Should We Talk About The Oscars?

That's the honest question I've been asking myself since last Sunday. It’s too significant a cultural event— as evidenced by the full week of coverage we at The Couch devoted to it in the week leading up —to not say anything about it, but this was an Oscars ceremony that left me and many others feeling like the less said about it, the better.

Nevertheless, I’m here to say some things about it. I’ll start with the necessary disclaimer: trying to stage an awards show, particularly one of this magnitude, amidst a worldwide pandemic is an unenviable task, and the fact that they pulled a show off in any capacity, let alone one that was not without its highlights, is a rousing success. Still, even with the, you know, COVID of it all, it’s hard not to think of ways it could have been better executed. We had seen a general upward trajectory in the awards ceremonies that had been held in the last year, from a pretty unimpressive and forgettable Emmys last fall, to a fun but chaotic Golden Globes in January, to most recently, a Grammys last month that was a rousing and remarkable success. Building off that positive momentum, the start of the Academy Awards had myself and fellow film nerds geeking out, with its introduction that played like the beginning of a movie. Regina King took an Oscar from outside Los Angeles’ Grand Central Station and something like opening credits rolled as she strode into a revamped main terminal that made for a beautiful setting, and began the show with a nice pseudo-monologue that included a nod to ongoing civil rights protests in the wake of the Derek Chauvin murder trial.

It’s not exaggeration, however, to say the show only went downhill from there. For starters, the organizers’ treatment of COVID was…bizarre. It’s no secret that most of the wealthy and privileged audience probably were vaccinated or had access to a vaccine long before we plebeians did. And with a largely outdoor/open-air venue and reduced capacity, it’s understandable that concern maybe did not need to be as high as it would have been if this show took place just 4 or 5 months earlier. But still, for an industry as vocally progressive as Hollywood tends to be, it was a bit jarring to see little-to-no mask wearing, and little-to-no careful distancing, etc., even around multiple attendees in more at-risk categories. The direction from King at the top of the show was that they were to treat this like “they were on a set: when the cameras are rolling, masks can come off, otherwise, keep them on.” Which, fine, but this felt much less like an earnest nod to the process of filmmaking that the Academy were probably hoping to promote, and more like a convenient excuse to be able to show all of the celebrities’ full beautiful faces.

For the 3rd consecutive year, the ceremony was held without a host, and this time around, the lack of an emcee was noticeable. While Regina King did a fine job kicking off the show, there was no real comedic introduction the way Steve Martin and Chris Rock got us started last year, or Tine Fey, Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph did the year before that, and a host not only could have set the tone for a breezier ceremony, they would have been a welcome intercession throughout the night to keep the show humming along. An even bigger qualm for me was the lack of clips from the nominated films and performances; I anticipated one positive byproduct of a reduced-capacity, host-less, liver performance-less show to be that the TV audience would be treated to more extended clips for each nominee. This is consistently one of my favorite parts of the Oscars, the ability to see snippets of what made this movie or this actor such a compelling nominee. Instead, strangely, there were virtually NO clips throughout the night, save for a couple seemingly random categories like International Film and Animated Film. The time was filled instead by presenters speaking at length about what made those nominees so great, and then acceptance speeches that seemed to have a minimum length requirement of 7 minutes. Because that’s what the people truly want: to hear about a great actress’ performance rather than see it, then listen to a producer ramble about how inspired they were by their own film without a live orchestra mercifully bringing his speech to a close.

Amidst it all, of course, were the awards themselves. It wasn’t a new idea to open the show with at least one of the more major categories, the way the Screenplay awards were the first ones presented this time around. What was a new idea was to unveil the awards with seemingly no regard for their significance. Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, and most egregiously, Best Director were all presented within the first hour of the show, before such crowd-pleasers as Best Production Design, Best Visual Effects, and all of the Shorts awards. The result in the case of the latter was giving very little shine to Chloe Zhao’s history-making win for Nomadland, becoming the first female director of color to win top honors. This phenomenon would be repeated late in the show, when Rita Moreno shockingly came out to announce Best Picture, the inarguable biggest award of the night, well before the end of the show; Nomadland won there, too, as expected, and again, was somewhat buried under the confusion of the order of awards rather than getting the curtain call. Fortunately, not too many complaints could be made about the winners themselves, other than that there were very few surprises, and when the surprises did start coming in, they were far from pleasant surprises. Mank winning Best Cinematography and Best Production Design (or really, winning anything), or H.E.R. winning Best Original Song over favored— and superior —entries from Eurovision Song Contest and One Night In Miami were examples of unwelcome upsets. And then of course came the cherry on top of the cow pie: inexplicably, the announcement of Best Actor and Best Actress were moved to after the award for Best Picture. This would have been a brazen and absurd decision anyway, but the only reason it could have been done would be to give Carey Mulligan or Andra Day proper recognition for their first-ever Oscar amidst an extremely competitive Best Actress race, and then of course, to close the show with an emotional posthumous tribute to Best Actor winner Chadwick Boseman. Imagine everyone’s surprise then, when Best Actress went to Frances McDormand, who took this prize just 3 years ago, and then the last Oscar of the night did not go, as everyone expected, to Boseman, who had won at just about every single show on the awards circuit, but rather to Anthony Hopkins, who wasn’t even present at the ceremony. So ended the 2021 Academy Awards: with a bemused Joaquin Phoenix telling a completely bewildered live and television audience that the last winner of the night wasn’t there to accept his award. Roll credits.

Of all of the ways the last 14 months or so have forced us to reconsider our priorities, a disappointing Oscars hardly feels like something to lose sleep over. Still, for a show that so consistently pushed the message of cinema providing a necessary reprieve from the pain and stress of the last year, it would have been nice to have the foremost awards show in cinema follow suit with an enjoyable night of escapism. Here’s hoping The Oscars better lives up to their own promoted vision in 2022.