The Problem Oscars

O ne of the Oscars last night went to a short film, Two Distant Strangers, about a black guy who keeps getting killed by police, over and over: It was a Black Lives Matter Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day certainly got a workout as a metaphor this past year, didn’t it? It’s almost as if the alarm went off every morning, Sonny and Cher sang, and people just . . . kept . . . talking about the same things. While we were all stuck in the same place. Stuck in time. Stuck in misery.

And what was the spirit of the 2021 Oscar ceremony? It was as if it set out to deliver, in the form of a glitzy gala, all the repetitive, irksome, frustrating, embittering endlessness of 2020–21. If a single five-minute period went by without someone reminding us of something horrible, I guess I missed it. When your comedy highlight is Glenn Close’s butt dance, you’ve got a little problem.

Incredible but true: Entertainment-industry celebrations used to be fun! One year, Whoopi Goldberg came out dolled up like Queen Elizabeth and declared herself “the African Queen”! Comics such as Chris Rock and Billy Crystal used to slay.

This year? Actress-director Regina King came out and immediately reminded us of the two things we least need to be reminded of:

We are mourning the loss of so many, and I have to be honest, if things had gone differently this past week in Minneapolis, I might have traded in my heels for marching boots.

“Now, I know that a lot of you people at home want to reach for your remote when you feel like Hollywood is preaching to you,” she added, as millions reached for their remotes to find a more cheerful option, like The Sorrow and the Pity.

For the first time since the 1940s, the Best Picture Oscar was not the final award given out: Best Actress and Best Actor were the final awards, apparently in the belief that honoring Nomadland (which predictably won Best Picture) would not be as exciting and emotional an ending as Chadwick Boseman winning posthumously for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a film based on August Wilson’s play that subtly explores racism’s hidden workings, though some missed it. Boseman died so young, and his performance was so powerful, and his widow’s speech was so moving when he won the Golden Globe, that he seemed like a lock.

Instead, Anthony Hopkins won, for playing a dementia sufferer in The Father. Hopkins wasn’t present, even via Zoom, just as when he won the BAFTA two weeks ago; he was in a hotel room painting instead. Apparently he, like everyone else, figured he had no chance against a dead man. Another big surprise was Frances McDormand’s Best Actress win for Nomadland; since she had won twice before, and since two black actresses (Andra Day and Viola Davis) gave highly acclaimed performances, it was widely assumed that all four acting winners would be minorities, which would have been a first. Best Supporting Actor Daniel Kaluuya and Best Supporting Actress winner Yuh-Jung Youn, both minorities, had won earlier. That two actors of color didn’t win Best Actor and Best Actress is bound to lead to raised eyebrows, and when I say “raised eyebrows,” I mean “apoplectic anger.”

Before those late surprises, the show was about as exciting as a celebrity reading of Jimmy Carter’s malaise speeches. The first awards, in order, went to movies about these subjects: toxic masculinity, Alzheimer’s, alcohol abuse, racism, racism, racism. We moved on to a movie about an indigent middle-aged woman living in a van and pooping in a bucket, Nomadland, which made Chloé Zhao the first woman of color to win Best Director. Then we honored a movie that horrifically re-creates the experience of going deaf, Sound of Metal, then the two short films — the first about a black man getting murdered by a cop over and over again, the second about school shootings. The two makers of the former, Two Distant Strangers, Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe, wore jackets whose linings were printed with the names of the victims of police violence and also adorned with lapel pins representing the jersey numbers of Kobe Bryant and his daughter, Gianna. Huh?

The first winner of the night that didn’t make the audience want to follow Bill Murray’s lead in Groundhog Day and take a bath with a toaster was Soul, the delightful Pixar cartoon about a jazz musician who, in the opening minutes, falls down a manhole cover and dies. It was a shock when the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature went to an undersea adventure called My Octopus Teacher that contained neither police brutality nor feminist revenge fantasies. Once in a while there was a sweet moment: Zhao, instead of delivering a speech about the perils of globalization (the subtext of her movie), cheerfully noted:

People at birth are inherently good. I have always found goodness in the people I met everywhere I went in the world. So this is for anyone who has the faith and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves. And to hold on to the goodness in each other, no matter how difficult it is to do that. And this is for you, you inspire me to keep going.

Britain’s Daniel Kaluuya — Best Supporting Actor winner in Judas and the Black Messiah, portraying the police-slain Black Panther Fred Hampton — at least gave a notably wacky and freewheeling speech that began by thanking God: “Thank you, God, I couldn’t be here without your guidance and protection.” He then proceeded to “chairman Fred Hampton, what a man, how blessed we are that we lived in a lifetime where he existed” (Hampton died 20 years before Kaluuya was born, but whatever), before adding:

I’m going to get back to work Tuesday morning because tonight I’m going up. We’ve got to celebrate life. We’re breathing, we’re walking, it’s incredible. It’s incredible. Like my mom liked my dad, they had sex, it’s amazing! And that’s why I’m here. I’m so happy to be alive, so we’re going to celebrate that tonight.

In an effort to reduce contact, the stage was a fake supper club built within Union Station in Los Angeles. (“Some local advocates criticized the city for making access to public transit more difficult for the weekend,” Variety delicately noted.) And the feel of the show was . . . strange. Most of the principals were at least in the same room, avoiding the bland Zoom-meeting feel of the Golden Globes.

But to assure maximum boredom, hosts read off biographical snippets about people the audience has, in most cases, never heard of. Reese Witherspoon: “Michael Govier’s favorite film at twelve years old was Citizen Kane.” Halle Berry: “As a young architecture student, [Best Production Design nominee] Nathan Crowley had no idea he could ever be a part of the industry.” Well, maybe he thought he’d be part of the architecture industry. Also, maybe he thought there were other industries besides showbiz.

The first Muslim Best Actor nominee (for Sound of Metal), Riz Ahmed, asked the crowd to raise their hands if they had started their career by working on a short film, and the camera angle made it impossible to tell how many answered affirmatively. Not that it mattered. Really, who cares? The show is supposed to be directed at the millions in the audience, not the dozens in the room, and it was a strange question to waste the audience’s time on. “How many here would say red is their favorite color? How many have been to Vancouver?”

Two hours and 40 minutes into the ceremony, a slow, pointless Oscar trivia game about black songs in movies reminded us to be mad about “Purple Rain” being snubbed 36 years ago, but it finally delivered the sight of Glenn Close dancing to the 1988 tune “Da Butt.” (Close lost for a record-tying eighth time and could have been forgiven for being in something other than a booty-shaking mood.) Even the memorial reel was introduced with a strange recitation of all the bad things that can kill people, including poverty, which seemed to shove the losses of some of the most beloved people to the background behind political issues. As though people wouldn’t die if only we fixed our social problems. For me, the highlight was definitely either the cute dogs or the luminous entrance of Julia Roberts, but alas both of these heartwarming appearances were in commercials (Freshpet, Lancôme).

Bryan Cranston’s giving out an Oscar to a nursing home in a deserted Dolby Theatre (the usual site) really captured the energy level of the night, and the slurred delivery by a suddenly 185-year-old Harrison Ford when he attempted a clunky comedy bit about initial negative reactions to Blade Runner was sad and dispiriting. In future years, not only will people not be watching the Oscars (last year’s ceremony hit an all-time low of 23.6 million viewers, and this one won’t approach that), but you’ll have to explain why people once thought these things were once considered fun and exciting.