So here we are again for
another year of live Oscars coverage—a little later than usual (it was February
of 2020 when we last did this thing), and proof that not even the CDC’s
warnings about large gatherings and how we probably shouldn’t be doing them again just yet can stop Hollywood’s biggest night. (Props, nonetheless, to the
“scientists, doctors, union workers, and more” trying to make this debatably wise
idea as safe as possible.) Normally, we’d be hunched over our respective
laptops in The Onion Inc. kitchen, scarfing pizza together while responding to
all the unjust wins (and occasional welcome surprises). But even if the world’s
most beautiful people are ready to meet in one place (or, actually, three,
technically), The A.V. Club isn’t. So
rest assured that if there’s any pithy banter between Katie and myself tonight,
we’ll probably be sharing it in this format—you won’t miss a single bad joke! Katie, what are you most excited about tonight?
I would have said seeing a live performance of my favorite Best Original Song
nominee, “Húsavík,” but sadly turned on my TV just in time to catch only the
last few notes of the Eurovision
selection—they performed all those before the ceremony this year, presumably
for logistical and safety reasons.
I admit I am curious to see how the Oscars will make this hybrid live/virtual format work. Attendees were encouraged to show up in person, and E! ran a red carpet show whose commercials kept emphasizing that everyone would be there LIVE and IN PERSON. But I can’t help but assume that the oddness that permeates everything in the COVID era will seep into the Oscars as well—whether the Academy likes it or not. As far as the awards go, we’ve talked through most of the major categories on Film Club, so I’m also looking forward to see how our predictions shake out.
Speaking of predictions, I took my shot at guessing most of the winners earlier this week. If anyone would like to chuckle at how wrong I will inevitably be, they’re all here. Let’s see how quickly I lose the proverbial office Oscars pool.
Okay, they built risers. That makes sense. (If you’ve ever been to Union Station in LA, the room they’re in is usually full of benches, which are usually full of people.)
If Promising Young Woman wins anything tonight, Original Screenplay is the one to win. Much of what I admire about this film—and much of what makes it controversial—comes from what Emerald Fennell put onto the page. And she seems to have the same kind of wit in person as well! Is this the first time someone ever ended an Oscars acceptance speech with a joke about “crossing [their] legs” to keep a baby inside? Given the Academy’s track record on gender parity, I’m going to bet yes.
On the other hand, I don’t
think it hurts Nomadland’s Best Picture chances that Chloé Zhao just lost Best Adapted Screenplay
to Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller, whose adaptation of the latter’s
stage play took home the second writing prize. Nomadland is great, but I don’t
think its screenplay is the most important component of the film. And The
Father is a much more complex (and showy) structural achievement. Sensible
choice, Academy!
As widely expected, Another
Round wins Best International Feature, formerly known as Best Foreign Language
Film; writing was on the wall when Thomas Vinterberg scored a surprise Best Director
nomination. Hard to begrudge the Dogme 95 veteran his victory—it’s a lively,
moving film, even if I think Collective maybe deserved it a hair more.
Vinterberg, who I talked to a few weeks ago, is a thoughtful man and a charmer,
and given the awful tragedy his family went through prior to production on
Another Round (which Vinterberg brings up in his moving acceptance speech), this is a bittersweet moment. I’m happy for him tonight.
I could be snarky and say “Vinterberg just dogme 95’d acceptance speeches”, but that was one of the lovelier and most-deserved run-on speeches in quite a while. Bravo.
They really should have made Laura Dern head of the Academy. I interviewed her a few years back, and she’s a very convincing pitch person for the museum as well.
In
the first acting win of the night, Daniel Kaluuya picks up Best Supporting
Actor for his performance as slain Black Panthers chairman Fred Hampton in Judas And The Black Messiah. Though
Kaluuya was heavily considered to be the frontrunner, I thought it was possible
he might split some votes with his
costar, LaKeith Stanfield (who’s even better in the movie in my opinion) and lose to maybe
Sacha Baron Cohen. Didn’t happen! Kaluuuya’s a little old to play the
21-year-old Hampton (he doesn’t much sound like him either), but he brought a
suitably commanding oratorical fervor to the role. Anyway, he should have won
Best Actor for his incredible, reactive turn in Get Out a few years ago, so as usual, the Academy is playing catch
up.
Apparently reading the room for once, the Academy hasn’t yet deployed play-off music. I know there are a lot of jokes about the Oscars being too long, but I would watch well past midnight if it meant everyone collecting awards, like Kaluuya and Vinterberg and Fennell, could say everything they want to say at one of the biggest moments of their life without worrying about the ol’ sonic cane yanking them off stage.
I agree. I’d rather hear winners speak from their hearts—something that’s a lot easier to do when you have some room to breather and aren’t just rushing to read a list of names—than watch a bunch of “edgy” monologuing.
