Well, this is awkward. I am at a loss for words, yet I find myself here needing to explain how I feel about what I just saw. Will Smith punched Chris Rock in the face on live television. I am not 100 percent convinced it was not a planned bit because nothing would surprise me about these Academy Awards, but all reports from those in the room suggest it was very real.
Forever, the 94th Oscars will be the Will Smith ceremony. There is no way around it. CODA won all three awards it was nominated for, including Best Picture, becoming the first Sundance film and the first streaming film to win the top award. It is a historic victory, but this is the Will Smith ceremony. Jane Campion became just the third woman ever to win Best Director, another historic victory, but this is the Will Smith ceremony. Dune was actually the big winner of the night, nearly running the table in the crafts categories in taking home six awards, but this is the Will Smith ceremony. And so on.
That was not the only thing to go awry, just the most prominent. Three hours into a show that lasted more than three and a half, I was pretty certain it was the worst Oscars ceremony I had ever seen. I have followed the Oscars closely for 20 years and have seen just about every second of every one of those shows, and the overarching feeling I had for most of this one was embarrassment for the Academy.
It may have been either Al Jean or Mike Reiss, former writing partners and longtime writer-producers on The Simpsons, who said about network notes that they are a lose-lose proposition. If you listen to the network and fail, the network blames you anyway. If you listen to the network and succeed, the network takes all the credit. Better to succeed or fail on your own terms. The Academy bowed to network demands and delivered the show ABC wanted. Its failure will fall at the doorstep of the Academy, not the executives who told AMPAS to adapt or die.
The non-Will Smith lowlights: the pre-show ceremony of course, during which eight Oscars were handed out to filmmakers and craftspeople who deserved better; the strangely altered performance of “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” a song that had no place on the show to begin with; the upbeat choir and dance number to accompany the in-memoriam segment; the band playing off Ryusuke Hamaguchi during his International Feature acceptance speech. I could keep going, but you get the point.
Ultimately, this felt like an Academy Awards ceremony produced by people who hate the Oscars, and maybe there is some resentment among ABC executives who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting this show, only to watch it hemorrhage viewers and rapidly lose whatever cultural cache it once held. Even if hate is a strong word, the show certainly was not produced by anyone who understands what people who love this show love about it.
Every single move by the Academy was a wrong one. The fan favorite “awards” went to two separate Zack Snyder movies, proving only that Snyder’s rabid fans have not lost their touch with a hashtag. The lack of applause in the room reflected what most of us felt: We cut eight awards from the show for this? Not to mention the interminably long 60 Years of Bond montage, which was shown during a portion of the show unrelated to Billie Eilish and Finneas playing their ultimately triumphant theme to No Time to Die. In essence, we got two 007 segments.
We can talk more about the actual awards tomorrow once we have had some time to clear our minds. Overall, the winners were fine, if not terribly exciting. Only three films won multiple awards: Dune (6), CODA (3), and The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2). Three of the Best Picture nominees won nothing, while The Power of the Dog went 1-for-12, winning just Best Director, a feat not accomplished since The Graduate pulled that same trick in 1967. The predicted quartet of Jessica Chastain, Will Smith, Ariana DeBose, and Troy Kotsur won the acting categories.
My predictions were fine. I missed every one of the shorts categories, which is frustrating, and I would have done better had I gone with the conventional wisdom and predicted Dune just about everywhere below the line. I outthought myself. Oh, well.
The truth is I don’t feel fully equipped to talk about the show right now. There is plenty to say, but I need a night to sleep on it. So, I will leave it there. Let’s meet here tomorrow and try together to figure out what just happened.
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