Last night’s Oscars were very pleasing for me, even if they did run too long and there were once again too many stupid filler bits (cough James Bond tribute cough). I also get the impression that this year’s Oscar telecast will probably have really low viewership numbers – while Dune 2 and Wicked were huge hits, people also came into the Oscars knowing that those films wouldn’t win much and they weren’t big Best Picture contenders. That’s exactly what happened – there was a big sweep of the major awards for Anora, with Sean Baker picking up a historic four Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing. Mikey Madison won Best Actress over Demi Moore and Cynthia Erivo. To be fair, I was rooting for Anora since I saw it last year. I loved that movie and I loved Mikey’s performance. I even complained several months ago that the Anora people should be campaigning harder and that Mikey should be the Best Actress frontrunner. Mikey’s Dior was kind of terrible? She has a real taffeta/satin problem.
Other notable winners: Kieran Culkin for Best Supporting Actor, who gave yet another charming speech about wanting more children with his wife Jazz. Adrien Brody beat Timothee Chalamet and Ralph Fiennes and Brody’s Best Actor speech bored everyone to tears, but hey, at least we know that he’s acting as stepfather to Harvey Weinstein’s children now??? Zoe Saldana won Supporting Actress.
Here’s Ariana Grande & Cynthia Erivo opening the Oscars with a medley of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “Home” and “Defying Gravity.”
Here’s Conan O’Brien’s opening monologue – I thought Conan did a good job as Oscar host and he had some genuinely funny jokes, like the Karla Sofia Gascon one (“’Anora’ uses the f-word 479 times — that’s three more than the record set by Karla Sofía Gascón’s publicist.”). I could have done without the Adam Sandler bit and the song about not wasting time.
What was the purpose of the James Bond tribute and why did Doja Cat sound like that?? I wondered if they even contacted Adele about any of this.
The weirdest moment of the night was the Best Song win for “El Mal,” with Camille Audiard’s creepy singing.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