It’s undeniable that the makeup and hairstyling on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom played a huge role in transforming Viola Davis into the swaggering title role. Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson are also the first Black women to win in this category, another sign of how much catchup the Academy still has to do.
Costume design is a category where the elaborate and eye-catching often prevails, and every single one of this year’s nominees is a period or fantasy piece, as usual. Ann Roth, who just won for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, is 89, which may explain why she wasn’t able (or willing) to appear in person for this year’s event. She’s got more than 100 credits going back to 1964, and is the oldest woman to ever win an Oscar—her second, after winning for The English Patient in 1997. (The late, great Agnès Varda was also 89 when she became the oldest-ever nominee in 2018—the same year James Ivory, also in the 89 club, became the oldest winner for Call Me By Your Name.)
Gotta say, I definitely miss performance clips. It’s always fun to see how the Academy chooses to illustrate supposedly great acting. And while the more informal vibe of this ceremony is, on the whole, not unwelcome, I’ll take a little actual movie footage over glowing, fawning remarks about the nominees. (Brings back traumatic memories of that tribunal thing they did maybe a decade ago, with someone on stage just complimenting the contenders.)
Last year’s winner, Bong
Joon Ho, remotely introduces Best Director, which almost never gets announced
this early in the night, with help from his trusty translator. He reads aloud
remarks from each of the nominees, who sent him their thoughts on directing.
(How do I get on that email chain?) And… Chloé Zhao wins! An expected but definitely
welcome outcome! Zhao is only the second woman to win this award (after Kathyrn
Bigelow, for The Hurt Locker), and the first woman of color to ever win. It’s
been a huge year for her, and I reiterate my interest in seeing if she can
assert her strong authorial personality behind the camera of a highly mediated
Marvel blockbuster. Is Nomadland a done deal for Best Picture?
Perhaps acknowledging that
its members had no earthly idea what the difference between Sound Mixing and
Sound Editing was, the Academy this year finally just combined the two
categories into one all-purpose Best Sound award. That Riz Ahmed is introducing
heavily tips the winner: Sound Of Metal,
whose immersive attempt to capture life through the ears of someone with 80%
hearing loss was a no-brainer for this Oscar. For those who want to read more
about how the winning team constructed the audio component of the film, Katie
conducted a wonderful interview with them a few weeks ago.
The awkward chuckling when Riz Ahmed asked who in the crowd started out on short films is the same awkward chuckle that Dowd and I would have just exchanged, were we in the same room. All of which is to say, I have not seen all the nominated live-action shorts, but congratulations to Two Distant Strangers, whose co-director Travon Free—a writer for Full Frontal With Samantha Bee and The Daily Show—made a heartfelt statement on police violence against the Black community not only in his film, but also in his acceptance speech. Free’s suit was also lined with the names of people killed by police in the United States; you can see a picture of it here.
On to Animated Short. These are often the best of the short nominees, in my opinion—but I
can’t say this year, as I didn’t catch the 2020 crop. The Oscar goes to the
very somber-sounding “If Anything Happens I Love You,” about two parents mourning
a child lost in a school shooting. “Thank you for believing that all stories
can be told with animation,” says one of the winners, before calling for change
in a country caught in an epidemic of gun violence.
Lovely castle in the background for the Wolfwalkers team, which will have to do as the Oscar goes once again to Pixar (and to Pete Docter, the company’s CCO, who picks up his third Oscar tonight). Soul also won this year’s Golden Globe for Best Animated Film, and of the two Pixar films nominated this year it’d be my pick—although I still don’t know how I feel about Pixar’s first Black lead being voiced by Tina Fey for a good bit of the movie.
Oscar
winner Marlee Matlin signs the nominees and the winner of Best Documentary
Short, the last of the night’s shorts awards. The Oscar goes to “Colette,”
about a French Resistance fighter who returns to Germany for the first time
since the war to visit the concentration camp where her brother died. When it
comes to predicting the Oscars, it’s never a bad idea to bet on the film that concerns the
Holocaust. I won’t weigh in here, as a close friend worked on one of the other
nominees, “A Concerto Is A Conversation.” Sorry, Josh! You’ll get ‘em next
time!
Compared to the unflinching Collective and poetic Time, My Octopus Teacher is a conventional choice, a feel-good movie about interspecies friendship that—at least if smartasses on Twitter are to be believed—was quite popular among older Academy voters. It was also one of two Netflix documentaries to be nominated this year, alongside the also uplifting Crip Camp.
Best Actor nominee Steven Yeun introduces and announces Best Visual Effects, a.k.a. 9-year-old Dowd’s favorite category. I’m on record thinking that the winner, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, is a confusing mess, but it’s leaps and bounds more impressive than the other nominees in the effects department. Pretty nifty, too, that some of them were essentially accomplished practically and even in-camera!
