It’s Hollywood’s biggest night. The awards show to end all awards shows. The cinephile Super Bowl. The last one of these ceremonies we’ll be covering for a while. All reasons to celebrate as the 91st Annual Academy Awards kick off in Los Angeles—without a host, but with cinematographers’ and editors’ annual moment of TV glory restored.
As we have in the past, The A.V. Club will be liveblogging the Oscars, with film editor A.A. Dowd and news editor Katie Rife providing expert commentary on tonight’s categories and winners when the ceremony kicks off at 8 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CT. Until then, you can catch up with our predictions for this year’s Oscars, and maybe even cram in a nominated film or two if you’ve got the time.
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But, but, but, but…………..it’s the Season Finale of True Detective!
You’re in Oscarcosa now.With me.
The cinephile Super Bowl.That sounds about right to me. I really don’t watch much televised sports, so this is pretty much my version of event TV. Every year, I endure people bitching about how long it is and mutter under my breath about the schedule-wrecking juggernaut that is the Super Bowl (or, really, any major-rivalry game). Of course, the big difference is the ratings/ad pricing, so, like the 800-pound gorilla joke, I guess it can sit wherever the hell it wants.
Enjoy! I’ll be recording it and starting to watch around 9:30 so I can skip all the commercials. Hopefully I’ll catch up by the end. Have a great night!
I only watch it for clothes. To celebrate that:Goop: Horse hair or cadaver?Beyonce: Cadaver of course.Goop: Well it’s to die for, hahaha imagine being poor?
This is becoming a tradition for me. Not the live blog, the comment section. Good to see y’all tonight!
And we’re live! Given all the snarky jokes I’ve been making about Rob Lowe dueting with snow white 30 years ago, hiring Queen for an opener was a good idea—even if this whole medley is Vegas-level Boomer bait.
Went to the Oscars and a Queen concert broke out!
…aaand, commercial. Or is it a montage? Both, really.
Including obvious Oscars snubs like Eighth Grade and Won’t You Be My Neighbor? in that montage was a bit cold, but I must say “you like movies, right?” is one of my favorite montage themes.
Yes! Regina!
Regina King wins Best Supporting Actress for If Beale Street Could Talk! Well deserved, she was the emotional glue holding the movie together. And her mom almost crying in the audience? Forget it.
As we celebrate Jason Momoa and Helen Mirren standing next to each other on the Oscars stage, a reminder of this evergreen tweet:
OH MY GOD HELEN MIRREN IS ACTUALLY PRESENTING DOCUMENTARIES! Worlds collide
Regina King the rightful winner in a strong field I want Amy Adams to win but not for this movie
As I expected, Free Solo wins Best Documentary Feature. Can’t remember the last time they handed out this award this early in the evening. (But then, without an official host, this ceremony is already moving much faster than usual, isn’t it?) I was rooting hard for Minding The Gap—in fact, it was the win I wanted the most tonight. But never bet against a huge popular hit in this category—especially not one built around both an interesting personality like Alex Honnold and remarkable natural footage.
I gotta say, bringing out Tom Morello is a pretty good Bush-era flashback.
Tom Morello presenting at the Oscars? Did the organizers get a copy of my high-school dream journal?
Without disqus, commenting here is like the make up department thanking an award
We all complain about these things going on way too long, but I have to say that I hate and have always hated the play-off music. Let people have their damn moment! It’s tacky. And you can bring it in if it’s really going off the rails.
Another expected win for Vice in Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Although you could argue that Christian Bale did a lot of the work by eating all those pies, his transformation into Dick Cheney was pretty damn realistic.As for the others, Border was terribly underrated last year (it didn’t make the shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film, despite being Sweden’s official Oscars entry) and so didn’t really stand a chance. And while Mary Queen Of Scots had some especially memorable hairstyling, the makeup was pretty standard, giving this award straight to Vice.
I’m not watching it, but this show’s really clipping along, eh?
“This has been a long time coming”- Ruth Carter, first African-American winner of the Oscar for Best Costume Design.
Melissa McCarthy and hardest working man in showbiz Brian Tyree Henry, both ostentatiously decked out, present Best Costume Design to the truly extravagant and versatile wardrobes of Black Panther. This is, by the way, the first category I whiffed in my predictions (figured Sandy Powell would win for The Favourite, which more closely adheres to what the Academy usually celebrates), so sorry to anyone who listened to me on that! I’m sure it won’t be my last screwup. Also, this is the first Oscar ever for the MCU—and I suspect it won’t be the last, assuming Black Panther picks up at least one more tonight.
I’m glad to read your comments Katie and A.A., but it was much more fun in the past when we could read what the commenters say live.
