Nomadland Takes Best Picture, Director, Actress at Strangest Oscars in Recent Memory

 

Frances McDormand won two Oscars on Sunday night, for Best Actress and Best Picture.

Remember more than a year ago when Parasite won Best Picture and Best Director and the elation most of us felt? The joy of watching an Academy Awards ceremony end in a genuinely surprising and wonderful way? Well, take that feeling and imagine whatever its exact opposite is, and that approximates the feeling we are all left with after the 93rd Academy Awards ceremony.

And, that is a true bummer. Because in truth -- a couple documentary winners aside -- I could not and would not want to make an argument against virtually any of the night’s winners. From the big awards on down through the crafts, the awards went almost entirely to genuinely deserving and often inspiring winners.

Nomadland took home Best Picture, Chloe Zhao won Best Director, becoming just the second woman ever to win the award, and Frances McDormand joined elite company with her third Best Actress Oscar. McDormand, as a producer on Nomadland, also became the first actress in history to win Best Picture for a film in which she starred. It is an absolute feel-good story. It is a tremendously deserving film and an amazing accomplishment that will hold up well against the test of time.

Unfortunately, the win was taken from its sails in a truly unfortunate way, with the show’s producers making a tragic miscalculation as to the trajectory of the night. For the first time I can recall -- and I feel safe in saying the first time in history -- Best Picture was not presented as the final award of the night. Instead, we got Best Picture with Actor and Actress still to come.

Now, I get it. Take the little-seen Nomadland and give it its moment, then clear the stage for the two big-name performers to enjoy a moment in the sun to cap off the night. It does make a certain amount of emotional, storytelling sense. Add to this the betting favorite for Best Actor, Chadwick Boseman, whose widow would likely be accepting the award on his behalf, and one would have a truly satisfying ending to a night of celebrating the movies.

Then, Joaquin Phoenix read Anthony Hopkins’ name and all the air left the room. Hopkins was not in attendance, so we did not even get a final speech. I can think of any number of analogies, but they all mean disappointment. It was disappointing, and it didn’t have to be. Though I preferred Boseman, Hopkins is a deserving winner. His work in The Father is amazing, and it is a wonderful film. Had Hopkins won before a commercial break, then the show returned for a Nomadland triumph, that would have been a fine, if lowkey, ending to the night. This was nobody’s idea of a good time.

What makes it all the more unfortunate is that I genuinely loved this ceremony. It played like the exact kind of ceremony I have always asked for, focusing on the nominees, the winners, and the speeches. This is what it is like when we do not play the winners off for going on too long. This is what it is like when instead of clip package after montage after scripted comedy bit, we get people who sincerely love movies just talking about how much they love movies.

By moving the song performances -- for my money, the worst part of the show every year -- to the preshow and doing away with extraneous fluff, the ceremony was tighter and more focused than any I have ever seen. This is what I want from the Oscars. They simply made one experimental move too many. They out-thought themselves, and rather than having people talk about the winners and their great speeches and all the wonderful films there are still to see, they will get second-guessing and Monday morning quarterbacking.

Again, I appreciate the instinct, but picture for a moment an alternative universe in which the night ends thusly: Best Actor, then Best Actress, then Best Director, and finally Best Picture. You slide right by the absentee Hopkins to get to McDormand making history with her third Best Actress win. Then Zhao comes up as the first non-white woman to win Best Director. Then cap it all off with McDormand and Zhao’s Nomadland taking the top prize. That would have been a glorious ending to a show, and all the elements were in place.

Enough about that, though. As I said, I really enjoyed the show up until the ending, and I could see from a few brief check-ins on social media that my opinion will be a minority one. It usually is. No one ever likes the show, and the fact they did not like this show, which was unlike any past show, is simply proof that much of the audience is incapable of being satisfied. They want a mythical, imaginary perfect show that does not exist and could not.

I thought the best speech of the night belonged to Thomas Vinterberg, who paid tribute to his daughter who died tragically just days into filming Best International Feature winner Another Round. Vinterberg’s speech was honest, heartfelt, and emotional. It was also the exact kind of speech that would have been played off for time in years past. Not so this year, when winners were allowed to finish their speeches, basking in a moment that does not come along very often (again, unless you’re Frances McDormand).

The supporting winners came from the more predictable set, with Daniel Kaluuya and Yuh-jung Youn winning their respective categories. Emerald Fennell won Best Original Screenplay for Promising Young Woman, and Florian Zeller won a surprising and well deserved Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Father.

Most things went as planned and at least fell within the margin of error for my predictions. The one true surprise that I did not see coming was the victory for Colette in the Best Documentary Short category. Looking back, perhaps I should have seen the appeal of a French resistance fighter visiting the concentration camp where her brother died. For me, however, it was the weakest of the nominees.

Speaking of the weakest nominees, My Octopus Teacher predictably won Best Documentary. I cannot state enough how much I hated this movie and how little this Oscars speech did to endear the film to me. It is an unfortunate look for the Documentary Branch of the Academy. If I were to take all 10 nominees in the two doc categories and rank them together, Colette and My Octopus teacher would be right there at the bottom. But, you know, 21 out of 23 ain’t bad.

I find myself now looking back with hope on the La La Land-Moonlight debacle. It seemed crazy at the time, and it was definitely a wild moment, and we all felt bad for the Moonlight team, which had had its moment of triumph forever tainted. But now, we just remember Moonlight winning Best Picture and waltzing into history as one of the most deserving winners in Academy history.

That is the point we will eventually reach with Nomadland. When the dust settles and the think pieces have been written and the Twitter comments have moved so far down the timeline we no longer think of them, that is when we will look back at the 93rd Oscar ceremony and remember that Nomadland, a great film, won Best Picture.