Brad Pitt is a noted fan of the 1968 kaiju punch-out Destroy All Monsters, for the record. He says it’s the movie that made him want to become an actor.
I’d call this an upset, but Youn Yuh-jung also won the BAFTA and SAG awards for her performance in Minari, so she’s been gaining momentum leading up to tonight. Her acceptance speech is a delight, however—if you’re standing 15 feet from Brad Pitt, you have to shoot your shot, even if you’re 73—and of the two veteran actresses playing eccentric grandmothers nominated this year, she’s the clear winner. Youn’s been a working actress since the early ‘70s—she won her first big award in South Korea for 1971’s Woman Of Fire, which she made with the director she shouted out in her acceptance speech, Kim Ki-young—but this was her English-language breakout role.
Wonderful acceptance speech (letting the winners just talk and talk tonight really paid off this time), and nice to see the Academy award a performance in a language mostly not in English—still a rare move on their part!
Mank
rather predictably wins Best Production Design, allowing the Academy to finally
hand an Oscar to this year’s most Hollywood-centric movie. I have a feeling Mank isn’t winning much else, but this
one makes some sense—there sure is a lot of elegantly dressed Hollywood real
estate in this movie!
The prospect of a Nomadland Best Picture win recedes in my mind for each of these crafts awards it doesn’t win. Considering the movie was made in the back of a van, the quality of the images in that film was astounding and I would have liked to see it win Best Cinematography.
And Mank takes Best Cinematography, too. I often quip there’s no such
thing as a bad-looking black-and-white movie, and this is no exception, though
I don’t think Erik Messerschmidt’s work here is quite as convincing a Golden
Age facsimile as it thinks it is. (Digital will never get the look of celluloid
exactly right. Never!) Anyway, I was for Nomadland
in this category (as I imagine you were, too, Katie), but it’s not like Zhao’s
film is doing badly tonight.
So, in your predictions piece, you had the acting awards at this year’s Oscars following the SAGs, Dowd. You’re two for two. Do you think Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman are a lock, then? I’d bet Boseman, at least, will win.
Davis is far from a lock—that is the tightest major race of the night, I think! So I’m watching on pins and needles. Boseman feels much more locked in; if he loses, it will be a huge upset.
Sound Of Metal wins Best Editing. Which doesn’t surprise me, as it’s the nominee here whose craft is maybe the most noticeable. (It’s been said that great editing is often
invisible, but nobody told the Academy that.) Nomadland was my pick, for both
its seductive flow and the philosophy behind it—the way the film seems to use
its editing to reflect the transient lifestyle itself.
Do they normally give the Humanitarian Award during the ceremony? Maybe it’s usually not a star as big as Tyler Perry receiving it. Side note: Whatever you think of the movies he’s written and directed (or the child-rearing tactics of Madea), the guy really should have been nominated for his delicious supporting turn in Gone Girl.
Taking
home the award for Best Original Score, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross defeat
themselves for a second Oscar, their soothing Soul score (composed alongside the jazz contributions of fellow
winner Jon Batiste) defeating their throwback Mank themes. It’s Batiste who does the talking on stage, which
seems fair—against all odds, the guy who once wrote “I want to fuck you like an
animal” has been up there before.
This is a good category to include clips—it really does help to have a multimedia element for a music category, and plenty of viewers (like me and Dowd) will tune in to the main broadcast but not the pre-show, to which the performances of this year’s Best Original Song nominees were relegated this year. (I assume that had something to do with COVID protocols, although Soderbergh might have nixed them in order to make time for these longer acceptance speeches.) H.E.R.’s song “Fight For You,” from Judas And The Black Messiah, is the kind of soaring, stirring pop-R&B anthem that you often see nominated in this category, combining an artist heavily influenced by the ‘60s and ‘70s and a film set in that era.
Katie,
I don’t want to make this all about me, but this is the first award I’ve missed
tonight (unless you count the shorts, which I cowardly punted on). I thought it would go to “Speak Now,” performed by Supporting Actor
nominee Leslie Odom Jr. My heart was with “Húsavík,” the best Disney yearning
anthem not made for a Disney movie over the past two decades.
Dumb question, but was Glenn Close prepped for that trivia question? Because go-go music is something most people don’t know about if you’re not from the DMV or have lived in the area for a bit of time…she referenced The Backyard Band…
I have to believe she was prepped. And that they got her permission for the bit, especially as they knew it would likely come after she lost for the eighth time. I’m glad she was game, but weird to slow down the whole show with that trivia segment so very late in the night (and especially right before the In Memoriam segment, too.)
Another interesting format change is that normally, the Best Picture clips would be spread out throughout the evening, Here, we’re getting them all at once.