I agree—hell, I remember them using that format for a book-club discussion—but I’m sure it was a pain to moderate. However clever and unique I think my comments are, I’m sure a bunch of other people had the same thought.
Is this the first time a winner has read their acceptance speech off a smartphone? I suspect it must have been done before, but I honestly cannot think of another time.
Tatiana Maslany did it at the Emmys, but that’s the only other instance I can think of where somebody read off their smartphone.
Another win for Black Panther in Best Production Design! This could be an even bigger night than expected for the superhero blockbuster, whose Afrofuturist aesthetics were stunning enough to keep the awards buzz going for an entire year, which is a feat in itself. (M’Baku’s mountaintop throne room? Come on!) And another historic first for Hannah Beachler, the first African-American ever nominated for a Production Design Oscar.
Ok, now we need RBG-dragon-riding memes
RATM isn’t really a Bush era flashback. They had broken up by the time he was sworn in I believe. Morello has nothing to do with movies and has no place being there.
Tyler
Perry hands Best Cinematography (during the show, not during a commercial
break, as Perry pointed out!) to Alfonso Cuarón for the spectacular long takes
and pristinely beautiful imagery of Roma.
Cuarón, who directed the film, was said to have wanted to work again with his
regular D.P., fellow Oscar-winner Emmanuel Lubezki, but the cinematographer was
otherwise occupied, so he handled the task himself. Nonetheless, Roma is very much shot in Lubezki’s
signature style, and Cuarón acknowledged as much in his acceptance speak. (“I asked myself, what
would Lubezki have done? This is for you Chivo!”) Feels like Roma is going to
have a very good night.
Katie, I really wanted Minding The Gap to win for Best Documentary. What are you pulling for tonight?
Hey, it’s another “Google ruins movies” commercial!
I’m pulling for everyone involved with Can You Ever Forgive Me?, whose praises I sing often to anyone who asks (and even some who don’t ask). But because he has the best chance to actually win—even if he’s not the favorite in the category, he’s picked up so many nominations and has so much goodwill, it could still happen—I’m pulling especially hard for Richard E. Grant for Best Supporting Actor.
Love Richard E. Grant!
Best Sound Editing, as a reminder, rewards the creation of individual sound effects—it’s where the Foley artists get their due. I’m not entirely convinced everyone voting for this award knows that, though, which might explain why Bohemian Rhapsody, which is no match for the invented noises of First Man and A Quiet Place, just won.
If there was one thing Bohemian Rhapsody definitely had, it was sound.
Ugh, and Bohemian Rhapsody wins Sound Mixing, too. This category is all about the overall mix—how all those sounds play off each other, how the levels are adjusted, etc. So it’s a less egregious winner here, for my money; the live performance scenes are well-mixed. But please don’t let this be a harbinger of more victory for this film, probably the most embarrassing Best Picture nominee since The Blind Side. Also, my beloved First Man has been robbed! (Still hoping/thinking it picks up Visual Effects.)
I realize taste is subjective and everything, but that sliced-up/fanned-out look for the statues on stage really freaks me for some reason.
Sooo, Roma’s going to win Best Foreign Language Film, right?
Can I just say again that I remain truly surprised by A Star Is Born’s awards-season fall for grace? It’s possible it picks up something tonight (in fact, it will almost certainly win Best Song), but it’s won almost nothing all season. Still wonder why exactly Hollywood didn’t go for it. At Toronto, I was very convinced I was seeing Best Picture.
Yup, Roma wins Best Foreign Language Film. I thought the Academy might go with Cold War instead, just to spread the wealth (and because Roma may very well win Best Picture), but that assumes that some 6,000-plus industry professionals would coordinate their vote. Which, nah. Anyway, it was a fairly strong lineup, what with both Cold War and Shoplifters in the running. (Our beloved Burning, the best movie of 2018 full stop, didn’t make the cut, sadly.) I enjoyed Cuarón talking about growing up on foreign-language movies…like Jaws and The Godfather. Maybe they should have asked him to host!
We were just talking about Keegan-Michael Key here at the office; do you think there’s any tension between him and Jordan Peele now that Peele’s one of the most celebrated auteurs in Hollywood? Anyway, we’re happy to see him presenting at the Oscars.
I know it won’t win best song, but damn if this one doesn’t get me emotional still
Yes, now all foreign language films can be nominated in other categories………as long as they are USA co-produced.
This thing is moving pretty quickly. Possibly because there’s no unrelated, broadly reaching montages about movie history.
Dowd just pointed out that no foreign-language film has ever won Best Picture, let alone Best Picture and Best Foreign Film. So Roma could be on its way to a historic win.
