Dune cleans up, CODA wins big, and Will Smith smacks Chris Rock: All the Oscars news in less than three hours
Zack Snyder picked up also two audience awards...if that means anything to you
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Where were you when Will Smith told Chris Rock to keep his wife’s name out of his fucking mouth? Hopefully watching the Oscars. But if you weren’t, we’ve got all the good stuff right here.
Will Smith kind of stole the night after that whole debacle. But minutes later, he won Best Actor for King Richard, which makes one wonder, was the whole Chris Rock thing a bit like the Glenn Close “Da Butt” debacle? He is the Best Actor, after all… Unfortunately, Smith’s slap robbed him of his big moment, shifting focus from the show to his antics. Sounds like someone’s going to take it to the Red Table.
It wasn’t all fisticuffs though. Jazz hands were held high tonight as CODA won all three awards it was nominated for, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor.
Troy Kotsur of CODA became the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar, and the second person overall. The first deaf person to win? His CODA co-star Marlee Matlin for 1986's Children Of A Lesser God. “This is dedicated to the deaf community, the CODA community, and the disabled community. This is our moment!” he said in his speech. CODA’s writer-director, Sian Heder, won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Speaking of writers, fresh off a COVID diagnosis (though was given the all-clear), Kenneth Branagh picked up his first Oscar, after eight nominations. The man simply never stops working, but tonight, he’ll likely drink enough champagne to fill the Nile.
Like Smith and Branagh, Jessica Chastain finally got that Oscar she’s been striving for. Winning for The Eyes Of Tammy Faye, Chastain took home the second Oscar for those famous peepers. The film about the makeup enthusiast/televangelist also won, appropriately, for Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling.
Kotsur wasn’t the only one making history. Winning for Best Supporting Actress for West Side Story, Ariana DeBose became the first Afro Latina and first openly queer woman of color to win an Academy Award for acting. DeBose is also the second actor born in the ‘90s to win an Oscar (the first was Jennifer Lawrence). Truly something only ‘90s kids understand.
“Imagine this little girl in the backseat of a white Ford Focus,” DeBose said in her acceptance speech. “Look into her eyes, you see, an openly queer woman of color, an Afro Latina, who found her strength in life through art, and that is what I believe we’re here to celebrate. So anyone who has ever questioned your identity, or find yourself living in the grey spaces. I promise you, there is indeed a place for us.”
Though presented off-camera (because why would anyone watching an awards show want to watch people collect awards) Dune: Part One won early and often, picking up awards for Best Editing, Production Design, and Score. The 11-time nominee, Hans Zimmer picked up his second Oscar for his electronic BRHAAAAAAMS and the “vocal technique called ‘Hans Zimmer.’”
Once the cameras were rolling, Dune kept doin’. Cinematographer Greig Fraser, who most recently shot The Batman (with a camera, not like he shot the Batman) won for Best Cinematography. And they even let those previously thought unfilmable Best Sound winners do a little televised thank you speech, with some Jason Momoa burping for good measure. The movie also won Best Visual Effects without any burps to speak of.
Dune more or less shut the other favorite, The Power Of The Dog, out. Of its 12 nominations, Dog went home with one award for Jane Campion, who nabbed her second Oscar, becoming the third woman to win Best Director. She had previously won for her screenplay for The Piano.
Despite the hype surrounding the movie about a man exploring grief through routines, Drive My Car went home with only one award: Best International Feature. This makes Drive My Car’s prize the second time Japan has won—despite receiving several honorary awards.
Summer Of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) won best documentary. Encanto won for Best Animated movie, beating Mitchells Vs. The Machines, Flee, and fellow Disney films Raya And The Last Dragon and Pixar’s Luca. Riz Ahed picked up his first Academy Awards, which he shares with Aneil Karia, for The Long Goodbye, which won Best Live Action Short Film.
In other weird news, famed TV movie, Zack Snyder’s Justice League picked up a win for, um, the Number One Cheer-Worthy Moment for “Flash entering the Speed Force?” Not sure who voted for an ineligible movie, but sure. The Snyder faithful turned out for their man, voting his movie Army Of The Dead the fan-favorite of that weird fan vote thing. What a great idea that was.
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The “Oscar Cheer” moment was open to any movie. A scene from Rapsity Street Kids or Animal Soccer World could win if enough people voted enough times.