I’ve gone on the record many times naming Nomadland as my No. 1 film of 2020, so to see it win Best Picture feels—to make it about me—like a validation. I also expected it, frankly; this film has been unstoppable ever since it premiered at Venice last September.
I’m happy to see it win, too. Definitely my favorite of the nominated films. Obviously not as shocking as Parasite’s victory—this whole awards ceremony has been building to Nomadland’s victory. As in most years, I’d love to see the points breakdown. What almost won? How many ballots did it go? We’ll never know!
Frances McDormand isn’t wrong about the karaoke bar. This is her third Oscar win, and she doesn’t seem to put that much importance on any of them, so appropriate that she kept it short and jokey. She already howled, what else is there to add?
Announcing Best Picture before the acting awards really took the air out of the ceremony, and ending this year on an “and the Academy accepts the award on his behalf” made it even more anticlimactic.
It’s interesting that this year’s Oscars skipped the clips for the acting categories in particular. You can sometimes spot which scene in an especially awards-thirsty movie is the “Oscars clip,” which makes me wonder if that particular balloon was being popped intentionally.
Yeah, very strange end to the ceremony. Guess I was wrong: The Academy did not save Best Actor for last in order to give the late Chadwick Boseman the Oscar. In an enormous upset, Anthony Hopkins wins for his performance in The Father—my favorite of the nominated turns, incidentally, but I can’t help but still feel like a missed opportunity on the Academy’s part. And you’re right: that Hopkins wasn’t there to collect makes it the most muted final minute, like, ever for this awards ceremony? The polar opposite of Parasite’s win? Did the Academy not know what won either, banked on Boseman, and then watched as their whole (fairly successful) COVID-era ceremony ended with a gigantic whimper? I’m truly baffled.
Supposedly no one knows who wins, outside of the people who counted the votes. My guess is they expected Boseman to win but Boseman wound up splitting the vote with another actor (possibly Steven Yeun or Riz Ahmed) and it created a Marissa Tomei situation where Hopkins was able to garner just enough votes to pull off a win.
I have to think that’s what happened. The Academy banked on Boseman, Anthony Hopkins didn’t expect to win so he just sent a headshot, and everyone gets to share that numb, flat “huh” feeling together. If nothing else, it does seem to indicate that the results really are secret right up until that envelope is opened on stage. We knew this year’s Oscars would be different because of the pandemic, but this particular swerve was not one I could have predicted. I’m ending the evening feeling deflated and confused—how 2020!
Wow, that mystery voter who reveals his/her picks every year was on the nose about Hopkins pulling a surprise win. They said everyone they’d talked to had picked Hopkins, and they felt that Riz Ahmed was syphoning votes from Boseman, which gets into a whole ‘nother discussion. Whiffed a chance to honor a real mensch, and gave it to the old white guy instead. Two steps forward, one and a half back.In short, the AMPAS is a society of contrasts.
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So here we are again for
another year of live Oscars coverage—a little later than usual (it was February
of 2020 when we last did this thing), and proof that not even the CDC’s
warnings about large gatherings and how we probably shouldn’t be doing them again just yet can stop Hollywood’s biggest night. (Props, nonetheless, to the
“scientists, doctors, union workers, and more” trying to make this debatably wise
idea as safe as possible.) Normally, we’d be hunched over our respective
laptops in The Onion Inc. kitchen, scarfing pizza together while responding to
all the unjust wins (and occasional welcome surprises). But even if the world’s
most beautiful people are ready to meet in one place (or, actually, three,
technically), The A.V. Club isn’t. So
rest assured that if there’s any pithy banter between Katie and myself tonight,
we’ll probably be sharing it in this format—you won’t miss a single bad joke! Katie, what are you most excited about tonight?
I would have said seeing a live performance of my favorite Best Original Song
nominee, “Húsavík,” but sadly turned on my TV just in time to catch only the
last few notes of the Eurovision
selection—they performed all those before the ceremony this year, presumably
for logistical and safety reasons.
I admit I am curious to see how the Oscars will make this hybrid live/virtual format work. Attendees were encouraged to show up in person, and E! ran a red carpet show whose commercials kept emphasizing that everyone would be there LIVE and IN PERSON. But I can’t help but assume that the oddness that permeates everything in the COVID era will seep into the Oscars as well—whether the Academy likes it or not. As far as the awards go, we’ve talked through most of the major categories on Film Club, so I’m also looking forward to see how our predictions shake out.
Speaking of predictions, I took my shot at guessing most of the winners earlier this week. If anyone would like to chuckle at how wrong I will inevitably be, they’re all here. Let’s see how quickly I lose the proverbial office Oscars pool.
Okay, you can already tell Soderbergh directed this.
Okay, they built risers. That makes sense. (If you’ve ever been to Union Station in LA, the room they’re in is usually full of benches, which are usually full of people.)