2/24/19 7:57pmBest Sound Editing, as a reminder, rewards the creation of individual sound effects—it’s where the Foley artists get their due. I’m not entirely convinced everyone voting for this award knows that, though, which might explain why Bohemian Rhapsody, which is no match for the invented noises of First Man and A Quiet Place, just won.
This is why i am in favour of having at least two categories have montages reflecting their history and what they are about each year.
Trevor Noah’s Mel Gibson joke didn’t seem to land with the Oscars audience as well as it did here…wonder why…
This is no slight to Roma, but does it seem stupid that it’s nominated in both the Foreign Language Category and Best Picture? I assumed the idea of a category like that was to shine a light on stuff that wouldn’t have a chance of getting in Best Picture. Couldn’t they have given that slot to another deserving film?
Best Editing is a weirdly lukewarm field this year. I was pushing for BlacKkKlansman, if for that crosscutting Birth Of A Nation scene alone. But no, Bohemian Rhapsody takes this one, too. Here’s a pretty good example why it definitely should not have.
I have gravely underestimated the popularity of Bohemian Rhapsody.
And…it appears that Bohemian Rhapsody has managed to shake the stain of Bryan Singer…
I seem to remember the comments on the AV Club for the Oscars moving along so quickly I couldn’t even type fast enough to make a comment. . .Where is everybody?
Right here.
oh, hey.
You’ll get ‘em next time, Richard E. Grant. Did I mention he’s in Star Wars: Episode IX?
Really happy that the Oscars are doing performance clips this year. It’s always fascinating to see how the organizers choose to briefly illustrate the work. And sometimes you can sort of tell who’s going to win by how prominent the clip is…which is sort of what just happened with Best Supporting Actor, as Mahershala Ali wins Best Supporting Actor for Green Book, after the longest and weightiest of the clips in the reel. Ali, who picked up this same prize two years ago for Moonlight, dedicates the award to his grandmother, and says he just wanted to capture the spirit of Don Shirley. Green Book is not a very good film, but it’s hard to begrudge Ali the plaudits—he brings what nuance he can to the script’s cartoon middlebrow buddy-dramedy. Sorry, Katie! Hopefully, Richard E. Grant will be back!
Nothing but respect for my Academy President, Laura Dern.
You’re goddamn right Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse wins Best Animated Feature.
Hey, guys doing the walk-on music, Laura Dern has been in other movies *besides* Jurrasic Park!
We, like everyone else, love Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse and are really happy to see it win Best Animated Feature. (In any other year, it would have been nice to see Isle Of Dogs take it home.)
Aww, was really hoping Tim Blake Nelson would be the one playing the tongue-in-cheek (but pretty lovely nonetheless) nominated song from Buster Scruggs. But this is a nice arrangement and performance.
You know, if they really wanted to keep the length down, they could have resisted the urge to tell us about the Academy museum. For that you were considering relegating Cinematography to the commercials?
meh nevermind
The Irishman!! Not much of a trailer, honestly, but nice to get confirmation it’s opening (and going to Netflix) in the fall.
COME OUT ON STAGE AS WAYNE AND GARTH YOU COWARDS.
You know what movie is way better than Bohemian Rhapsody, and also a better tribute to Queen? Wayne’s World.
Seriously though, if you were going to do the whole bit with the Wayne’s World clip, and have them say “we’re not worthy” and all that, why not just throw on the wigs? For old times’ sake?
King of the reaction shot, Spike Lee, at it again!
The Mel Gibson joke fell flat because his news-making tirade was decades ago and he’s barely made a movie since. There’s a lot worst stuff going on now.
He was literally nominated for an oscar 2 years ago
You know what’s a better buddy comedy than Green Book? This John Mulaney and Awkwafina bit.
It’s true, Alex—I would absolutely watch a movie with those two as substitute teachers taking an unruly class of fourth-graders on a field trip (just for one example).
Pixar’s “Bao,” which was paired with Incredibles 2 in theaters last summer, wins Best Animated Short. Four out of five of the nominees are sentimental parent-child stories. I preferred the slightly weirder and more inventively animated “Weekends,” though that might be my child-of-divorce talking.
King of the reaction shot, Spike Lee.
You may have noticed the shoutout to Netflix—Period. End Of Sentence is already streaming on the platform, if you’re interested. Also, on a personal note, I never thought I’d hear the words “menstrual equality” on live TV.
I figured “Period. End Of Sentence,” about a village in India where menstruation is a taboo topic, would win Best Documentary Short. It’s the most uplifting of the five nominees—and if you caught the whole program in theaters, its placement at the end really felt like a breath of mildly hopeful air after the other, grimmer nominees. The winning filmmakers, ahem, punctuate their acceptance speech by noting that “A period should end a sentence, not a girl’s education.”
