Academy Awards: Depressingly Woke & Dull

One 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.

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Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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One 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.