Wow, this is a tiny venue. What are there, a couple hundred people in that room?
Still not sure it was a great idea to do a live Oscars ceremony this year, but I like that they’re making safety precautions a topic of conversation.
They’re really getting to it—so much so, neither of us realized that was a category that just got announced.
If Promising Young Woman wins anything tonight, Original Screenplay is the one to win. Much of what I admire about this film—and much of what makes it controversial—comes from what Emerald Fennell put onto the page. And she seems to have the same kind of wit in person as well! Is this the first time someone ever ended an Oscars acceptance speech with a joke about “crossing [their] legs” to keep a baby inside? Given the Academy’s track record on gender parity, I’m going to bet yes.
If you’re drinking along tonight, take a shot everyone someone mentions Steven Soderbergh.
Katie,
we called this one! Not a good sign for Trial Of The Chicago 7 pulling off the Best
Picture upset.
Some real awkward camera angles when in-person and virtual nominees appear in the same frame.
On the other hand, I don’t
think it hurts Nomadland’s Best Picture chances that Chloé Zhao just lost Best Adapted Screenplay
to Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller, whose adaptation of the latter’s
stage play took home the second writing prize. Nomadland is great, but I don’t
think its screenplay is the most important component of the film. And The
Father is a much more complex (and showy) structural achievement. Sensible
choice, Academy!
I kind of like the more casual, conversational vibe of this ceremony. And I don’t miss the official host any more than I did the last couple years.
Another Round’s Oscars clip is the obvious choice for that film, but it also gives you the impression that it’s a totally different film.
It was a little shocking how quickly they got to it. But I like that.
Clearly, they’re letting attendees talk longer than usual, but if it gets us more speeches like Thomas Vinterberg’s, I’m okay with that.
As widely expected, Another
Round wins Best International Feature, formerly known as Best Foreign Language
Film; writing was on the wall when Thomas Vinterberg scored a surprise Best Director
nomination. Hard to begrudge the Dogme 95 veteran his victory—it’s a lively,
moving film, even if I think Collective maybe deserved it a hair more.
Vinterberg, who I talked to a few weeks ago, is a thoughtful man and a charmer,
and given the awful tragedy his family went through prior to production on
Another Round (which Vinterberg brings up in his moving acceptance speech), this is a bittersweet moment. I’m happy for him tonight.
I could be snarky and say “Vinterberg just dogme 95’d acceptance speeches”, but that was one of the lovelier and most-deserved run-on speeches in quite a while. Bravo.
They really should have made Laura Dern head of the Academy. I interviewed her a few years back, and she’s a very convincing pitch person for the museum as well.
In
the first acting win of the night, Daniel Kaluuya picks up Best Supporting
Actor for his performance as slain Black Panthers chairman Fred Hampton in Judas And The Black Messiah. Though
Kaluuya was heavily considered to be the frontrunner, I thought it was possible
he might split some votes with his
costar, LaKeith Stanfield (who’s even better in the movie in my opinion) and lose to maybe
Sacha Baron Cohen. Didn’t happen! Kaluuuya’s a little old to play the
21-year-old Hampton (he doesn’t much sound like him either), but he brought a
suitably commanding oratorical fervor to the role. Anyway, he should have won
Best Actor for his incredible, reactive turn in Get Out a few years ago, so as usual, the Academy is playing catch
up.
Apparently reading the room for once, the Academy hasn’t yet deployed play-off music. I know there are a lot of jokes about the Oscars being too long, but I would watch well past midnight if it meant everyone collecting awards, like Kaluuya and Vinterberg and Fennell, could say everything they want to say at one of the biggest moments of their life without worrying about the ol’ sonic cane yanking them off stage.
I agree. I’d rather hear winners speak from their hearts—something that’s a lot easier to do when you have some room to breather and aren’t just rushing to read a list of names—than watch a bunch of “edgy” monologuing.
Okay, I want to see Spielberg’s West Side Story yesterday.
It’s undeniable that the makeup and hairstyling on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom played a huge role in transforming Viola Davis into the swaggering title role. Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson are also the first Black women to win in this category, another sign of how much catchup the Academy still has to do.
It would be nice if we could actually see the fucking costumes huh
Costume design is a category where the elaborate and eye-catching often prevails, and every single one of this year’s nominees is a period or fantasy piece, as usual. Ann Roth, who just won for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, is 89, which may explain why she wasn’t able (or willing) to appear in person for this year’s event. She’s got more than 100 credits going back to 1964, and is the oldest woman to ever win an Oscar—her second, after winning for The English Patient in 1997. (The late, great Agnès Varda was also 89 when she became the oldest-ever nominee in 2018—the same year James Ivory, also in the 89 club, became the oldest winner for Call Me By Your Name.)
