspective out of time on a night honoring a historical epic about our all-but-certain atomic annihilation, of which is surely imminent. It’s an election year! The traffic! What caused the traffic on your way into the venue?! David Zaslav is eliminating whole films for tax write-offs! The tech industry has eaten your medium whole! Anyone? Anybody? My dark horse going into the evening was RDJ, the son of a true underground American king, but Downey Jr.’s speech referring to a terrible childhood was at odds with his fond remembrance of it in the intimate SR. from 2022, and a bizarre dagger to throw at the Downey name in an otherwise completely unmemorable bit of jabbering. Goddamn, how many standing ovations do you need, motherfucker? The overall irony I’m poking at here is that the actual telecast was a solidly entertaining, relatively brisk late-afternoon of live production; the celebrities hauled in by the truckload failed to rise to the occasion.
To address the elephant in the room, a visibly trembling Jonathan Glazer owned the evening with an equally tremendous and mealy-mouthed speech that brought his film, the greater social context of said film, and the intensely Jewish attachments to both full circle. It was a somber triumph that has welcomed a bevy of deliberate misinterpretations to make him out to be Sonderkommando. Could he have explicitly called for a ceasefire? Or called Israel’s 75-year occupation of Palestine an ethnic cleansing? In many ways, he did without the sloganeering. Compare it to proud Irishman Cillian Murphy, who took after his nation’s proud disavowal of genocidal Joe Biden by… Dedicating the trophy to all the “peacemakers”? Jesus Christ.
#3 Hollywood Legacy Is Good and Dead
This year’s ceremony drew 19.5 million viewers, barely up from the 18.8 of 2023. Now, if you are working for The Academy, you’ll be quick to note that the upward trajectory from 2021’s dismal all-time low of 10.4 million viewers to 2022’s 16.6 and now here is a good omen of rising re-interest in The Oscars (wowza, a third consecutive year of growth!), but 29.6 million people watched GREEN BOOK win Best Picture and now a full 10 million less tuned in to watch two of the biggest blockbusters of all time square off in the ring. This show—at this scale, in this format, with this industry-freezing pomp—is so cooked. It’s not just that the days of Robert Evans running a coke ring to feed his odyssey of rebuilding Hollywood in his artists’ visions are over—it’s that they’re sure as fuck never coming back in this mega-tech oligarchy. Once this shit topples, we’ve got rising sea levels to worry about. Time’s up, bucko. The planet is rejecting us. The “movies are dead” sentiment is fueled by the core reality that the horrors are ever more persistent and the bourgeois distractions are a whole lotta mid. The Oscars still matter, obviously: why else were you able to watch THE ZONE OF INTEREST in a shopping mall? Why do talk show hosts know the name of the dog from last year’s Palme d’Or winner? Austin Butler has yet to deliver a good performance, but he is a permanent fixture of the A-List for his rampant participation in the fucking ELVIS awards campaign, I mean, come on, we got Giamatti out of BILLIONS jail, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph is now known for an Alexander Payne dramedy (and not the most popular global pop star’s prestige HBO series). There’s a little toothpaste still in the tube. While international voters are pushing their absolute hardest to advocate for the global impact cinema still has, I wish The Oscars cared to squeeze with the same intent.
There was some rehabilitation (giving Keaton a tuxedoed reprisal of Bruce Wayne after his return to the role flopped hard enough to kill the DC Extended Universe), but you’ve still got Kimmel openly mocking half of the films (the abject, jeering disrespect KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON has received for its length alone throughout all of awards season is a special kind of evil Hollywood Liberalism—imagine being so brazen as to offer unsolicited script notes for Oskar Schindler to get on with it and wrap up the list) and a limping culture as the backbone (despite making over $100 million and winning half of its nominated awards, is it just me or does it still feel like POOR THINGS hasn’t even come out yet?). Foregoing sizzle reels of the nominated actors’ performances, The Academy has settled on a simulacra of sisterhood and faux-fraternities—coworkers (and, in most cases, complete strangers) reading supposedly heartfelt, personal tributes from cue cards with the grace of a seventh grader’s class presentation. For the first round of Best Supporting Actress nominees, the confusing choice made immediate sense once I saw how weepy each performer was getting while locking eyes with their speaker, but as the night wore on, the facade wore thinner. It’s tough to say this is really about “the movies” anymore. Feeding the parasocials has become the last resort, while producers give a standing ovation to the IATSE crew members they’ve bitched about having to pay a living wage to.
#4 Ryan Gosling Is the Greatest Movie Star of a Generation
The post-pandemic Oscars have fallen back on this sour tradition of rolling out a mummified remnant of New Hollywood’s past to dodder about after being seemingly ripped from their hospital intubation mere seconds before—a visibly unwell Liza Minnelli being nursed by Lady Gaga through a CODA coronation is a moment I’ve still never watched in full without rushing for the mute button. Harrison Ford, with his out-of-breath slurring of a teleprompter reading, did “The Joe Biden Boogie” and doomed his conceited, summer-bound victory lap’s chances at success by explicitly reminding the American public how fucking old he was. Al Pacino’s muttered vamping of OPPENHEIMER’s Best Picture crowning wasn’t as bad (for one, if there were news reports of Al dropping dead 48 hours from when you read this, I’d be genuinely shocked), but the likely drunk Pacino (or, possibly more upsetting, overmedicated) was drained of the sauce of a legend who could command the coliseum. But good goddamn, Ryan Gosling sure had the sauce.
For the first time since the globe was invested in Leo winning an Oscar, the Academy minted an actor into the pantheon of icons. Sure, the elaborate “I’m Just Ken” musical performance only cemented the weirdness of BARBIE’s sidelined female characters (they all suck!), but Gosling did that LA LA LAND thing where none of his choreography nor singing was particularly memorable, and yet he walked away with the whole evening in his back pocket. He’s only 43, so there’s time after David Leitch almost certainly ruins any potential THE FALL GUY may have, but we need to get this guy a definitive Hollywood vehicle as soon as possible. Imperative to being a true movie star is having more duds on your track record than surefire hits, even if some of the hits aren’t home runs. It’s the Clark Gable playbook, and the first time in my adult life I’ve seen that writing on the wall for the millennial celebrity class. Jack Nicholson hasn’t been sat in the front row for many years—a living emblem of charismatic vanity sticking out his proverbial pinky ring for all the marching winners to lay a lip upon—and Gosling is the exact descendant for the task.
#5 You Can Literally Read From a Piece of Paper at a Live Televised Event and Zionists Will Still Purposefully and Maliciously Misquote You in a Slanderous Mass Tantrum
Truthfully, it is not worth a single bit of your effort to engage with bad faith reactionaries! You have Jewish friends with psychopathic extended family who are being culturally and spiritually isolated by an occupation that has hijacked Judaism and the Shoah to justify colonial genocide! You’ve got weirdo Christian fanatics exiling their alt-weirdo socialist children like they were garbage! Get off Twitter and show kindness and compassion for them as they vow to maybe one day successfully re-educate their propagandized family with love and liberty!
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