For an Oscars season and Academy Awards ceremony as strange and eventful as we just experienced, it felt necessary to break the wrap-up into parts. In Part I, we covered the actual award winners and their speeches. In Part II, we are talking about the ceremony itself. And, for Part III, the controversy around the Will Smith-Chris Rock altercation.
We are not going to talk about the slap here. We all know it happened, and that’s what the third part of this series is about. For this, I want to talk about the other three hours and 40 minutes of a broadcast that was, at times, embarrassing to watch but mostly just dull.
It was always going to be bad. From the minute the Academy announced it would award eight categories before the show, it was clear this would not be an event for people who care about movies. That was further made clear by the decision to include two fan-voted “awards” on the broadcast – segments that went over about as well as you would imagine.
There was never going to be a version of this show for movie lovers. Still, I was unprepared for just how hostile it would be to the art of filmmaking and how insulting it would be to fans of that art.
Let’s start with the obvious and go from there: the eight awards presented prior to the broadcast. During the actual show, we got truncated clip packages for each category and edited speeches from each of the winners. Later, as the show was stretching well past the three-hour mark, it was reasonable to question why this even happened. The ceremony ran more than 20 minutes longer than last year’s show, which included all the categories and cut off no speeches. And, what did we get in trade? Nothing of value.
During the run up to the show, we said the calculus would be: If you are cutting eight categories from the show, every moment of the show needs to justify that decision. Otherwise, we loyal viewers will be left constantly asking: We gave up eight categories for this? I expected to ask that question, but I did not expect it to be the theme of the show.
Some culprits were clear and others more subtle. There was, of course, the excruciatingly long James Bond 60th anniversary package, introduced by three extreme sports athletes. I think Tony Hawk, Kelly Slater, and Shaun White are cool, but they don’t have anything to do with movies, and they certainly don’t have anything to do with 007. A 60th anniversary tribute is nonsensical in the first place, but if you insist on having one, perhaps invite one of the dozens of performers in the audience who has been involved in the series to introduce it.
Shockingly, that wasn’t even the worst “anniversary” tribute of the night. That would have to be the 50th anniversary tribute to The Godfather, generally regarded as one of the five or 10 best movies ever made. That was a Best Picture winner celebrating a milestone anniversary, so I at least get the thinking behind a tribute, but that seems to be the extent of the thought put into it.
First and foremost, yes, The Godfather came out in 1972, and this is 2022, meaning it has been 50 years since the film came out. But, these are the awards for the films of 2021, and the ceremony at which The Godfather won Best Picture took place in 1973, meaning for Oscars purposes, this was the film’s 49th anniversary. But, maybe I am the only one who cares about that.
Second, like the extreme sports intro to the Bond tribute, why did Sean “Diddy” Combs introduce this tribute? There was not one performer or filmmaker available to talk about the influence of The Godfather on their work? We had to resort to a music artist?
Then, there was the clip package itself, which included scenes from all three Godfather films, the second and third of which were celebrating their 48th and 32nd anniversaries, respectively. I also didn’t see anyone else mention this, but the spoken dialogue in the package mostly came from the third film, generally agreed to be the worst of the series and also not the movie being celebrated.
Finally, there was the appearance of writer-director Francis Ford Coppola with legendary actors Al Pacino and Robert De Niro (who, of course, only appears in the second film of the trilogy). This should have been the biggest moment of the night, and it was positioned that way – a Godfather reunion taking place toward the tail end of the show. Some of this is not the Academy’s fault – the slap having taken the wind out the sails for everything to come after – but the shoddiness of this tribute was truly appalling.
Coppola delivered brief, relatively perfunctory remarks, thanking author Mario Puzo and producer Robert Evans, and Pacino and De Niro didn’t speak at all. Why on earth would you invite two of the most legendary actors in Hollywood history onto the stage and not invite them to say even one word? It boggles the mind.
Now, those are a lot of words spent breaking down what was ultimately a pretty small part of the show – its smallness being problematic in and of itself – but that one segment was emblematic of the lack of care and consideration put into any part of the show. The producers wanted to give the appearance of loving movies without apparently loving movies.
That lack of reverence for the art supposedly being celebrated extended to what is usually among the most powerful moments of any Oscars broadcast: the In Memoriam. I have complained in the past when the Academy has prefaced the In Memoriam segment with a song performance, which is then followed by another song performance to accompany the tribute to the artists who died in the past year. I would take that presentation in a heartbeat over what we got.
We got dancing. A choir. Two relatively up-tempo music numbers. I understand the inclination toward a celebration of life rather than perhaps a quieter, more somber affair, but this I did not understand. It was tone deaf and sad in all the wrong ways.
The hosts were fine. Some of the jokes were okay, though the animation branch is right to be offended by the presenters positioning animated films as something only children enjoy – a particularly galling assertion in a year with Flee nominated. It is as though the folks writing the intros didn’t watch the movies – I would be very surprised if they did. Moreover, it felt like the producers did not watch any of the movies, or at least, they did not put on a show that felt like it cared about the nominated films.
Which brings us to the final point I want to make: the Twitter “awards.” Opening up anything of this nature to the wider world to vote on is generally a mistake. See the Boaty McBoatface saga. For the Academy – an organization that could charitably be described as “not tech savvy” – to jump into the cesspool of Twitter and think that anything good would come out of it was naive at best and self-destructive at worst.
First up was #OscarsCheerMoment, which for whatever reason seemed to cover all movies ever, not just films from 2021. This made an already inane exercise shockingly useless. To the degree the producers and ABC wanted this, they got what they wanted: about 2 minutes of out-of-context superhero footage, capped by the revelation that the most cheerworthy moment in the history of cinema was when The Flash entered the Speed Force in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a movie that never actually played in theaters.
If that all sounds like gibberish, that is precisely what it felt like in the moment, and the most cheerworthy moment of all time was rightly greeted by icy silence in the room of mostly accomplished artists. Later, Snyder’s Army of the Dead, a zombie movie released and quickly forgotten on Netflix, won the #OscarsFanFavorite “award,” proving only that Snyder’s fans are the most obnoxious and well organized of fandoms on the internet. More silence in the room.
It is exactly this kind of lowest-common-denominator, squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease thinking that is destroying the movie industry. That is why the box office results look the way they do. That is why the films nominated for the Academy Awards are so little seen. There is assumed to be no money in challenging the audience, in giving them something new and interesting. Great films are marketed like rare jewels, available only to the few, while the industry caters exclusively to those consumers who shout the loudest.
Ratings were up 6 million viewers from last year, a nearly 60 percent increase over the all-time low of the 2021 ceremony, which attracted just 10.4 million viewers. The Academy will likely tout the changes it made as a cause of the increase, but it seems unlikely ABC will consider the second-lowest ratings in the history of the show a win, leaving the future of the broadcast up in the air. This probably was not the end of the Oscars. But, it sure felt like the beginning of the end.
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