Gotta say, I definitely miss performance clips. It’s always fun to see how the Academy chooses to illustrate supposedly great acting. And while the more informal vibe of this ceremony is, on the whole, not unwelcome, I’ll take a little actual movie footage over glowing, fawning remarks about the nominees. (Brings back traumatic memories of that tribunal thing they did maybe a decade ago, with someone on stage just complimenting the contenders.)
Bong Joon ho’s awards-season translator is back! I missed her!
We called this one too, Dowd, but you didn’t have to be a psychic to predict this award.
Good old Frances McDormand, sitting in the back with a plain black face mask on. She and Chloe Zhao are meant for each other.
Last year’s winner, Bong
Joon Ho, remotely introduces Best Director, which almost never gets announced
this early in the night, with help from his trusty translator. He reads aloud
remarks from each of the nominees, who sent him their thoughts on directing.
(How do I get on that email chain?) And… Chloé Zhao wins! An expected but definitely
welcome outcome! Zhao is only the second woman to win this award (after Kathyrn
Bigelow, for The Hurt Locker), and the first woman of color to ever win. It’s
been a huge year for her, and I reiterate my interest in seeing if she can
assert her strong authorial personality behind the camera of a highly mediated
Marvel blockbuster. Is Nomadland a done deal for Best Picture?
Perhaps acknowledging that
its members had no earthly idea what the difference between Sound Mixing and
Sound Editing was, the Academy this year finally just combined the two
categories into one all-purpose Best Sound award. That Riz Ahmed is introducing
heavily tips the winner: Sound Of Metal,
whose immersive attempt to capture life through the ears of someone with 80%
hearing loss was a no-brainer for this Oscar. For those who want to read more
about how the winning team constructed the audio component of the film, Katie
conducted a wonderful interview with them a few weeks ago.
The awkward chuckling when Riz Ahmed asked who in the crowd started out on short films is the same awkward chuckle that Dowd and I would have just exchanged, were we in the same room. All of which is to say, I have not seen all the nominated live-action shorts, but congratulations to Two Distant Strangers, whose co-director Travon Free—a writer for Full Frontal With Samantha Bee and The Daily Show—made a heartfelt statement on police violence against the Black community not only in his film, but also in his acceptance speech. Free’s suit was also lined with the names of people killed by police in the United States; you can see a picture of it here.
Uhhhh….are we sure Quentin Tarantino isn’t serving as an uncredited co-director?
On to Animated Short. These are often the best of the short nominees, in my opinion—but I
can’t say this year, as I didn’t catch the 2020 crop. The Oscar goes to the
very somber-sounding “If Anything Happens I Love You,” about two parents mourning
a child lost in a school shooting. “Thank you for believing that all stories
can be told with animation,” says one of the winners, before calling for change
in a country caught in an epidemic of gun violence.
Lovely castle in the background for the Wolfwalkers team, which will have to do as the Oscar goes once again to Pixar (and to Pete Docter, the company’s CCO, who picks up his third Oscar tonight). Soul also won this year’s Golden Globe for Best Animated Film, and of the two Pixar films nominated this year it’d be my pick—although I still don’t know how I feel about Pixar’s first Black lead being voiced by Tina Fey for a good bit of the movie.
Yeah, it’s a weird narrative choice—and one of a few reasons I would have preferred to see this Oscar go to Wolfwalkers instead.
Collective’s Oscars clips aren’t doing it any favors, but it’s an absorbing film, I swear.
Oscar
winner Marlee Matlin signs the nominees and the winner of Best Documentary
Short, the last of the night’s shorts awards. The Oscar goes to “Colette,”
about a French Resistance fighter who returns to Germany for the first time
since the war to visit the concentration camp where her brother died. When it
comes to predicting the Oscars, it’s never a bad idea to bet on the film that concerns the
Holocaust. I won’t weigh in here, as a close friend worked on one of the other
nominees, “A Concerto Is A Conversation.” Sorry, Josh! You’ll get ‘em next
time!
Compared to the unflinching Collective and poetic Time, My Octopus Teacher is a conventional choice, a feel-good movie about interspecies friendship that—at least if smartasses on Twitter are to be believed—was quite popular among older Academy voters. It was also one of two Netflix documentaries to be nominated this year, alongside the also uplifting Crip Camp.
Time was robbed!
I would love to see pictures of a young Steven Yeun and his mom going to see Terminator 2.
Best Actor nominee Steven Yeun introduces and announces Best Visual Effects, a.k.a. 9-year-old Dowd’s favorite category. I’m on record thinking that the winner, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, is a confusing mess, but it’s leaps and bounds more impressive than the other nominees in the effects department. Pretty nifty, too, that some of them were essentially accomplished practically and even in-camera!
Brad Pitt with the Godzilla shout-out!
