My Thoughts on the 94th Academy Awards

One of my unspoken rules of 2022 (which has become far more spoken the longer I live by it) is that I don't have to have an opinion on everything.  In a world where we are basically required to constantly be angry, whether performative or genuine, or to be appalled, shocked, dismayed, saddened, and whatever emotions are most en vogue that particular day, I have found that that is not healthy for my mental health.  I have therefore allowed myself to not have a lot of opinions on things that in a past life I would have forced myself to invest more energy & time into.  I do this approach with a large amount of self-awareness.  Not having an opinion on everything does not mean not having an opinion on anything, and it does not mean only having opinions on things that directly impact me, because that's not self-help, it's just abusing your privilege.  But I have found, as occasionally awkward as it may be (I've literally said to people in conversations trying to make me take a side "I just don't care to have an opinion on that") that this is one of the healthiest decisions I've made in a while.

But I also know that in the coming week I'm going to have to have an opinion on Sunday night's Academy Awards, and most critically the infamous "slap" moment, new ethos be damned.  My personal brand is far too synonymous with the Oscars & movies to escape this particular pop culture hot potato. For those who missed yesterday's Oscars, during the presentation of the Documentary Feature category, Chris Rock made a joke about how Jada Pinkett Smith was auditioning for GI Jane 2, mocking her appearance and specifically that she came to the show with a bald head.  Pinkett Smith suffers from alopecia, which she made public a few years ago, a fact that it's not entirely clear Rock knew, but one might be able to infer he probably had an idea given he's familiar with the Smiths (he roasted Pinkett Smith the last time he was at the Oscars so this isn't a one-off situation), and because Rock himself did a documentary about Black women's hair in 2009 called Good Hair.  At best it was in bad taste, at worst it was deliberately cruel.  

Following the joke, an irate Will Smith walked to the stage and slapped Rock, in what initially seemed to have been a weird comic bit that was then confirmed to not be scripted as Smith yelled profanities at Rock after returning to his seat.  A visibly shaken Rock quickly presented the award, and got off-stage.  Photos show in the moments after that Smith chatted with Denzel Washington, Tyler Perry, and Bradley Cooper, before going onstage moments later to a standing ovation for his Best Actor trophy win for King Richard, during which he apologized to his fellow nominees & the Academy, but notably not to Rock.

This, I'll be honest, is the kind of thing I'm trying not to have an opinion on.  I'll provide some historical context here-as far as I can find, this is the first time someone has gotten into a visible fight on the stage at the Oscars.  The 1974 Oscars arguably came the closest, when Hearts and Minds producers made an anti-war statement about Vietnam, which culminated in stars as diverse as John Wayne, Shirley MacLaine, Frank Sinatra, Brenda Vaccaro, & Bob Hope all coming to blows backstage, with (according to reports), Hope pinning Oscars producer Howard Koch up against a wall until Sinatra said something countering the winning documentarians' views on the war.  But onstage, in front of everyone...no, this had never happened before.

In terms of my thoughts-violence is never the answer, and while Rock was seriously out-of-line & arguably deserved being heckled or booed (attacking a woman's medical condition, particularly in such a public way in front of her family was tacky & gross), Smith took it a step too far by physically accosting him.  I honestly don't have more to say than that, both because Smith won't face any legal ramifications (Rock won't press charges because that's how Hollywood works, a fact Smith was well aware of when he got to sit back down afterward), and because it's difficult to say how all of us would've reacted in that same scenario given the struggles that Pinkett Smith has gone through in the past few years as a result of her medical diagnosis.  I want to believe I'd be super enlightened in that scenario, but if someone I'd love had something that had caused them mental anguish to be mocked in such a public way...I'd be angry too.  I will say that this will become a permanent mark on Smith's star persona-when he dies, it'll be in his obituary that he ruined the biggest night of his career through violence, and one of the last big stars of the 1990's to still feel relevant to today's movies arguably saw a huge chunk of his career go up in flames last night.  He'll always work, but he'll never be able to get the universal appeal star position he had going into last night back again, no matter how much his press agent tries to mend fences (there's at least a 50/50 shot that Rock & Smith will end up presenting together next year in hopes of Hollywood trying to cover its glossy veneer in a rare break to an increasingly over-produced star system).

Smith's actions cover up the rest of the night (this will forever be known as the "Will Smith Oscars"), which had some good, but quite a bit of bad in what I'll admit was the least-anticipated Oscars of my lifetime (had I not been going to spend the weekend with my parents like I do most years, I was seriously considering not watching the ceremony in protest).  Let's start with the hosts, who I think did pretty well all-things-considered.  The opening monologue was well-done, with Amy Schumer coming off arguably the best of the three (something I wouldn't have guessed in a thousand years as her brand-of-humor felt like such a poor fit for a night as staid as the Oscars).  The bit with Sykes and the Oscars museum was good, Regina Hall's "find a man through Covid testing" bit was good in theory even if it didn't actually work, and I love when the hosts get into costumes, so the costume interlude was great.  Not everything worked, particularly the jokes about the movies being "too elitist" (more on that in a second) and the seat-filler bit from Schumer at the end of the show (with Kirsten Dunst), but they brought an energy to the show that was lacking last year.  I know this criticism is frowned upon, but I don't think the Oscars work well if they don't have some humor or visual splendor, and last year was a dud.  You need the audience to feel like they're having fun, and while that doesn't require crudity or even being all-that-accessible (inside baseball jokes usually land well because you want to laugh along with movie stars), you need humor.  So for me, the hosts get a thumbs up-it's a tough job, and they largely landed the plane.

