The Oscar ceremony was a nice break from reality this year. There were a few shots at activism related to ongoing conflicts overseas, but not much related to the current Trump administration. Kamala Harris was rumored to be making an appearance, but those were only rumors. I had a pretty good bead on all of the winners well in advance, with the exception of Mikey Madison surprising in Best Actress, so there wasn't much suspense. That left the usual pageantry and production snafus to enjoy, which I did.
Conan O'Brien hosted this year, which was a great choice. He's very much of the old school late night host mold, but still current enough and silly enough to put a giant sandworm playing the piano on stage, pull up old headshots of nominees, and devote a whole opening musical number to promising to not waste time. His monologue was only so-so, but a real stroke of genius was inviting some of the local first responders onstage to be lauded for their efforts in the recent disaster efforts - and then having them deliver a few below-the-belt jokes to capitalize on the goodwill. Conan's audience interactions were great, and I will be very disappointed if the disappointed John Lithgow bit doesn't become a widespread meme immediately.
Format changes this year included not having any of the Best Song nominees actually performed. It was a sorry crop of nominees anyway, thanks to the inexplicable support for "Emilia Perez." Instead, we had the show open with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande doing an Oz medley, and later on there was a Quincy Jones tribute and a whole James Bond extravaganza that feels a few years too late. Did Amazon sponsor that one? The presenters were decent - Ben Stiller got to do a great physical bit - and I liked having actors pay tribute to the craftspeople, but I still missed having the clips. There were good speeches (Zoe Saldana), weird speeches (Kieran Culkin), bad speeches (Camille), really bad speeches (Animated Short turning into a power struggle), and Adrien Brody beating the Greer Garson record for longest acceptance speech in Oscar history. Of course the show ran over, but at least they didn't hit the four hour mark.
It was a bad year for the Oscars' production design. The virtual backdrops were often very busy looking, and showrunners were having trouble getting what was on the screens to look right on the broadcast. The orchestra was elevated above the stage, and for some reason partially blocking the central screen at times. This resulted in the worst In Memoriam segment I have seen in a long time, which not only had the musicians blocking the screen, but also headshots of the deceased superimposed over their tribute clips, resulting in visual chaos. And they left out Tony Todd. And whoever decided to have a choir up there singing Mozart's "Requiem" as the accompaniment needs to be held accountable. At least Morgan Freeman was recruited at the last minute to pay respects to Gene Hackman.
I didn't watch the reportedly disastrous live broadcast on Hulu, which apparently didn't account for the extended running time of the ceremony and kicked a lot of people off the feed right before the announcement of Best Actress. I was hoping that this would be a viable alternative to my having to wrangle the local ABC broadcast signal every year - always a dicey proposition when you live in an apartment. Alas, no such luck. As long as we're saving movie theaters, maybe we should also look into maintaining the television broadcast networks for situations like this.
In the end "Anora" won big, and Sean Baker especially (tying Walt Disney's trophy count), but nearly all the Best Picture contenders walked away with something. There were more Bob Dylan jokes than Trump jokes, and it's always great to see Goldie Hawn, Mick Jagger, and Bowen Yang. June Squibb did a solid comedic bit with ScarJo. The Quincy Jones number was worth it to see Whoopi, Oprah, and Queen Latifah looking fabulous. Not everyone who won should have, but there were no glaring misses either. And I hope Conan considers coming back regularly in the future.
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