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It seems like the fourth time really is the charm for Jimmy Kimmel and the Academy Awards.
Back hosting the Oscars for the second year in a row and fourth time overall, the ABC Late Night leader took a show where most of the big winners were pretty predictable and gave it a much-needed bite. “Look kids, sometimes smoking is okay,” Kimmel joked after Da’Vine Joy Randolph won her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role as a cigarette smoker in The remnants.
Sometimes, kids, it pays to take a big hit, as Sunday’s Academy Awards proved.
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With the great David Alan Grier as the voice of God and picking up where the Grammys and many other awards shows have been discarded in recent months, Oscars executive producers Raj Kapoor, Katy Mullan and Molly McNearney joined the 21street century this year.
Thank the movie gods, even if the show was almost three hours and 30 minutes long.
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Thank the movie gods that for the first time in a long time and after more than a few false starts, the Oscars didn’t just celebrate movies tonight, they celebrated putting on a show about celebrating movies.
Hollywood’s biggest night this year was made for the small screen with movies people have actually seen on stage. At the same time, Guns’n’Roses’ Slash shows up to add his stadium-sized guitar licks to Ryan Gosling’s star-studded and deliciously over-the-top pyrotechnics. Barbie performance of “I’m Just Ken” showed american idol and The voice exactly how it should be done.
We may not have known that John Mulaney was going to use the Best Sound award presentation as a platform to audition to be the 2025 presenter, but we all knew Christopher Nolan. oppenheimer I was going to clean. And that is what the saga of the creator of the atomic bomb did with awards for Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor for Cillian Murphy and Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr, among others.
If we are honest, we hoped The remains‘Randolph and a song Barbie (in this case, Billie Eilish’s song “What Was I Made For?”) to win, as they did. In an awards season that was too close for her to be called in the Best Actress category, it was a toss-up between poor things‘Emma Stone and Flower Moon Killers‘s Lily Gladstone: the victory went to the first, as she did in 2017 for The The Earth.
As with almost all Academy Awards ceremonies in modern times, they could have picked up the pace and merged a few more categories and presenters. Having five previous winners present the nominees in the main categories could easily have become a tedious gimmick. I could have, but the concept worked much better than expected. That said, it wasn’t the easiest move to bring up the stage exit music when Sean Ono Lennon was getting the crowd to sing “Happy Birthday Yoko” to his iconic 91-year-old mother.
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For reasons that had much more to do with capitalism and advertising fees than with protesters in the streets delaying some stars, the Oscars started earlier than usual, about five minutes after 4 p.m. Pacific time. Thanking attendees for “being on time” on this first full day of daylight saving time, Kimmel warned viewers at home and those at Dolby that “it’s going to be a long night after a long year.”
In a world that truly seems on fire, months and months of Hollywood strikes and shutdowns, falling studio stock prices, and the slow start to production so far made the year seem very long.
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That’s why if you’re going to land a punch, make sure it’s a TKO.
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Kimmel’s onstage salute right at the start of the show to last year’s tough strikes and below-the-line workers punching the studios in the eyes while simultaneously punching holes in the pretentiousness of Hollywood’s “union city” was precisely a blow of that type. Barely heard over the standing ovation the crowd was giving the team, Kimmel’s comments that those who went on strike in 2023 would be there for IATSE, the Teamsters and other Hollywood craftsmen in their negotiations with the studios and In one of my own labor actions it was a very public one, fuck you corporate overlords.
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Fortunately, not everything was so serious.
It was no surprise that Robert Downey Jr won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his oppenheimer role, has been a giant throughout the awards season. What was a surprise is that after all those other pre-Academy Awards wins, Tinseltown’s perpetual prodigal son had the killer line of “I’d like to thank my terrible childhood and the Academy, in that order” to start his gratitude. Crowded acceptance speech.
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Fortunately, there were more than a few surprising moments tonight, as there should be at every awards show. Kimmel pulled out her phone to mock Donald Trump for calling him the “worst host” on social media. Put an end to the above Celebrity Apprentice On the host’s post with “blah blah blah make America great again,” the host added that he was surprised Trump was looking “beyond his prison time” and was the kind of finely swiped fine-tuned that the thin-skinned former president doesn’t get. Well.
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Trump jabs aside, there wasn’t much geopolitics at the Oscars on Sunday considering the global situation. From an overall perspective, it was a very touching touch on the part of the Academy and Oscar producers to begin the In Memoriam segment with a clip of Alexei Navalny from the 2023 Oscar-nominated documentary about the now-deceased Russian opposition leader.
Just look at John Cena in his birthday suit.
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Just watch and listen as hearts soared at the Osage tribal singers and dancers performing Scott George’s Oscar-nominated song from Flower Moon Killers in a setting bathed in the sunset.
The powerful speech of 20 days in Mariupol Director Mstyslav Chernov laments the Russian invasion of his country as he wins the first Oscar for a Ukrainian film with his documentary.
That contemptuous “Kensplaining” of oppenheimer‘s Emily Blunt for her specialist co-star and Barbie boy Ryan Gosling.
That’s how you sell a show.
This is how a song and a culture are celebrated.
This is how you embarrass a superpower.
This is how you squash a rivalry and get a joke.
The very amateur Cena was ironically right: “the male body is no joke.” True, but damn, it was hilarious and cool to see the naked ones and make fun of the reluctant ones. Pacifier The star presents the award for costume design as she commemorates the infamous player who crashed at the 1974 Oscars.
For God’s sake, a Godzilla movie won an Oscar tonight! A really good Godzilla movie, although it would have been polite to provide a translator for the overwhelmed. Godzilla minus one equipment.
The Oscars haven’t been much fun or a very coherent spectacle for over a decade. In a fairly predictable year, the 2024 Oscars were something else… as Michael Keaton gestured from his seat when Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger lamented how Batman outplayed their villain roles in the movie: “Come get him!