Academy awards

Usually, by the time the BAFTAs — now comfortably established, along with the Golden Globes, as a dress rehearsal for the Oscars — roll around, it is fairly clear which film or films are likely to be taking gold at the Academy Awards next month. Thanks to the often frenzied behind-the-scenes lobbying and intriguing of various well-paid publicists, a storyline will emerge, and it is only in relatively rare cases that there will be a genuine surprise on the night. After all, nobody wants to spend a fortune on promoting (or celebrating) a lost cause. This year, however, is wildly unpredictable, and in fact is the first occasion since 2019 that it’s genuinely difficult to know which film is going to be triumphant.

It is hard to think of the last time that the Academy Awards had a great host. Jimmy Kimmel did a competent job in 2023 and earlier this year, and was fortunate to sit out the notorious ceremony in 2022 in which Will Smith marched on stage to slap Chris Rock. Yet it’s impossible to remember anything really entertaining that Kimmel did or said — unlike his first time hosting in 2017, when the event fell apart in Curb Your Enthusiasm-esque chaos when La La Land was wrongly announced to have won Best Picture when in fact Moonlight had — and it’s no wonder that he didn’t want to return for a fifth go for next year’s ceremony. Many estimable comedians and chat show hosts have tried, and failed, to make their mark at the Oscars.

It looked like it was finally going to happen. At last night's Academy Awards, after a fun back-and-forth with Emily Blunt, Ryan Gosling — who stars with her as a stuntman character in this year’s The Fall Guy — said “We’re here to celebrate the stunt community. They’ve been such a crucial part of our industry, since the beginning of cinema.” In a subsequent video, narrated by Gosling, paid tribute to the best of stunts work for the past hundred years, showing clips from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin to John Wick, Fast & The Furious, RRR, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Matrix, Mad Max: Fury Road and more.

The Academy Awards are a strange affair. Last year, they ignored Tár, a brilliant film that will be remembered as long as cinema exists, in favor of Everything Everywhere All At Once, an over-excitable picture that barely deserves to linger in the memory as long as you can recite its unmemorable name. But the nature of awards is that its directors — the Daniels! — are now Oscar-winning filmmakers, and so score above Hitchcock, Kubrick, Fincher and the rest. Anyway, we are now in that brief period where Christopher Nolan, the most significant director of the past two decades, is not an Oscar winner, yet soon, that will no longer be the case.

This Sunday, the annual orgy of back-slapping, expensive frocks, frenzied behind-the-scenes campaigning and self-promotion will finally climax with the 96th Academy Awards, taking place at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. The ceremony itself is perhaps the most predictable and consequently least exciting for years. Barring an upset of unimaginable proportions, Oppenheimer will win Best Film and Best Director, and its co-star Robert Downey Jr. will win Best Supporting Actor — a popular award for a popular figure — and Da’Vine Joy Randolph will win Best Supporting Actress for The Holdovers.

My first reaction to this year’s Oscar nominations was that it was a sane and sober list, where the right films were recognized and where tokenism had largely been dispensed with. There were a couple of surprises: I had thought that Past Lives might have featured more heavily, but generally speaking, it was a robust and intellectually satisfactory assortment. But I had, of course, not fully reckoned with Barbie.

After the debacle of Jo Koy’s appalling, worst-ever hosting of this year’s Golden Globes ceremony, the organizers of the Academy Awards are probably patting themselves on the back in the knowledge that they’ve successfully hired safe-pair-of-hands Jimmy Kimmel for this year’s ceremony. Yes, alas, because his joke-nemesis Matt Damon features in this year’s dead-cert winner Oppenheimer, there will be the public continuation of the smuggest and least amusing fake feud in contemporary life, but at least Kimmel won’t offend anyone, knows how to deliver a carefully scripted punchline and can be relied upon to keep things moving at a lick.

The news stories regarding the 2022 Academy Awards were supposed to be about how it was the first time a film (Coda) produced by a streaming service (in this case, Apple TV) took the highest award at the Oscars. But moments earlier, Will Smith had marched on stage to slap Chris Rock — and everything changed in an instant. Without any doubt, the thirty seconds it took Smith to assault Rock, who had been making poor-taste jokes about Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett’s alopecia, and to bellow repeatedly, “Keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth,”will prove to be game-changing, both for the Academy Awards and for Hollywood at large.

