This year I composed a warm-up article to the Oscar ceremony before my usual predictions, all the questionable decisions they have made in the past. Then I made my predictions and something was different. I took no joy in the process for the first time. Just weeks before I had pronounced my own awards for everything I watched over quarantine, and that was more fun than sifting through a dozen films I had to track down and try to watch. But not only were my Oscar predictions a chore, for the first time in 10 years, there was no buzz on my Facebook page of anticipation for my awards thread that night. When we got to the ceremony, there appeared to be exactly three people commenting on the show and about ten people watching and following me, with most of them tuning out over the course of the evening. What was wrong with Oscar this year? In reflection, plenty, and that resulted in this cool-down article.
We know the big, obvious reason. Covid. Covid has not only loomed over our heads, having burnt us out and depressed us for over a year and running, but on top of that it did double duty on the arts. No Broadway, no tours, no concerts, no sports, not even any school events. Even the Superbowl, the granddaddy of home celebrations, was pretty much a non-event this year. But the Oscars, as the undisputed king of celebrations in the arts, had a bigger burden.
For the most part, Hollywood handled it admirably. Scale the evening down. Find a significantly more intimate venue. Nobody but nominees and presenters who were vaccinated and tested and retested were allowed to attend. I give them most credit for actually figuring out how to address the most anticipated part of the evening and assemble a serviceable, socially distanced attempt at the red carpet in anticipation of the evening. All the gowns were elegant to demure, no trashy, obnoxious excess. (This however, maybe had more to do with the fact that only the nominees were invited. We found out the year of the “fight sexual harassment” black dress that the nominees all selected tasteful and modest gowns. It was the attendees with no spotlight on them who wore black dresses, but absurd to totally tasteless ones so they would land in People Magazine on Monday.) But from there on, the attempts to overcompensate fell flatter than day old root beer. Here were the most glaring offenses:
1.) Using Film. This decision went so far outside of the box to do something different on the 90-something try that never needed to be done. Director Stephen Soderbergh chose to use film instead of video to make the event look “like a movie, with a narrative”. What it did was give us one more layer of detachment from what little connection was there. And how self-important was it to actually think your awards ceremony would make am amazing pseudo-film about an awards ceremonies. I also blame the Academy and ABC because who at any of the dozens of desks this proposal crossed thought this idea sounded good even on paper?
2.) No Clips. The most bone-headed decision Soderbergh could have made. Virtually no one has been to the movies this year, and the nominees are scattered across so many paid platforms—Netflix, Amazon, HBO Max, Hulu, among others—that most people have seen few to none of the nominees. This was the perfect and necessary way to showcase what we have been missing. Instead, we got to listen to stars ramble about other stars in the most self-congratulatory way imaginable. Listening to Laura Dern or Renee Zellweger tell actors they were “really good” in their nominated movie was just condescending and silly. We are there to celebrate the movies, and you removed every last fragment of what we are there for.
3.) No Enthusiasm. One of the traditional highlights of the evening are the unexpected emotional speeches that just bring us joy. With the single exception of Best Supporting Actress Youn Yuh-jung and Tyler Perry’s “refuse to hate” speech, the acceptances speeches were generally bland to almost disinterested. Yes, the usual energy was not in the room, but when the best short animated foreign language feature guy is just staring at his feet and rambling on his only trip to the podium ever, that says a lot. The non-Hollywood royalty nominees are just beat down and burnt out as we are.
4.) No Musical Numbers. Again, thanks Stephen Soderbergh for sucking the little bit of entertainment out of the evening. I understand not having the full orchestra there but the nominees could have sung to tracks or at least run the videos you burned off during the red carpet, and nobody asked for Rob Lowe and Snow White to come back and open the show. Was this the sign that you attempted to suck all the joy out of the evening on purpose? The music numbers, like the film clips, break up what is on record now as a tremendously boring and self-congratulatory evening.
5.) The Order. The penultimate award of the evening is Best Picture. Let’s repeat that one more time for Stephen Soderbergh who apparently didn’t hear it. The penultimate award of the evening is Best Picture. No single award is better than best picture and no awards ceremony in the history of awards ceremony has ever not saved it for the final award. All the single component awards culminate in the grand prize of the main award. Shake the order of everything else up but the last 4 awards must be Best Director, Best Actor & Actress, and Best Picture. Burning Best Director off four awards in was bad enough to upset the balance, but leaving best actor till the end rolls into the biggest blunder of the night…
6.) The “End”. This was the most telling moment of the evening and what a statement it made about Hollywood. The Academy assumed its members were so inclusive and so progressive that there was no chance they would not award Chadwick Boseman, who swept the American awards circuit all season, the posthumous award as Best Actor, and with Viola Davis picking up steam with a SAG win, they just knew if they moved Best Picture up ahead, they would end the evening in two actors of color climaxing with a wonderful, emotional tribute by Boseman’s wife. The hilarious irony of this decision is by committing to showing how inclusive and progressive they claim to be, they magnified exactly how stagnant and backward they are by selecting the oldest, whitest actors in the races. Taking nothing away from either Anthony Hopkins and Frances McDormand who both gave outstanding performances as always, but by setting up the results they wanted, the Academy ended up making fools of themselves. The best thing we can take from this is at least confirming that no one really knows the results until they’re revealed.
Then it hit me all at once: the real problem at the root of the Superbowl and the Golden Globes and the Oscars is not that we are remote or there’s no audience or wherever the nominees are; the problem is we are in no mood to celebrate anything. Why should we be? We haven’t been allowed to celebrate our own lives without the government and the local busybodies lecturing and shaming us into sitting home alone and distanced. We had no graduations, no proms, no weddings, no birthdays, no vacations. We weren’t allowed to have Easter or Passover or even Thanksgiving or Christmas other than with those we live with, or worse, on Zoom. (Does anyone now hate Zoom as much as me?) Our leaders hypocritically spent a year taking the joy out of our holidays and milestones, leaving nothing to celebrate. Don’t have Thanksgiving or you’ll kill Grandma! But be sure to run out to shop the big box Black Friday sales because our economy needs it! Another big spike at Christmas, skip that too! They spent a year basically disrupting and extracting our traditions. So why, after that, if we can’t even celebrate our lives and our families, should we get excited if a billionaire athlete runs a ball over a line, or if Renee Zellwegger thinks Viola Davis was “really good” in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
The sad thing is it feels as if we’ve hit a wall. And the longer this goes on, the more detached from our celebrations and traditions we will become. Yes, we’re getting vaccinated and numbers are going down, but the media and the government makes sure we know there’s a faction who will never get vaccinated so we still have to worry forever about this strain and that strain and strains that don’t even exist. They won. They’ve beaten us down. They’ve forced us to look to leaders who really don’t lead, just pander for good ratings. Who cares if opening day was last month? What holidays are we going to pass on this year? Will we ever feel totally relaxed traveling and going on vacations? Will we ever really feel safe hugging Grandma again? The fact is we are numb. And nothing magnifies that more than when I hover over a potential post about how little I care about Glenn Close doing “da butt” and then just hit delete. Because the answer is “just that little and who’s even reading this anyway”. This year’s Academy Award debacle closed a season where Hollywood insisted they were relevant and necessary, and we all just sat here, numb, tuning in yet tuning out, and asked why.