Thoughts on the 2025 Oscars
When Quentin Tarantino strode onstage last night at the Academy Awards ceremony to hand out best director, it was an indicator of two things. The first was that last year’s winner in the category, Christopher Nolan, was unavailable. Nolan is currently working on his star-studded adaptation of The Odyssey (who cares, we have O Brother Where Art Thou?), a blank check project made possible by the world-beating success of Oppenheimer, and whose production also potentially explained the absence of A-listers like Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Charlize Theron, Anne Hathaway, and Zendaya from the ceremony.
Adrien Brody seems like he could fit right into a historical epic at this point, but he wasn’t going to miss his potential second coming out party. He deserved the award but I wish there was a rider in the Oscar contract that allows for awards to be rescinded if the acceptance speech sucks even half as much as Brody’s did. His remarks were completely self-aggrandizing, and danced clumsily around his quasi-cancellation, before landing on a call for unity in trying times that could have been generated by ChatGPT.
The second indication was that Sean Baker was going to win best director for Anora. There is precedent for the Academy tipping its hand in this particular category via its choice of presenter: In 2007, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola teamed up to bestow a long-delayed Oscar on their pal Martin Scorsese—a moment no less great for being so obviously stage-managed. Tarantino and Baker don’t have the same kind of personal history, but over the course of this awards season, Baker has assumed Tarantino’s mantle of loud and proud public advocacy on behalf of the theatrical moviegoing experience. He's not wrong but I still hate him.
It was a very good night for Baker, who, by taking home best director as well as awards for best original screenplay, best editing, and best picture, became only the second person in history to win four Oscars in a single evening. His predecessor: Walt Disney, whose name was evoked in Anora’s Oscar campaign by a pull quote blurb claiming that the film “made Pretty Woman look like a Disney movie,” when in fact Pretty Woman was, literally, a Disney movie due to being distributed by Buena Vista, a Disney subsidiary.
Anora’s success, which includes Mikey Madison (a huge favorite this year despite giving a performance basically any woman I’ve ever met could pull off) upsetting Demi Moore (a true performance and certainly the more deserving of the Oscar) brought the film’s depiction of sex work back to the front of my mind. Sean Baker has been lauded for his frank and honest stories about sex workers, but I still don’t buy it. I think he’s an opportunist that knows people will pay attention not to mention the idea that the film had no intimacy coordinator, and all his works include young, naked women. Yeah, buddy okay. You’re an “artist”.
Getting back on track, another point to make about Anora’s win is its modest box office take (about $40 million). Last year’s winner, Oppenheimer made over $1 billion. Other best-picture winners in the last decade include Nomadland and CODA both of which made less money than Anora. Big studio productions don’t necessarily mean awards anymore.
The Oscars as a ceremony was...alright but I’ll take that over the trainwrecks of the past. Despite some genuinely bizarre choices—like staging an extended, song-and-dance number for the James Bond franchise, and scoring the annual In Memoriam segment like a scene from The First Omen (Ariana Grande singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow was RIGHT THERE)—the broadcast went down easily enough.
Speaking of Ariana Grande, the opening musical number, with Wicked stars Grande and Cynthia Eviro covering “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Home,” respectively, before converging on “Defying Gravity,” was truly excellent though trying to tie it to the enduring spirit of LA in a post wildfire 2025 was an odd move. (The accompanying I Love L.A. montage included clips from the late David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, which makes Anora, and everything else, look like a Disney movie. Also, there wasn’t a single shot from a Michael Mann film in there and no one has put LA on film like Mann) It was, however, effective on its own showbiz-tearjerker terms, and as a way of getting Wicked, the most populist best picture nominee some airtime.
I love Conan O’Brien, and I believe he put his heart into hosting this year’s show. His performance existed in the sweet spot between the ingratiation Billy Crystal and sneering, above-it-all indifference à la Seth MacFarlane. Conan talked about movies like he actually enjoyed watching them, enlisting Scorsese—who has even more gravitas than another of Conan’s cast of jokesters, Adam Sandler—to put across an SNL-style fake ad for a company called “Cinemastreams,” a satirical proof of concept for the revolutionary structures known as movie theaters.
Beyond using Anora to prod Donald Trump’s deference to Vladimir Putin, Conan avoided politics (which is arguably preferable than inserting them in an attempt to curry favor). The sober references to local devastation were carefully handled, with members of L.A. Fire Department enlisted to deliver some solid zingers.
Conan and his writers sold the idea that this year’s show would pay respect to the actual craft of filmmaking. Which it did by giving certain categories extended showcases, like having the nominees for best costume design and best cinematography feted individually by cast members from their productions.
At the same time, the stilted personal praise in the supporting acting categories from presenters Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Robert Downey Jr. to the nominees were poor substitutes for clips of the performances themselves, while asking viewers to scan a barcode to hear the best original song nominees, rather than having them performed live, was flat-out disrespectful. Emilia Pérez’s composer, Camille, did try to get the audience to sing along to the winning entry, “El Mal,” during her acceptance speech, to no real avail; as an earworm, it’s not exactly “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” or even “Defying Gravity.”
It turned out that the Emilia Pérez backlash was real if not selective, to the point that the various montages seemed designed to omit best actress nominee Karla Sofîia Gascón as much as possible. It didn’t stop “El Mal” from beating out Dianne Warren’s “The Journey,” which represented the songwriter’s sixteenth failed Oscar bid in a row and it didn’t prevent Zoe Saldana’s best supporting actress victory for her showy role as a cartel lawyer in the throes of a crisis of conscience—a performance that, like nearly everything else in Emilia Perez, is spirited and incoherent. But despite its record-tying 13 nominations Emilia Perez film lost the best international feature film Oscar to Walter Salles’s finely turned political drama I’m Still Here—THANK GOD.
Both Saldana and Salles gave earnest, impassioned speeches referencing the dangers of authoritarianism, but the most charged moment was the presentation of best documentary feature to No Other Land, whose co-directors, Basel Adra (a Palestinian journalist and activist) and Yuval Abraham (an Israeli journalist), displayed the same united front onstage as they did on-screen in a film structured around images of destroyed Palestinian homes. “We call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people,” said Adra. The moment would have been even more dramatic if Gal Gadot (a proud Israeli, who was originally supposed to present best documentary, had not been moved over to best special effects; the absence of cutaways to the audience during Adra and Abraham’s remarks was conspicuous in and of itself.
One of the enduring justifications for the Oscars is that they help to draw attention to worthy movies. If, as Cona suggested, there were a billion people watching the ceremony—or at least they were until the Hulu feed cut out, right before the final awards—it’d probably make good business sense for some American distributor to pick up No Other Land and put it in theaters.
The Oscars is mostly watched by people who haven’t seen all the films and people being nominated and that’s okay. “Most” people have lives. But I’m here to say that I do wish the ceremony would extend itself to a full week so that they could do at home screenings (for ease of access) of all the films in contention. I think the Oscars, with all its next day watercooler buzz, could really be something if it put its money where its mouth is and worked harder to get people to watch the films it keeps telling us are worthy of all these golden statues.