Lady Gaga fans, unite in grief. Their idol — who was widely expected to win the Best Actress Oscar this year for her performance as the murderous Patrizia Reggiani in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci — has not even been nominated for the award. In her place are Kristen Stewart, Jessica Chastain and Nicole Kidman — who are recognized for playing real people, respectively Princess Diana, Tammy Faye Messner and Lucille Ball — as well as Oscar stalwarts Olivia Colman and Penélope Cruz. Any of them stands a decent chance of winning now that the Gaga threat has been removed. But this still represents the greatest volte-face in what is otherwise a largely predictable set of Academy Award nominations.

It is an article of fashionable faith that genetic differences in sex are meaningless and malleable, but genetic differences in race are so profound and meaningful that they must not be tinkered with at all, even though race, we are told, is a ‘social construct’. Hence it is positively progressive to sneak a cheeky penis into a women’s changing room, providing the penis is attached to a ‘trans woman’. But it was despicably racist of the disgraced professor Jessica Krug, who was born white and Jewish, to have masqueraded as a woman of color.The gaps in this logic are so big that you could drive a bus through them, whether you’re sitting at the back or the front.

Today, politics is show business and show business is politics. Last week the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new efforts to improve inclusion institutionally and for the Oscars themselves. A task force has been created to come up with new inclusion standards for Oscar eligibility by the end of July. The Academy’s president Dawn Hudson said: ‘The need to address this issue is urgent. To that end, we will amend — and continue to examine — our rules and procedures to ensure that all voices are heard and celebrated.’We have traveled a long way from 2003. Then, when Michael Moore made an overtly political acceptance speech about George W. Bush, he was forced off the stage as a result.

First, Britney Spears was caught trying to pass off a 'Food Network' meal as her own cooking, then James Corden was caught on camera not driving the car on 'Carpool Karaoke', and now I find out ghostwriters are behind the acceptance speeches we just saw this awards season? Say it ain't so! After watching Brad Pitt’s acceptance speech at the Academy Awards last week, I commented to my wife how funny he was all awards season long and she showed me a Vulture article that suggests that Pitt doesn't write his speeches himself. The piece claims his 'representatives contacted at least one outside speechwriting agency to consult about engaging their services'.

Come friendly bombs and fall on Hollywood, it isn’t fit for doing good. Another year, another dreadful Oscars, another round of moral lectures from the beautiful people. It’s all so tiresome. The only reason most people pay attention to these irritating award ceremonies is precisely so that they can be irritated. So there was a vegan theme at this year’s Academy Awards. So the show had no host. So Brad Pitt is angry about impeachment. So someone said 'workers of the world unite'. So Joaquin Phoenix is mad (in all senses) about what mankind is doing to the animal kingdom. So Natalie Portman, in what she called ‘my subtle way’, had the names of the women directors who weren’t nominated for awards sewn into her dress. So what?

As per longstanding annual tradition, Hollywood yesterday woke up early to announce the 2020 Academy Awards nominees — and Twitter, as per slightly more recent annual tradition, woke up to be annoyed when the list of Oscar-worthy actors, writers, directors, and other filmmaking professionals was, as always, not particularly diverse. That this year's nominees could still be so overwhelmingly white and male was a particular slap in the face, especially since the Academy made a highly public move in 2019 to avoid exactly this outcome. July of last year saw the introduction of 842 new members, half of them women, into the Academy's voting ranks, with many spectators anticipating a wave of awards-season recognition for female and minority-led films as a result.

If you’re looking for answers as to why Joker, the Todd Phillips-helmed, gritty comic book Scorsese knock-off, garnered 11 Oscar nominations on top of being the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, then buddy, this isn’t the piece for you. I don’t have an explanation. Joker is not a ruckus Marvel CGI theme ride. It’s an excruciating anxiety-inducing and unforgiving character study, a very good one along the lines of older cult callings like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

Sunday night is Oscar night, from the red carpet in the early evening to the white line in the small hours. The Oscars, like the most of the members of the Academy, have seen better days. Audience shares are down, and it no longer seems possible to find presenters who can read jokes from an autocue, or, in the case of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in 2017, read the Best Picture winner’s name correctly. This year, it wasn’t even possible to find a presenter. Kevin Hart would have been a great host — unlike most actors in Hollywood, he’s capable of ad libbing, and he can also move the muscles of his face. But Hart was culled on grounds of political correctness.