H-Metro
LOS ANGELES. — At the end of the Oscars, the ceremony’s host, Jimmy Kimmel, strode into the wings and flipped a number one on to a board that read: “Number of Oscar Telecasts Without Incident”.
It was only natural that Kimmel should make so many jokes about last year’s Incident, but even if you had somehow forgotten about Will Smith slapping and swearing at Chris Rock, that closing gag would have made sense.
In recent years, the Oscars have often been debacles, whether that was because of the envelope mix-up in 2017 or the socially distanced gloom in 2021, but this time the event was slick and competent enough to convince you that the producers and directors actually knew what they were doing.
Kimmel was relaxed and in control: he even finished by mentioning that he would be back on his talk show the following night, as if to suggest that this was just another evening’s work for him.
No one made any embarrassing mispronunciations or gaffes.
The introductory speeches weren’t too painful, and the jokes weren’t bad.
It’s true that long stretches of the three-and-a-half-hour bash were boring and repetitive, but that’s almost always the case with awards ceremonies, and there were only a couple of obvious flaws.
Angela Bassett didn’t look too pleased that she hadn’t been given the best supporting actress prize.
The big winner, with seven Oscars including best picture, best director and best original screenplay, was Everything Everywhere All at Once, a film that not only had an Asian-American co-director, Daniel Kwan, but was also all about an Asian immigrant family.
The absence of so many of Hollywood’s biggest names, Tom Cruise and James Cameron among them, hinted that the US film industry’s certainties are crumbling.
The major, historic studios had to content themselves with a sound design award for Top Gun: Maverick, a visual effects award for Avatar: The Way Of Water and a costume design award for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
It was an independent studio, A24, that was behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, a heady science-fiction martial-arts comedy that wouldn’t even have been nominated for an Oscar a decade ago.
A24 was also behind The Whale.
The evening’s other big winner, All Quiet on the Western Front, was a German production that was funded by Netflix. The same streaming service bankrolled the winner of the animated feature Oscar, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.
The whole evening could be read as Hollywood’s confession that it doesn’t make the best films any more — or, at least, the kind of films that win Oscars.
So, maybe, Kimmel was wrong to joke that the telecast had passed without incident. It was a smooth, happy affair, but it was a slap in the face for Hollywood. — BBC.