Even the commercials are Queen-themed? Fuck, is Bohemian Rhapsody going to win Best Picture??
C’mon, First Man!
Yes! First Man wins Best Visual Effects. I think the lesson here is that the Academy usually votes for the most respectable, most “prestige” of the nominees—see also Hugo, Ex Machina, Interstellar, etc. But it shouldn’t be ignored that the effects in First Man are really spectacular, in a much less ostentatious way than the other nominees. Sadly, this is where the film’s Oscar night ends. (Also, will the MCU ever win this award?)
Naturally, no intro is needed for the opening notes of “Shallow,” a song I still wake up humming a couple of times a week.
Yeah, I don’t think you’re alone, Katie. “Shallow” winning has to the surest thing of the night, right?
As good as this performance is, it’s not even Lady Gaga’s best Oscars performance by far.
No surprise that Lady Gaga is killing it. But Cooper sounded very good, too. Folks, I like this song. Sue me.
It has to be! It won several awards at the Grammys a few weeks ago, and although the voting bodies of those two groups probably don’t overlap all that much, it’s a damn catchy song.
I’m not interest in the movie, and succesfully avoided listening to Shallow everytime. But damn if that wasn’t a perfect performance and Oscar history right there.
Feels churlish to be annoyed about any short film winning an Oscar (it’s not like they have a big studio infrastructure, generally), but ugh, “Skin” is not good. Honestly, the Live Action Short category is a real misery pile this year in general. Some skill in the filmmaking, but I felt bludgeoned by these movies, and often pointlessly. “Marguerite” was robbed.
you guys should check out #ColliderOscars so that the AV can watch Collider watching the Oscars. It would be a meta head explosion.
Nice live Captain Marvel trailer, ABC.
Can I just say, the exact scenario I just said I didn’t want to happen, happened? “As long as Paul Schrader doesn’t lose to Nick Vallelonga, I’m cool…” and BAM. I apologize for jinxing you, Paul.
Yeah, everyone, Katie let out an anguished “Noooo” when Green Book won Best Original Screenplay, and I’m inclined to agree. Even setting aside Vallelonga’s bullshit anti-Muslim conspiracy twittering, it’s not a good script. This category usually honors much better films.
Green Book is winning best picture
Was….was that an elaborate The Lobster joke in a Geico ad?
Did Spike Lee just give the weirdest speech in Oscar history?
Samuel L. Jackson is giddy announcing BlacKkKlansman’s win for Best Adapted Screenplay. Almost feels like an apology for the Green Book win in the other screenplay category. Spike Lee, reading prepared remarks during his first Academy Awards acceptance speech, encourages everyone to vote in 2020: “Do the right thing!” It’s great to see Spike finally win an Oscar, even if he should have won Picture, Director, and Screenplay back in 1989, when Do The Right Thing wasn’t even nominated for the big one. (The winner that year: The very Green Book-esque Driving Miss Daisy.)
Aren’t Tessa Thompson and Michael B. Jordan the prettiest couple?
Wow, Black Panther wins Best Original Score. It’s one of the more eclectic, propulsive MCU scores—but better than Nicholas Britell’s achingly beautiful Beale Street music? I’d say no.
Wait, Kendrick and SZA aren’t doing “All The Stars”?
Black Panther winning Best Score is insane. This year’s Oscars is the closest thing to the People’s Choice Awards that dumb people bitch they wish these dumb things were.
I’ve been listening to it since it won and . . . it’s not great.
Did they mean to give the award to the soundtrack, because that’s pretty good.
I rather enjoy Lady Gaga’s over-the-top joy at winning awards. Imagine if she wins Best Actress!
Happy for Spike.
Yeah, shouldn’t she be used to being up there by now? Anyway, “Shallow” wins Best Original Song. That’s probably a wrap for A Star Is Born, but who knows? It’s just the big four left—and A Star Is Born is up for three of them. (Sorry, Bradley Cooper.)
Congrats to Regina King for winning an Oscar and Emmy in the same year (2018). Amazing.
The “In Memoriam” should just be all the characters who died in Infinity War.
Glad the Academy didn’t exclude Shoah director Claude Lanzmann from the in-memoriam tribute—they have left off major directors from other countries before.
Re: That moment of silence at the beginning of Spike Lee’s speech:
Glad they included Stan Lee and the title comic book writer, a double tribute to him and the genre that basically is making billions for Hollywood at present.
Since he just died yesterday, I’m assuming Singin’ In The Rain director Stanley Donen will be honored in next year’s In Memoriam montage; the same thing happened with Alain Resnais, who died the day before the Oscars in 2014.