The presenters were more of a mixed bag.  I loved the tributes to Pulp Fiction, White Men Can't Jump, and Juno-I am enthused with reuniting stars & reminding the audience at home why they love going to the movies (I'm not including The Godfather reunion both because it would've been more impactful if they'd gotten Keaton, Duvall, Shire, & Caan-if you're at the Oscars, go big-and because they didn't really do anything except stand for a second & then leave).  I also was great with some of the newer faces of Hollywood (excellent use of Jacob Elordi & Rachel Zegler)-the best way to invite the next generation of filmgoers is to make sure their matinee idols are seen, so more of that please.  The musical performances, for the most part, worked, with all of the nominated songs selling well, though "We Need to Talk About Bruno" elicited "wait, why are they singing that if it's not nominated?" questions from my house (and I suspect we weren't the only one) and it was choreographed horrendously (easily the night's worst number).  The night's best moment was the "save it for last" duo of Lady Gaga & Liza Minnelli.  I am not a fan of Gaga as an actress, which I've shared here many times, but I admire her as an entertainer, and it was super classy of her to present on a night she was expected to be a nominee.  Even better, she brought out screen legend Liza Minnelli to join the pantheon of people presenting Best Picture, and in the process honored Cabaret & one of the last living links to Classical Hollywood in the process.  More of that please-more, more, more of that (also, I saw on Twitter a proposal to have Lady Gaga serve as host & I'm totally onboard with that-someone hire her immediately).

But other aspects of the night's presenters were terrible.  What, exactly, was Shawn Mendes (who is neither an actor nor someone who has had his music play a large part in films) doing up there (I never object to looking at Shawn Mendes, but come on)?  Worse, though, was having three athletes, including antivaxxer Kelly Slater, showing up for no apparent reason to introduce a segment about James Bond when Judi f-ing Dench was in the audience. Stupid, absolutely stupid, and proof positive that it's not the hosts who deserve any of the blame for last night, but the producers.

Because even if you subtract the Will Smith incident, the producers and writers of last night's show had no handle on what to do.  The show lacked flow.  The comedy was never stemming from the night, but felt entirely (save for Schumer's ad-lib about Smith's incident, which a comedian of Schumer's ability could do in her sleep) like it was written before.  Gone are the days where Billy Crystal would do bits throughout the night about Jack Palance's pushups or Cuba Gooding's effusive thankfulness.  Here, we have a tightly plodded show that felt like you were stuffing as much in as possible without it ever feeling organic.  

This was driven in large part by cutting eight categories from the night.  I will admit, to be forthright, that I didn't entirely notice the difference the first 1-2 categories they did it for.  It felt disjointed, but someone who wasn't entirely paying attention or thinking too hard would be forgiven for not realizing that these weren't being awarded in real-time.  However, three problems occurred in this situation.  One, you couldn't go on social media if you didn't want these awards ruined for you (I learned that the hard way when Sound was announced prominently on my Twitter feed & I realized I needed to get off of social media to not have winners spoiled, which is exactly what the Oscars didn't want us to do in a year where mentions are a key indicator of how important an event is).  Two, it was clear after a while that these weren't the actual speeches, perhaps most so when Oscar-nominated actor Riz Ahmed won and there was too little time for it to register at home for audiences that someone they knew had just won an Oscar.  And three, it didn't shorten the show.  The ceremony was considerably longer than last year, running forty minutes over the initially-promised three hours, and thus cutting these categories did nothing but insult the artists and fill the show with endless, idiotic pablum.  In a show where Power of the Dog and Drive My Car were insulted for being too high-brow & out-of-touch, movies with minimal mainstream pop culture cache like Minimata and Army of the Dead were given high-profile moments, and somehow the producers said with a straight face that Justice League contained the most "cheerful moment" in movie history.  Pathetic, honestly, it felt pathetic...you spend hours insulting great movies and then try to gloss by the fact that a bunch of Reddit fanboys made you honor two completely disposable blockbusters.

This gets at the biggest problem for the Oscars-they have no sense of what makes them special, and I'm not entirely certain if they know how to get that back.  What makes the Oscars special isn't that they honor movies, it's that there are 94 years of honoring them.  Tradition is a valuable tool, and the Oscars run roughshod over it last night without getting any gain.  Ratings will be up, but that was inevitable given that box office on these movies was better than last year (and honestly that there were more movies that people could see), but nothing was gained.  The show was filled with no surprises from the envelopes...literally the only category where the frontrunner didn't win was Animated Short Film, which was presented off-screen.  Twenty years ago, the Oscars were relevant not necessarily because they were honoring a lot of really famous films (movies like The Hours and The Pianist were not huge box office bonanzas), but because we genuinely weren't sure who would win.  If the Oscars can't figure out a way to make it so that anyone who pays attention can get 20+ predictions right simply by guessing the frontrunners, the show will go extinct.

One of the best ways they can do that is by giving Animated Feature Film to another studio.  Last night, Encanto, which admittedly was my personal choice, won, and as a result, 90% of the last ten winners of this category were Disney or Pixar product (the sole exception is 2018's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which nearly lost to Incredibles 2).  This is wrong-one studio should not have this kind of a stranglehold on a category no matter how good their movies are.  I do a lot of OVP articles on this blog, and I'll admit that in those ten years I'd give Disney a few of the trophies (about half), but even I would've voted for The Mitchells vs. the Machines last night just in hopes of someone upsetting Disney.  Particularly in a year where ABC (owned by Disney) totally screwed over half of the Academy by moving eight categories to the commercials so that Disney could keep a tribute to one of its movies and a trailer for one of its upcoming properties in the show, it says a lot about how little the Academy truly cares about those artists that they didn't take the chance to send the Mouse House a message.