Brad Pitt is a noted fan of the 1968 kaiju punch-out Destroy All Monsters, for the record. He says it’s the movie that made him want to become an actor.
I’d call this an upset, but Youn Yuh-jung also won the BAFTA and SAG awards for her performance in Minari, so she’s been gaining momentum leading up to tonight. Her acceptance speech is a delight, however—if you’re standing 15 feet from Brad Pitt, you have to shoot your shot, even if you’re 73—and of the two veteran actresses playing eccentric grandmothers nominated this year, she’s the clear winner. Youn’s been a working actress since the early ‘70s—she won her first big award in South Korea for 1971’s Woman Of Fire, which she made with the director she shouted out in her acceptance speech, Kim Ki-young—but this was her English-language breakout role.
Wonderful acceptance speech (letting the winners just talk and talk tonight really paid off this time), and nice to see the Academy award a performance in a language mostly not in English—still a rare move on their part!
Mank
rather predictably wins Best Production Design, allowing the Academy to finally
hand an Oscar to this year’s most Hollywood-centric movie. I have a feeling Mank isn’t winning much else, but this
one makes some sense—there sure is a lot of elegantly dressed Hollywood real
estate in this movie!
The prospect of a Nomadland Best Picture win recedes in my mind for each of these crafts awards it doesn’t win. Considering the movie was made in the back of a van, the quality of the images in that film was astounding and I would have liked to see it win Best Cinematography.
And Mank takes Best Cinematography, too. I often quip there’s no such
thing as a bad-looking black-and-white movie, and this is no exception, though
I don’t think Erik Messerschmidt’s work here is quite as convincing a Golden
Age facsimile as it thinks it is. (Digital will never get the look of celluloid
exactly right. Never!) Anyway, I was for Nomadland
in this category (as I imagine you were, too, Katie), but it’s not like Zhao’s
film is doing badly tonight.
So, in your predictions piece, you had the acting awards at this year’s Oscars following the SAGs, Dowd. You’re two for two. Do you think Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman are a lock, then? I’d bet Boseman, at least, will win.
Davis is far from a lock—that is the tightest major race of the night, I think! So I’m watching on pins and needles. Boseman feels much more locked in; if he loses, it will be a huge upset.
Loving grumpy Harrison Ford reading disparaging studio Blade Runner notes in order to set up Best Editing.
He’s really trying his best to get everyone’s names right.
Sound Of Metal wins Best Editing. Which doesn’t surprise me, as it’s the nominee here whose craft is maybe the most noticeable. (It’s been said that great editing is often
invisible, but nobody told the Academy that.) Nomadland was my pick, for both
its seductive flow and the philosophy behind it—the way the film seems to use
its editing to reflect the transient lifestyle itself.
Do they normally give the Humanitarian Award during the ceremony? Maybe it’s usually not a star as big as Tyler Perry receiving it. Side note: Whatever you think of the movies he’s written and directed (or the child-rearing tactics of Madea), the guy really should have been nominated for his delicious supporting turn in Gone Girl.
Only five awards left! Leave it to Soderbergh (of the classic cinema recuts, among his more famous accomplishments) to keep this thing moving.
Taking
home the award for Best Original Score, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross defeat
themselves for a second Oscar, their soothing Soul score (composed alongside the jazz contributions of fellow
winner Jon Batiste) defeating their throwback Mank themes. It’s Batiste who does the talking on stage, which
seems fair—against all odds, the guy who once wrote “I want to fuck you like an
animal” has been up there before.
This is a good category to include clips—it really does help to have a multimedia element for a music category, and plenty of viewers (like me and Dowd) will tune in to the main broadcast but not the pre-show, to which the performances of this year’s Best Original Song nominees were relegated this year. (I assume that had something to do with COVID protocols, although Soderbergh might have nixed them in order to make time for these longer acceptance speeches.) H.E.R.’s song “Fight For You,” from Judas And The Black Messiah, is the kind of soaring, stirring pop-R&B anthem that you often see nominated in this category, combining an artist heavily influenced by the ‘60s and ‘70s and a film set in that era.
Katie,
I don’t want to make this all about me, but this is the first award I’ve missed
tonight (unless you count the shorts, which I cowardly punted on). I thought it would go to “Speak Now,” performed by Supporting Actor
nominee Leslie Odom Jr. My heart was with “Húsavík,” the best Disney yearning
anthem not made for a Disney movie over the past two decades.
Well, I’m going to make it even more about you, and say that I am looking forward to seeing Summer Of Soul after reading your Sundance coverage.
As time-killers go, this Questlove bit was pretty good. Love the Academy shade (and bleeped profanity!) at the Academy’s party.
Katie, Summer Of Soul is so good!