I was hoping for BMX Bandits or maybe The Wizard.
BMX Bandits Eh, I think A Bush Christmas remains the standout of Nicole’s early oeuvre.
Encanto is good, but man was The Mitchells fantastic. I feel like that should have won.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League joins David Ayer’s Suicide Squad in the category “Awful Films That Won Academy Awards*.”
The Oscars these days are rightfully classified as the pre- DNC conference where democRATS display their A N T I F A tactics on stage. — Lancaster George, Chicago, United States, moments ago
I’m surprised a mention of CRT didn’t make it into that comment.
Meanwhile RePUBlicans drink their sorrow away in, um…a pub. OK that didn’t go anywhere.
Encanto is a by-the-numbers animated flick that looks pretty and takes zero risks. I’d have much rather the award went to Mitchells, a film I didn’t like but did some interesting things that Encanto never bothered to attempt.
I’d have loved Luca to win, since that film was both gorgeous and really resonated with me, but I understand it wasn’t beloved, and Encanto was another baffling Disney juggernaut.
I haven’t seen Luca, but Encanto resonated with plenty of people too – it had some really interesting, subtle things to say about refugees and the generational trauma caused by dislocation and loss.
But it didn’t say them well, and its stated themes don’t well-match the script as presented. Encanto is a second-draft movie—there’s a great, coherent third draft of that script just begging to be written.
I mean, I found the message was well done enough to make me cry thinking about what dispossession did to my own grandmother, and thought the emotional ah-ha moment resonated back through the movie pretty well. But I accept that different people can take different things from the same story, and I’m genuinely glad you at least found some good kernels in there.Tangentially, I’m really appreciating the rise in genuine sibling dynamics in kids movies (Onward was great in that respect too, and while Frozen may have been the bane of adults’ existence for years everyone was right to praise it for focusing on a different kind of love).
I think the moment where Mirabel meets with her grandmother by the side of the river is really powerful and moving—I really don’t want to invalidate your feelings on the matter or pretend that there isn’t strength in the moment. My issue comes more how that scene is not strongly layered into previously ninety-odd minutes: Much like Coco a few years back, it’s a really emotionally moving moment that sits somewhat awkwardly with the preceding film, in some sense the narrative hasn’t earned it.
Let me put it like this: the big emotional break in the film come when Miribel finally confront her grandmother about her shitty treatment of the rest of the family, about the pressure she lays on them all in their good works in the town.
The problem with this, of course, is that with one exception there is no sign of this in the movie. Miribel’s mother at no point shows any sign of discontent that she has to heal the town; indeed we see no sign of her evening doing such outside the opening song. Pepa’s weather powers, especially rain, could be a goddsend to an agricultural community, but we never see her out of feeling doing anything for anyone— instead the entire family seemingly tiptoes in fear around her, terrified of making her emotionally distraught and thus bringing her rage down upon them (and boy is that disturbing aspect never touched upon.) Isabela… makes… flowers… and complains that she’s driven to be perfect in her big song that comes out of nowhere, but we don’t see much of that, and nor especially is it ever clear why she is being expected to marry some random dude, what the family will allegedly get out of this match, what the dynamics even are. Camilo is implied to be good at… making people laugh with his shape-shifting for some reason, but again, outside the opening song he just wanders about doing whatever the heck he wants. Even worse is Dolores, whose shitty power of extreme privacy violation doesn’t seem to be of use to anyone during the course of the movie (and, far worse, at the end of the film the woman’s whose only defining character trait is ‘incorrigible gossip who cannot keep a secret’ apparently spend a decade knowing Bruno’s secret and… said nothing at all. Bruno himself, in the one scene we see of his pre-hiding days, seems to have gone into exile entirely of his own according due to his own perceptions of himself— and god could I go on about how Bruno gets an entire song where everyone says how creepy he was and why they don’t like him, and then he shows up at the end of the film and everyone is super happy to see him and there are no problem or worries or anything.)
