This isn’t the first year the Academy Awards have been held on the second Sunday in March, forcing good Hollywood folks to juggle hair appointments and limo rides around the annual scourge of daylight saving time. It was done. Still, the 96th Oscars ceremony brought more chaos to the schedule than expected. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose to start the show at an unprecedented 4 p.m., hoping to expand its audience among people with stay-at-home orders and short attention spans. afternoon Or so this year’s host Jimmy Kimmel said in his opening monologue. It will still be very late. ”
For Christopher Nolan and “Oppenheimer”, such a temporal dislocation was certainly a good sign, and not for nothing. After all, Nolan’s films are not laments of lost time, but bold explosions of chronological anarchy. His early masterpiece, Memento (2000), has a noir-like plot that unfolds both backwards and sideways. In his masterful World War II thriller Dunkirk (2017), three disparate timelines climb, interweave, and occasionally intertwine, as if linearity itself had been destabilized by the dangers of military combat. I’ll do some fighting. The most spectacularly disorienting is the sci-fi blockbuster Interstellar (2014). In this film, a team of astronauts slips through a wormhole for several hours, emerges on Earth, and discovers that 23 years of Earth time have passed. Applying the same math, he could theoretically look back on 96 years of Academy Awards history in about 13 hours. That’s how long the average Oscar ceremony feels to many viewers.
By comparison, Oppenheimer’s structural loops are a little taxing at best, which is probably why the film was so well received by critics, audiences, and now Academy members. I don’t think so. Despite hopscotching the decades-long life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist now remembered as the “father of the atomic bomb,” Nolan’s film does not emphasize its moral urgency. It’s driven by sexuality, dark themes, and above all, consistency. , the intellectual brio and emotional sensitivity of Cillian Murphy’s performance in the title role earned him the Best Actor award. “Oppenheimer” won seven awards Sunday night, including Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr.), Best Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score and Best Picture. The climax didn’t even come close to Al Pacino’s chaotic failure. You can prevent your presentation from feeling like it’s a pre-conclusion.
Nolan himself won his first Best Director statuette, which he received from a quietly beaming director Steven Spielberg, almost exactly 30 years after Steven Spielberg won the award. his Oscar-winning director’s debut. Spielberg accepted that honor with Oppenheimer’s cracked-mirror World War II drama “Schindler’s List.” Both films gave their creators long-awaited artistic prestige, each winning him seven Oscar awards. But where Spielberg’s Holocaust survival story asserts the existence of inexplicable good amidst unspeakable evil, Nolan’s dark and despairing biopic focuses its subject on Allied antiheroes. He is depicted as the most defiled person in the world. Here is a man we remember for more than just his many lives. Not only because he was saved, but also because of the apocalyptic terror he unleashed on the world.
Did “Oppenheimer” make too much of a fuss? From a symbolic point of view, this is not the case. Even as Nolan’s films represent an exploration of lost time, the sustained spotlight on this film brings us poignantly to a stubborn sense of time that has been reclaimed. There has been a string of small-scale Best Picture winners for several years, with Moonlight (2016), Parasite (2019) and Nomadland (2020) by far the best picture winners. “Oppenheimer” is an aggressive nod to Hollywood’s bygone heyday. Back then, the Oscars were often associated with oversized epics with grand themes, star-studded ensembles, and glossy celluloid photography (as cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, the film’s winner, was at pains to remind us) It was an era dominated by virtue. our). Oppenheimer received the most nominations, with 13 nominations, but earlier blockbusters such as Titanic (1997) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) won. This was far short of the astonishing 11 awards he won. Still, this is the closest thing to a triumphant past that Hollywood studios, or what’s left of them, have produced over the years. After being stripped of near-consecutive films first by the pandemic and then last year’s writer’s and actors’ strike, there’s something comforting about the Academy’s desire to recognize brainy blockbusters for making a difference. was a much-needed reminder, if only for a final gasp, of what it means to see the genius of systems at work.
Like Oppenheimer itself, the Oscars ceremony made a sometimes tense effort to recapture some of Hollywood’s vanished grandeur. Miles away from the disastrous 2022 ceremony, where a misguided pursuit of higher ratings saw several awards categories removed from live broadcast, this year’s ceremony is an unabashedly old-school Oscars show. I was leaning towards the prize. And here we have Kimmel merrily embracing his fourth stint as Academy Awards host, calling himself a movie buff, leaving behind his harshest disdain for three of his most disgusting targets, and several others. “Killers of the Flower Moon” has a running time of 1 hour and 26 minutes. Once again, the five Best Original Song nominees performed gorgeous musical numbers, but none more so than Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell’s performance of Barbie’s “What Was I Made For?” There wasn’t a song that made me feel overwhelmed. It is a more extravagant and eye-catching work than “I’m Just Ken,” also from “Barbie.” Ryan Gosling, in his most beautiful pink, led the way, surrounded as far as the eye could see by Kens in tuxedos, but they were more than just Keno. It was definitely Kenormous, even Kenervating, a full-fledged Kendorsment that could have sent it into irrevocable kentropy if it had been held for even one more beat.
