In the best of all worlds, the Oscars are exciting: fun and suspenseful, moving and meaningful. At their most supreme, they leave you with the feeling that movies matter. In the worst of all worlds, the Oscars are boring: blasé and predictable, overrun by kitsch, with no seeming import. But then there’s the in-between version, which is what we got tonight. The Oscars this year were not boring, because the winners felt like they mattered (and were good choices), and the people who put the show together have learned — by listening to the gripes about boring Oscar telecasts — how to sand off the rough edges and avoid the missteps and keep the spectacle moving.
But the Oscars tonight weren’t exciting, either. They were a bit rote. Not because they were badly executed, or larded with segments that made you groan (by my count, there were none), but because they tended to take the safest route possible. The set, with its tall wall of slatted windows revealing plants on the other side, resembled nothing so much as an open-air steak restaurant in the lobby of an oversize corporate hotel. (After a while, the backdrop shifted to sushi restaurant.) It was pleasing and comfortable and a bit generic, like the show itself. Conan O’Brien came out and did an entertainingly sharp monologue, from his Ted Sarandos diss (“This is his first time in a theater!”) to his AI shoutout (“I’m honored to be the last human host of the Academy Awards!”) to the inevitable benign tweak of Timothée Chalamet (“I’m told there’s concern about attacks from both the opera and ballet communities”) to a joke of pure juvenilia that was just…funny (“Between ‘Hamnet’ and ‘Bugonia,’ it’s been a big year for movies that sound like off-brand lunch meat”).
Yet one reason that Conan now rules the Oscars like the new Jimmy Kimmel, if not the new Billy Crystal, is that the jokes were trimmed of the cutting sharpness the Oscars have flirted with in the past. Conan struck a note of friendly winning mockery, and made a touching statement at the end of his monologue about the joy and optimism that movies incarnate. Then it was on to business as usual.
We went into the show expecting suspense, because major categories were up for grabs, and that can produce its own horse-race tingle. The best actor category remained a nail-biter: It was one of the only times I can remember when right down to the wire, after the names had been read, I felt as if any one of four nominees (Michael B. Jordan, Timothée Chalamet, Ethan Hawke, Wagner Moura) could win — and, making the whole thing a bit surreal (at least for me), the actor I personally would have chosen, Leonardo DiCaprio, was the only one out of the running. Jordan’s win provided the night with a much-needed catharsis, because this was really the Academy’s deepest acknowledgment of the power of “Sinners” — and watching Jordan’s beautiful speech, with its shoutouts to the past and its confidence in the future, you realized just how much of the film’s personality came from him.
But there were telling indications, early on, that “One Battle After Another” would be marching to victory, starting with the fact that it won the award for best casting, a new category that many predicted would go to “Sinners.” The triumph of Sean Penn, even though he didn’t show, only seconded that feeling. And by the time Paul Thomas Anderson took the best director prize, the trajectory of the night had begun to come clear. Anderson, as he’s been throughout the season, was the soul of pensive grateful modesty, though it felt like he’d taken a page from the Book of Chalamet when he admitted how much he wanted that director prize. And I would be amiss if I didn’t ask why, during his acceptance speeches, the director of “Boogie Nights” (still his greatest film, by the way) kept rubbing his gold statuettes, as if they were magic lamps he thought might disappear.
The two performances of numbers nominated for best song — the transcendent “Golden” from “K-Pop Demon Hunters” and a kind of international restaging of the “Pierce the Veil” sequence from “Sinners” during “I Lied to You” — were both killer. The reunion of Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, from “Moulin Rouge!” (a movie now 25 years old), was tart and touching, though the “Bridesmaids” reunion (the cast members gathered to present the award for best score and wound up reading sexist notes “written” to them by Stellan Skarsgård) didn’t levitate in the same way. The In Memoriam section found room for major statements, from Billy Crystal’s pitch-perfect tribute to the populist artistry of his friend Rob Reiner to Barbra Streisand’s touching homage to her “The Way We Were” costar, Robert Redford. I have to say, though: How could this segment have omitted any mention of Brigitte Bardot? She became a right-wing troll, but she’s an essential part of film history.
For all that, the crucial element missing from the evening was a more explicit salute to what “One Battle After Another,” as a movie, really meant. We didn’t need obnoxious political preaching — though I did like hearing Pavel Talankin, the co-director of the best documentary winner “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” speaking out against the “complicity” that allows fascism to take root. By contrast, Javier Bardem’s sloganeering (“No to war. And free Palestine!”) felt like a dated throwback to the era when Oscar celebrities would turn the podium into a soapbox. But “One Battle After Another” is a movie that has the politics of America today at the very core of its cinematic DNA. The film was not a piece of “resistance.” It was a piece of cathartic political art. In an evening where it took home six Oscars, that reality should have been at the forefront of the celebration of its triumph. Instead, if you tuned into the Oscars but hadn’t seen the movie they saluted most ardently, you might never have had the slightest idea of what the movie was about.