Dumb question, but was Glenn Close prepped for that trivia question? Because go-go music is something most people don’t know about if you’re not from the DMV or have lived in the area for a bit of time…she referenced The Backyard Band…
I have to believe she was prepped. And that they got her permission for the bit, especially as they knew it would likely come after she lost for the eighth time.
I’m glad she was game, but weird to slow down the whole show with that trivia segment so very late in the night (and especially right before the In Memoriam segment, too.)
As far as manufactured delight goes, I’ll take Glenn Close spouting facts about go-go music.
Even the In Memoriam is efficient this year.
My imagination, or is the In Memoriam montage moving faster than usual? Sad reality may be that there’s more names than usual to include.
Oh, that’s possible, Dowd. I hadn’t thought of that. I figured we were getting pretty close to the top of the hour, so they were moving things along.
Also possible. Often feels like that montage moves slower than some of the full lives it eulogizes. Not on Soderbergh’s unsentimental watch!
wait…what?????
Hold on, they’re doing Best Picture before the acting awards??
Jinx, Dowd! This might be the biggest shakeup of the entire evening!
My guess: They want to end with Boseman’s win.
Another interesting format change is that normally, the Best Picture clips would be spread out throughout the evening, Here, we’re getting them all at once.
I’ve been watching the Oscars for more than 25 years, and I’ve never seen them do Best Picture anytime but the very end.
Me neither!
I’ve gone on the record many times naming Nomadland as my No. 1 film of 2020, so to see it win Best Picture feels—to make it about me—like a validation. I also expected it, frankly; this film has been unstoppable ever since it premiered at Venice last September.
Soderbergh up his Limey and Out Of Sight chronology tricks with this Best Picture thing, huh?
I’m happy to see it win, too. Definitely my favorite of the nominated films. Obviously not as shocking as Parasite’s victory—this whole awards ceremony has been building to Nomadland’s victory. As in most years, I’d love to see the points breakdown. What almost won? How many ballots did it go? We’ll never know!
So Best Actress, and then a big standing ovation as Chadwick Boseman wins Best Actor?
Renee Zellweger sounded like a 5th grader reading a report in front of the class.
Hurray! Nomadland wins Best Picture. Tomorrow we discuss: Was Nomadland overrated?
Everyone’s a winner tonight… for making the right face, grateful and humble and touched, as a celebrity delivers prepared remarks about them.
Frances McDormand isn’t wrong about the karaoke bar. This is her third Oscar win, and she doesn’t seem to put that much importance on any of them, so appropriate that she kept it short and jokey. She already howled, what else is there to add?
I still don’t know what Gary Oldman really looks like.
Announcing Best Picture before the acting awards really took the air out of the ceremony, and ending this year on an “and the Academy accepts the award on his behalf” made it even more anticlimactic.
It’s interesting that this year’s Oscars skipped the clips for the acting categories in particular. You can sometimes spot which scene in an especially awards-thirsty movie is the “Oscars clip,” which makes me wonder if that particular balloon was being popped intentionally.
Hilarious how they set the stage for a posthumous Chadwick Boseman win, and yet…
Yeah, very strange end to the ceremony. Guess I was wrong: The Academy did not save Best Actor for last in order to give the late Chadwick Boseman the Oscar. In an enormous upset, Anthony Hopkins wins for his performance in The Father—my favorite of the nominated turns, incidentally, but I can’t help but still feel like a missed opportunity on the Academy’s part. And you’re right: that Hopkins wasn’t there to collect makes it the most muted final minute, like, ever for this awards ceremony? The polar opposite of Parasite’s win? Did the Academy not know what won either, banked on Boseman, and then watched as their whole (fairly successful) COVID-era ceremony ended with a gigantic whimper? I’m truly baffled.
Supposedly no one knows who wins, outside of the people who counted the votes. My guess is they expected Boseman to win but Boseman wound up splitting the vote with another actor (possibly Steven Yeun or Riz Ahmed) and it created a Marissa Tomei situation where Hopkins was able to garner just enough votes to pull off a win.
I have to think that’s what happened. The Academy banked on Boseman, Anthony Hopkins didn’t expect to win so he just sent a headshot, and everyone gets to share that numb, flat “huh” feeling together. If nothing else, it does seem to indicate that the results really are secret right up until that envelope is opened on stage. We knew this year’s Oscars would be different because of the pandemic, but this particular swerve was not one I could have predicted. I’m ending the evening feeling deflated and confused—how 2020!
Wow, that mystery voter who reveals his/her picks every year was on the nose about Hopkins pulling a surprise win. They said everyone they’d talked to had picked Hopkins, and they felt that Riz Ahmed was syphoning votes from Boseman, which gets into a whole ‘nother discussion. Whiffed a chance to honor a real mensch, and gave it to the old white guy instead. Two steps forward, one and a half back.In short, the AMPAS is a society of contrasts.