In keeping with the general old-fashioned vibe, the Academy has revived the sweet but time-consuming tradition of presenting acting awards to five past winners instead of one. So while Cillian Murphy seriously shakes hands with Forest Whitaker, Ben Kingsley, Brendan Fraser, Matthew McConaughey and Nicolas Cage, Robert Downey Jr. shakes hands with Tim Robbins and gives Sam a fist bump. Rather, a warm scene of eerie interactions was created. Rockwell barely made eye contact with last year’s winner, Ke Huy Quang, but he eagerly pressed the statuette into Downey’s hand. In some ways, the most graceful handover came from Da’Vine Joy Randolph of The Holdovers, whose acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress was, not at all surprising, an emotionally charged start to the show. I cut it. More shocking to some was Emma Stone’s Best Actress win for her insane comic fantasy Poor Things. The film came in second place behind “Oppenheimer” and won four awards, including Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Production Design, and Best Costume Design. The finale featured a nearly nude John Cena in a cheeky homage to the infamous streaker incident at the Academy Awards 50 years ago, a nice touch on a show that isn’t afraid to acknowledge its history. is.
But what about the history the academy has yet to build? Stone’s win is her second in the Best Actress category, following her win for La La Land (2016), making Lily Gladstone the first Native American to win the Best Actress Oscar. He disappointed the people who were rooting for him. The strength of her subtly powerful work in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” But despite an impressive 10 Oscar nominations, “The Killers” is only behind “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), “Silence” (2016) and “The Irishman” (2019). , the latest film from director Martin Scorsese. The Oscars are empty-handed. It was a somber reminder that, despite all his accolades, Scorsese has always been considered an outsider to the Hollywood establishment this year’s awards seek to celebrate. However, Stone’s win was not unexpected (she won Best Actress at last month’s BAFTAs), and the film, which was adapted from a Scottish novel by a Greek director and produced by a British-Irish production company. “Poor Things”, which is set in a fantastical world, achieved strong results. The Victorian depictions of London, Lisbon, Paris, and Alexandria may also foreshadow something broader than mere Scorsese indifference. This is a sign that the Academy has taken important steps in recent years to diversify its membership, and as a result is a more global organization than ever before, which in my eyes was entirely welcome. .
There have been signs of this international progress all along, but none was more exhilarating than the Best Picture win for the South Korean thriller Parasite four years ago. But for those who know where to look, there was another clue Sunday night. At last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the difficult drama “Anatomy of a Fall,” which is primarily in French, won the Best Original Screenplay award, ending a series of awards that began with the Palme d’Or. The Best Animated Feature Award went to Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film, “The Boy and the Heron,” but there was a slight upset over the popular American hit “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” Ta. The documentary feature category was dominated, seemingly unprecedentedly, by foreign films, with the important and intensely harrowing 20 Days in Mariupol taking home the top prize. The film’s Ukrainian-born director, Mstislav Chernov, gave one of the few unusual speeches of the night, expressing his wish that he had never made his film in the first place, and his belief that “the people of Mariupol and the film form memories.” And because memory shapes history, those who gave their lives will never be forgotten.”
Similar sentiments were reflected in the night’s other epic speech, the only one that even threatened to send the audience and the academy into a semi-nostalgic stupor. Nolan was not an orator. Nolan, like many of his Oppenheimer winners, largely avoided the issue of nuclear war that his films helped reawaken. I’m talking about British-born Jonathan, who won the International Feature Film Award for Zone of Interest, a ruthless and captivating indictment of a Nazi family living in terrifying comfort next to the Auschwitz concentration camp. I’m talking about Coach Glazer. . No film has been nominated for this year’s Oscars, and no film has reflected the effects of off-screen cruelty more deeply. And Glazer, a film industry outsider who sought to make Scorsese resemble Spielberg, used the moment of triumph to make the moral argument his films had already laid out with quiet clarity in blunt terms. Expressed with.
Connecting the conflagrations of the Holocaust to those currently raging in the Middle East, he said, He denounced the “occupation that he caused”. His words drew some applause, but they sounded pretty lukewarm to my ears. For every person in attendance who wore a red pin on their formalwear in support of the Gaza ceasefire, I can’t help but think of the many more who would have avoided or ignored the pro-Palestinian protesters who had gathered just hours earlier. Traffic on Hollywood Boulevard was halted outside the theater, which was unable to enter. I suspect that, at least within the auditorium, Glaser’s speech, and perhaps even his film, elicited similarly weak reactions, irritation at best and apathy at worst.
“Zone of Interest” isn’t the first movie to prove too good or embarrassing for the Oscars, finally transcending the glitz and glamor of awards season. But its mere presence on the Dolby Theater stage can be turned a blind eye or ignored as the Academy becomes more global in its membership and scope of films. It was a dissonant but welcome reminder of what will become increasingly difficult. The real world beyond Hollywood is deafening. That may be another reason why honoring Nolan at this year’s Oscars felt foolishly right, after all. Progress can be frustratingly slow and even seem like you’re moving backwards, but it’s always just a matter of time. ♦