I love Spike Lee.
I cannot wait for the pictures of Spike from tonight’s afterparties.
Why couldn’t they have just kept the tradition of letting a previous year’s winner present the opposite category’s award? It’s weird that Allison Janney and Gary Oldman are up there together.
Did they just… use a clip of Rami Malek lip-syncing as evidence of his acting talent?
Bohemian Rhapsody takes home its fourth (and please final) Oscar of the night as Rami Malek wins for his fake-teeth-abetted impersonation of Freddie Mercury, becoming the first Arab American to win the Best Actor Academy Award. His performance is not the worst thing about the film, nor was this the strongest lineup in recent memory. But this win doesn’t dissuade me from believing that the Academy just can’t resist famous people playing other famous people.
Boom Baraka, Exactly!!
BlackKklansman is probably not quite Lee’s masterpiece, but it still eats Green Book’s lunch. Decades from his breakout with Do The Right Thing, he still knows how to force us to look at the ugliest side of racism. The middlebrow take on racism is always going to be “boy, it was really bad back then, huh? Glad we’re better now!”; his take is always going to be “it was bad then, but it’s still bad now! Wake up!”
The big snub from this year’s In Memoriam montage is Dick Miller, whose ubiquity as a character actor sadly didn’t translate into the Oscars. Sure, many of his roles were in B-movies, but he was in The Terminator! And Gremlins! And 179 other movies!
Verne Troyer! A bigger snub, with Mike Myers in the house.
FUCK YEAH OLIVIA COLMAN!
Glenn Close was like a-800 favorite. Real shocker. It did seem like no one gave a crap about that movie and just everyone expected her to win.
Olivia Colman won The Oscars
The night’s biggest upset, and a great surprise! Everyone assumed Glenn Close was going to win Best Actress for The Wife. “It’s genuinely quite stressful,” Colman says from the stage—she seems very surprised, too. Colman’s performance as an occasionally pathetic, almost childlike Queen Anne was, for my money, the best of the nominees—even if it was not really more of a lead performance than those of her nominated costars, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz. Anyway, also great to see a comedic performance take home Best Actress, which almost never happens.
Just looked back through a list of the winners for best actor and there’s a real trend for the last 15 years or so, going back to Jamie Foxx playing Ray Charles, of actors winning for playing famous people. Before that there are only a handful, Gandhi, Louis Pasteur, Patton, I guess you could count Salieri.
“His name I can pronounce,” Guillermo del Toro says, before announcing that Alfonso Cuarón has won his second Best Director Oscar (and his second Academy Award of the night) for Roma. This was not such a surprise—the film’s mix of expert craftsmanship, epic scope, and personal recollection made him the frontrunner from basically the moment Roma premiered at Venice back in the early fall. But will it take the big one?
At this moment, I’m honestly not sure who will win Best Picture. Some years, by this point in the ceremony the winner is obvious. But this year, Roma, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Black Panther have all won multiple awards, and any of them—most likely Roma or Bohemian Rhapsody—could win.
Congratulations to this year’s runaway favorite for Best Red Carpet Color, hot pink.
Oh. It’s Green Book.
To be a fly on the wall at the AV Club offices at this moment.
Offices?
Yay, Green Book!
Didn’t Cuaron win 3? Foreign Language, Cinematography and Directing?
what the fuck though
I know, how are the Coyotes up 3-1 on the Jets?!
Green Book wins Best Picture, which is…a real drag, honestly. In a year that saw some genuinely unusual and adventurous and unconventional Best Picture nominees (a superhero blockbuster! a black-and-white foreign-language Netflix drama! Yorgos Lanthimos and Spike Lee joints!), the Academy goes with the most regressive, middle-of-the-road option—a movie that could have won 30 years ago. There will be a lot of think pieces about this, but I have to say this was a depressing way for a pretty good Oscar night to end.
Well… Green Book huh? Split vote!? Is this a larger prediction of things to come…. Please no.
At least it wasn’t Bohemian Rhapsody.
Anyway, loved seeing Olivia Colman win. And I was happy for First Man and Black Panther. The ceremony itself was brisk and fun and mostly no-bullshit—I didn’t miss any of the viral nonsense or the montages. More of that next year, please. Just, maybe, give less awards to movies like Bohemian Rhapsody and newly-minted-Best-Picture-winner-ugh Green Book. Goodnight, everyone.
So do you hate Bohemian Rhapsody much? Favorite film nominated this year and Malek deserved his win. The most overrated film, A Star is Born, won the only Oscar it was deserving of so that’s a success to me.