The two characters who do seem to be under pressure are Mirabel and Luisa, but it is only Mirabel who actually seems to have any interactions with her grandmother. Luisa clearly feels that due to her enormous strength she is obligated to do all sorts of things of the village – indeed, other than healing power’s she’s the only person whose power seems meaningfully useful on. daily basis. But that pressure only seems internal: she has taken her family belief n the power of service to the community and internalized it to the point of mental distress. And yet at no point do we Abuela increasing that pressure her on her to any meaningful degree. Yes, Abela’s created this family culture and is the proximate cause of its entry into Luisa’s brain, but Miribel’s big ‘you’ve done this to us’ speech is predicated on an active influence far more detrimental than the movie really expresses, at least given that the vast majority of the Madrigal family don’t seem to be doing shit in their day-to-day lives. Man, Abuela, you’ve intensely pressured Dolores to do… what, exactly? What strain is hurting Camilo? My poo mother, she had to… make a plate of food for the opening song an hour and a half ago.
The explosive confrontation that is the crisis point of the movie ought to be how Abuela treats Miribel like hot shit. Miribel is indeed under pressure from her grandmother – her grandmother has been awful to her, and that should certainly fuel the breaking between them. But the broader implication that Abuela is hurting her family just doesn’t seem to be true: most of her family seem absolute fine (or, in Pepa’s case, a better candidate for an accusation of abusive behaviour).
This is why Encanto feels like a second-draft movie: all the pieces are there, and the ending is a powerful statement about generational trauma and how it can unintentionally be passed down from parent to children (and grandchildren), but nobody’s gone make and revised the text enough to make the entire script consistent. The ending is expressly framed as a generational trauma passed down from its senior member to the whole family—but that is just not as strongly evident in the text of the film as it ought to be.
Encanto isn’t a bad movie. It’s pleasant, the characters are fun, the acting is passable, it looks… well it look like every 3D Disney movie: lots of money spent on making something extremely attractive but un-innovative. I’d argue that it’s Miranda’s worst score, that Beatriz isn’t a great singer, and that it’s a real issue that the exposition-heavy opening song that lays out the premise of the movie is so badly mixed that I had to go back and watch it with subtitles in order to grasp what people were saying (weirdly, this seem down to the in-film mix: the version on the soundtrack is very clear and the vocals come through with a clarity they do not in the film itself) – but its fine.
It’s all just… fine. It’s okay. It’s acceptable. I wasn’t bored watching it.
But it could be so much stronger than it is. The bones are good, the structure is good, Miribel’s is a compelling and likeable protagonist, Abuela is a great foil. For all I don’t think the animation makes a terrible innovative world, it makes an unquestionably pleasant one that would be wonderful to slip in to.
But like so many of today’s movies, the script is where it stumbles, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is where the least amount of care was spent on making sure it was as solid as it could have been.
(For the record, my issue with Coco is that the last ten minutes reduce me to weeping, but the rest of the film is a bog-standard ‘boy’s adventure’ with an evil villain surprise. What I like about Encanto, what I was really pleased to see, is that it did what Coco should have, which is to understand that a villain is completely unnecessary to the story that is being told. Coco ought to be a story about how family can let you down, can make mistakes, but that love is a complicated thing. Coco’s grandfather fucked-up: he abandoned his family and never came home, and is full of regret, and Coco finding is within o forgive the man and love him for all his failings is a an incredible and moving act of empathy. But no it turns out that Grandfather was coming home but was murdered by Evil Bad Man who stole his cool song and so culpability is entirely with the bad guy and while grandpa skeleton probably shouldn’t have left his family to go make money as a travelling singer, I guess, the family’ generational bitterness towards him was all based on lies and he’s a pretty-stand-up guy,a ctually!
And that story… sucks. A lot. Encanto to its really great credit, lets Abuela be in the wrong… because she was wrong. There’s no evil neighbour’s house that lied to her about why she had to pressure her family: Abuela’s failures are Abuela’s failures, and the movie doesn’t pull a villain out of its ass to remit her sins and make everything better.
So much like Encanto I find Coco’s script undermine’s the story it nominally sets out to tell. And yeah, when Coco gets back to the land of the living and sings his sad song to his grandmother, I cry like a baby – but I do so because it’s a well-written scene, the song is very moving, and the outside understand of how aging robs you of loved ones is very influence. I don’t cry because I find it a very satisfying conclusion to the previous ninety of minutes of faffing about. (With a shout-out to that one great scene with the old skeleton singer fading away because he is no longer remembered))
And if you’ll forgive the wait, I agree – I didn’t love Onward, but I admired its… solidity, for lack of a better word. It is consistent from its first moment to its last, and the script is really good at reinforcing its own themes throughout the story, so that when you get to that really touching final moment where our hero chooses to sacrifice his own happiness for the sake of his brother (giving-up meeting his father), it is really earned, because his brother has done so much for him throughout the course of the film (at the very least, his heart was always in the right place, even when his execution was flawed).
