Oscar Night

The 96th Academy Awards - Hollywood's annual celebration of itself - took place last night. Because of travel, I missed the first part of the show. Usually, when I have watched the Oscar show, it has been more for social reasons than an overwhelming interest in the proceedings themselves. Las nights show, however, seemed - at least to my unsophisticated tastes - an improvement on past performances. Best of all, it seemed shorter, ending at a decent hour.

It was no surprise that Oppenheimer more or less stole the show. Personally, I would have given The Holdovers' Paul Giamatti the Oscar for Best Actor, but it is always hard to stop a runaway train. Robert Downey, Jr., may well have deserved his award, but Oppenheimer would have been a better move without most of the last hour, in which case Downey's award would inevitably have had to go to someone else. 

As seems typical of very long movies, Oppenheimer is likely longer than it needs to be. Apart, obviously, from the dramatic, convincingly scary, central scene of the Trinity atomic test, it is largely a three-hour talk-fest. Its artistry seems to me to be overdone and thus gets in the way of the story. Accordingly, I have been criticized for disrespecting the director's artistry, but artistic self-expression leaves me unmoved, whatever the medium. That said, its length is worth sitting through, and its artistry of entangled timelines, constant scene-shifting amid a confusingly large cohort of famous scientists (whose names most of us no longer remember or never knew), and its gratuitous back-and-forth from color to black-and-white are all still worth the extra work they impose on the audience.

Oppenheimer aside, it was nice that the original Mothers Day got so much attention at the Oscars. Maybe the most moving moment was when Mstyslav Chernov accepted the documentary award for 20 Days in Mariupol, which he called Ukraine’s first Oscar. Given what is happening (or perhaps one should say not happening) in Washington right now, the reminder of the Ukraine war's civilizational significance was timely. And, in keeping with the evening's primary purpose of focusing on movies, I resonated with what may prove to be one of the evening's more memorable comments, “Cinema forms memories and memories form histories.”

Otherwise, the Oscars show seemed somewhat less political than usual - apart from Jimmy Kimmel's great "Isn't it past your jail time?" response to Donald Trump, who unsurprisingly could not resist the opportunity for a real-time post on Truth Social by Trump. “Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars.” In that exchange (and with that audience) Kimmel clearly won.

But for me the most fun part of the evening had to be Ryan Gosling's rousingly wild, show stopping, rendition of I’m Just Ken. All in all, quite contrary to my recent experience and despite the obvious lack of suspense about most of the winners, the Oscar show was actually fun to watch this year!