I didn’t see Frozen until years after it had come out. I do this sometimes – for example, when I watched Encanto a month ago, I did so in a block where I watched all the animated movies I had never got around to seeing, and in the space of a week I watched Encanto, The Lego Movie 2, Soul, Onward, Brave, The Good Dinosaur, Cars 3, Luca. Finding Dory, Turning Red, and the last two Evangelion movies, which was… a lot. (The Eva films were horrible, and just kinda shitty, respectively, but the real stinker proved to my shock to be The Good Dinosaur – a mean, dull, unpleasant, ugly, deeply hateful movie, god is it bad, and far worse than Cars 2, which is terrible but at least is never boring).
Where was I?
Oh, right Frozen – I watched that years after it had released, so I came to it knowing nothing about it except it had a song that was very popular that I had magically somehow never once managed to hear. (A song that proved to have bad orchestration and be really poorly sung by a singer who cannot hit its high notes, Idina Menzel is a lousy singer – she was bad in Wicked, she’s bad here, and I will fight people on this), but the movie itself was really lovely. Its twist that the Handsome Prince is a shithead hits hard and hits well. The relation between the two sisters feels real and painful — in the context of the movie ‘Do You Want To Build A Snowman’ is a crushing song about how awful it is when siblings grow apart and can’t figure out ways to come back o one-another when confronted with the difficulties of adulthood. The sequel… I bailed on in the first twenty minutes and haven’t yet gone back. Didn’t seem great. But Frozen 1 was an absolute delight, and I understood why it had exploded as largely as it had. Controversial opinion: the sisters are great!
Turning Red is so much better. Encanto is lucky it didn’t have to go up against it this year.
I was frustrated that I didn’t love Turning Red when I really wanted to, but it is unquestionably a better film on just about every level, especially animation.
Why wait when they could just give Turning Red next years Best Animated Feature now? Nothing’s going to beat it.
I do think that Smith’s hand made contact with Rock’s body. This kind of toxic male behavior is the absolute last thing we need right now and yet I’d bet a lot of people are so pent-up from the pandemic that they’ll unabashedly love it. Anger is a secondary emotion. We need to deal with the feelings that lead to anger before it reaches this point.
You think the pandemic would be the reason people chuckled at that?LOL. Hell no. People would react the same way if it happened ten years ago or ten years in the future.
That’s why Vince McMahon is about to get a lifetime appointment as the producer of the Oscars.
“Sounds like someone’s going to take it to the Red Table.”
Jazz hands were held high tonightNot cool. I mean, I get the glib pop culture reference, but this is a long standing ASL tradition and I was seriously impressed that so many people used it. (I assume they were coached.)Just because something means one thing in mainstream culture doesn’t mean it means the same thing in other cultures. The Academy still has a long way to go, but good on them for recognizing other people’s contexts. Hopefully we’ll get to a point where people don’t have to win for that context to be recognized.
Funny, “Not cool” is exactly what Jeb Bush tweeted when he heard Oxford had banned clapping in favor of BSL applause — which the BSL also calls “silent jazz hands”.
Thank you! I was just going to say that this was applause and not jazz hands.
I assumed that Matt was aware of that and I believe I have seen it before. I thought it was just a joke about the fact that it does look like jazz hands out of context. Either way it was harmless.
I’m not assuming ill will. That doesn’t mean that referring to a well known and common pop culture punchline in the context of ASL isn’t icky, especially since the Academy’s choices around including interpretation were a little weird. (Although still a notable improvement on years past!)Also, given that at least some sources connect the origin of “jazz hands” to 1927’s The Jazz Singer (a seminal movie that heavily featured black face), it’s just an icky vibe all round.
Hans Zimmer picked up his second Oscar for his electronic BRHAAAAAAMS
“BRHAAAAAAMS” are so eight years ago.
Now it’s all about the BAAAAAACHS.
I got sleepy after watching the first half of Dune, and never finished watching it. Maybe the second half is better?
The second half is actually a film that isn’t finished yet called Dune: Part Two
The entirety of Dune is “the first half of Dune”.